Planning

How Safe are Your Plans from Unexpected Expenses?

This post is super-important. If you can embrace the concept of financial readiness, I believe you can achieve any reasonable financial goal that you set. The problem is that we’re lying to ourselves. We design our budgets, set up our goals and live out our financial lives with the expectations that the world is at [...]

What Do You Have to Lose?

I have a serious problem with contingency planning, even when I don’t mean to. In the back of my mind, I’m always 10 steps ahead of everyone else in terms of thinking of the “what-ifs.” It’s not necessarily a bad thing–I tend to be a very defensive driver, anticipating dumb things people will do well [...]

Goals, Goals, Goals: 2012 Edition

Every year starts out with the best intentions, grand plans, and dreams of what’s possible. By March, the initial momentum is usually gone, and it takes a lot of effort and motivation to rekindle the excitement that filled those initial weeks. This year, I’m doing things a little differently. For starters, I’ll be targeting only [...]

Sorting Out Your Expenses

If you ever set out to clear your house of unwanted things, you probably used or at least heard of the “box” or “pile” method. In essence, you’re forced to review everything you touch in a particular area of the house and categorize it based on what should happen with the item. Typically, the piles [...]

Write Your Own Amazing Story

I sometimes wonder if I have what it takes to be an engaging personal finance blogger. In many respects, I’m just a “regular guy” with a dream: I haven’t traveled to 27 countries and become location-independent. I didn’t sell a business I created in my 20s for a million dollars. I’m not paying off mountains [...]

Considering Money in Family Planning

Many couples are deciding precisely when to get pregnant and have their first or subsequent children. The decision-making process considers a lot of factors, but money definitely plays a big part.

The Balance Between Doing and Planning

There is a force at the heart of nearly everything we do in life. It tugs on us in two directions (assuming we are not “at rest”)–in one corner is doing, in the other is planning.

3 Key Ingredients for Delectable Finances

This is a guest post from Charles at CreditDonkey, which discusses three key ingredients for success in personal finance.

Can We Boil Down Personal Finance to Simple Ratios?

That’s the premise of a new book by Charles Farrell, “Your Money Ratios: 8 Simple Tools for Financial Security at Every Stage of Life.” The book lives up to its title—people at any stage of life can pick this up and figure out exactly how they relate to where they should be, according to Farrell. [...]