finance question

Financial independence is a term typically used to describe a state where you have sufficient assets to live a certain lifestyle indefinitely without having to work or be employed.  Whether your income is derived from interest on savings, investment income, real estate income or something else, it really doesn’t matter.  The key is that you’re [...]

We in the personal finance blogosphere love to fill the internet with ideas on how to save money and discuss everything under the sun that you should not spend money on. Well, today, I’d like to discuss a few things that I believe are acceptable purchases.

The other day a friend called and asked me for some advice on personal finance. I was pretty flattered because it has only been a year since I first began reading and studying personal finance. In only one year I have already seen the positive effects that studying personal finance has had on my life. [...]

January!  Time to once again set lofty goals. While glancing through a fitness book (Fit and Well: Core Concepts and Labs in Physical Fitness and Wellness) I noticed a subtitle — Reaching Wellness through lifestyle management.  The section “introduces the general process of behavior change and highlights the decisions and challenges you’ll face at each [...]

PocketSmith is an online personal finance management tool with some unique features. It features a calendar that allows you to add events, multiple calendars, and forecasts how much cash you will have over the next year. Like other personal finance or budgeting sites, you upload transactions to the site from various accounts and are able [...]

Most people go on vacation with expectations of a non-stop extravaganza or with the hopes of an interruption-free solitude. That’s what I call setting yourself up for failure. Neither of those two is going to happen. We both know it. Whether you are envisioning a week of beach lounging and Pina Coladas or a week [...]

I have two daughters and one son. They are all quite young (the oldest is four). At this moment when I look ahead to the future I am have the exact same financial plan for each of them. Currently, we financially treat them all the same. We save the same amount for college, buy the [...]

It’s not a very happy thought, but have you ever considered what you want to happen to your assets after death? What about the guardianship of your children in case both parents die together? If something happens to you but doctors could keep you alive through life support or other measures would you want that? [...]

I have heard it is said that people spend more with credit cards than with cash. I believe those statistics based on my personal experience. However, there is something to be said for the convenience of the credit card because there are advantages of credit cards over cash. One way to minimize the cost of [...]

Up until about 10 years ago, there was one type of IRA, the traditional IRA which was deducted from your taxable income, grows tax deferred, and upon withdrawal, is taxed at whatever rate you find yourself. Its cousin, the Roth IRA is the mirror image, the money you put in is after tax money, but [...]