You know that feeling. You check your bank account on a Tuesday and wonder where $400 went. You didn’t buy anything big. Just coffee, lunch out, a streaming subscription you forgot about, and that “emergency” Amazon order at 11 PM. This is the budget version of eating an entire bag of chips because the bag …
The median American household has about $8,000 in a savings account. The average retirement savings for someone nearing 65 is roughly $200,000. That number needs to be closer to $1.5 million to maintain a modest lifestyle. That gap — between $200k and $1.5M — is not a math error. It’s a structural problem in how …
You spent three hours comparing two credit cards to save $12 a year in fees. You rebalanced your 401(k) for the fourth time this quarter. You clipped coupons for an hour to save $3.50 on groceries. That feeling of wasted effort? It has a name. The law of diminishing returns. In economics, it says that …
Long-time readers here know that personal savings rate is one of my favorite personal finance metrics (along with safe withdrawal rate, crossover point, net worth, and “usable net worth”, to name a few). No other metric is as apt at diagnosing your current “personal business” of household cash flow management. In its simplest form, Personal …
In belated honor of Earth Day and as a show of appreciation for our one and only planet, I wanted to do a little something special. Reducing my negative impact on this planet and saving money are both things that I care very deeply about. So, I thought it would be worthwhile to create a …
Money, when used effectively as a tool, can help you achieve some pretty phenomenal goals in life. Just to name a few: Get you out of debt. Get you out of a bad job situation and put you in a good one. Improve your relationships/marriage. Give you the opportunity to take time off for extended …
When you distill it to its most basic level, personal finance is simply: 1.What’s coming in (your income) minus 2.What’s going out (your expenses) With that in mind, it stands to reason that if you want to improve your personal finances, cutting your expenses needs to be one of the major areas that you focus …
Trying to frugally navigate our lives through a consumer-driven culture is not easy. We are presented with choices about if and what we should purchase multiple times per day. And we are so bad at saying “no” that the average U.S. household now has over 300,000 items. How do we even begin to deal with …
I recently highlighted a few different alternatives to stocks and low-interest cash savings. One of the options I mentioned was a money market fund (also known as a money market mutual fund). Money market funds are often confused for similar-sounding money market accounts – a type of savings account that banks offer, but they are …
Most taxpayers realize that the sooner they file their tax return, the quicker they will receive a refund. Beyond that simple common sense truth, however, there are a number of compelling reasons to file your tax return as early as possible. And, as someone who has often historically waited until the last few weeks before …
