Listen, Money Matters!

I was budgeting like everyone told me to and packing my money away into a savings account.  My savings grew really fast. Once I had cracked the code of being financially responsible it was easy.  I went to work every day and after two years of working and saving smartly I had a nice war chest built up.  It wasn’t like I was rich or anything but it was a lot of money for me at the time.  I wanted to make my money earn more money so my savings could multiply.  I wanted to learn how to invest like an expert! I read everything I could get my hands [...]

Sure we are trying to save money but we all have something we really need or want.  Sometimes we want really small things like a new pair of work shoes or an iPhone and sometimes it’s big stuff like a wedding, new car or a house.  Depending on your financial situation there may not be that much room to go out and buy it.  The next best solution to buying it in cash is to save small amounts of money over time or setting a goal for your big purchase. Once we’re actually saving a little bit of money each month, it becomes really hard to track our progress and how [...]

Most people don’t realize it but every year fees are slowly destroying their retirement.  These fees are very tiny and often ignored.  However, over the course of time they can cause serious damage.  If you’re contributing regularly to your 401k (and I really hope you are!), you should be very concerned.  To protect your retirement you need to destroy 401k fees. Fortunately, destroying 401k fees is easy and not very time consuming at all.  You can definitely look at the prospectus of each 401k fund you have by hand but I never really want to spend so much time tweaking my 401k.  So, for the sake of this post I’m going to [...]

New year, fresh budget.  Wait, you haven’t budgeted before?  If so then Budgeting for Dummies is for you since there is no better time to start then now! If you didn’t already read the budgeting primer, Don’t be Cheap, Be Smart. Budget!, you might want to go check it out first.  In that post we set the stage for budgeting and a few loose ground rules.  If this whole thing is new to you, I would say you should plan to spend 2-3 hours setting everything up.  After that things will be on autopilot for the most part only requiring you to spend an extra 2-3 hours per month from then on. [...]

Look, you’re going to want to have a nice night out once and awhile.  It’s always a fun time and you work really hard so you deserve the occasional treat.  Problem is, eating out is really expensive so if you’re trying to retire early like I am then these extravagant nights set you back.  The thing is, they don’t really have to.  You should always save when you eat out, you’re date will think you’re savvy!  Here are a few tricks I’ve found help you slash the cost of dinner so you can go out more often and feel less guilty about it.   Save Before you Walk in the Door While [...]

Good, you want to save money. Well it hasn’t been easier, especially with the internet. Now you can not only find good deals for what you need but automagically track all of your finances (Mint.com), optimize those finances (PersonalCapital.com) and make the most out of those savings (Betterment.com, LendingClub.com, etc…). We’ll definitely discuss the end to end ultimate money solution in time, but today we’re just going to focus on budgeting. Or in other words, your way to be smart with your money and never seem cheap.  Don’t be cheap, be smart instead; create a Smart Budget!   What Matters to You? Before we go into the details of Mint.com, [...]

I’m working on the final steps to close my Condo and I asked myself, “Should I Overpay My Mortgage?”  Right now rates are incredibly low and prices are super cheap so while I do plan to do a lot of living in this Condo, in 3-4 years I would like to rent it out. Just to bring you up to speed, these are the numbers I’m working with: Sale price: $321,000 Down payment: 20% ($64,200) Mortgage value: $256,800 Interest rate: 3.375% Term: 30 years Total interest paid over term: $151,909 That’s quite a lot of money going to interest!  Traditional thinking is to overpay and avoid as much extra interest [...]

These days just hearing the word “investment” is enough to send shivers down your spine.  It’s been four years since the financial crisis and while we are definitely doing better, our wounds still ache.  Everybody knows someone who lost a job or a huge chunk of their retirement savings.  Depending on who you ask you’ll hear a different cause for the crisis but the one take away from the whole thing is that everyone is afraid of the stock market. With those wild price fluctuations and monster crashes, why risk your money?  Most people are just holding on to huge savings accounts that blow your mind at 1.0% interest.  Now, while you [...]

Money matters, we can’t go on our awesome vacations and buy our fancy iPhones without it.  Since we need to pay for our homes and buy our organic toilet paper, we wind up working at least 40 hours a week.  Let me just say that 40 hours a week is a lot of time.  Do the math, 40 hours a week for the average career length of at least 40 years (25 – 65), that’s 83,200 hours of work or about 9.5 full years of our lives spent not relaxing and doing what we want when we want. Well, working till 65 is a fact of life… everybody does it.  Or [...]