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What We've Learned from Millionaires
I've completed 22 interviews with millionaires (here's the millionaire category in case you want to read them) and after the third one there were already patterns in their answers. So with all the responses we have now, I thought I would summarize what we've learned from this group with very high net worths.
Here are some common denominators:
How to Sell a House
If you're looking for the details on "how to sell a house", I'll cut to the chase:
Bury a St. Joseph statue upside-down in your yard, facing toward the for-sale house. After the house sells, the seller is supposed to dig up the statue and place it in a spot of honor in their new home.
:)
I stumbled upon this piece from the Wall Street Journal that talks about the inverse relationship between the housing market and sales of St. Joseph statues. When the market is bad, sales of the statues rise (because people are looking for ANYTHING that will help sell their house, even if it doesn't work.) When the market is good, homes sell quickly, so no help is needed from St. Joseph.
I find this piece interesting because:
Do You Rebalance These Days?
Here's a piece from CNN Money that asks whether you should rebalance your portfolio or not. Their thoughts (FYI, this piece was published at the end of 2013, hence the numbers below are not for 2014):
Free E-Book on Finance Basics...Kind Of
A reader recently sent me an article titled The Key to Build Wealth? Start Slowly. The article itself was pretty basic, but also good, so when it mentioned that the author interviewed was giving his e-book away free on April 25, I made a note to check it out.
So I went to Amazon this morning, and the book is not free (as of this posting, maybe it will be later) but was still 99 cents. I don't have the time today to watch it hourly to see if it becomes free, but I thought I'd at least post a link and you could check it out as often as you like.
How Much Should You Save for Retirement?
This is a guest post from J.D. Roth, who founded the blog Get Rich Slowly in 2006. Roth wrote Your Money: The Missing Manual and is the "Your Money" columnist for Entrepreneur magazine. His latest project is a year-long course on how to master your money, which explains how to slash costs and boost income so that you can pursue early retirement and other goals. This article is one piece of this course.
In Case You Were Wondering
You may have noticed that my site has been down for the past few days.
Typepad, the service I use to run this blog, was attacked system-wide and most, if not all, of their blogs have been down since the weekend.
Thanks to those of you who emailed or tweeted me. I appreciate your concern and thank you for looking out for me.
Anyway, I hope we're back to normal and things will proceed as usual.
Thanks for reading FMF.
Update: Here's a newly posted piece featuring advice from top personal finance bloggers. Click through to see what I had to say. :)
A Money Expert Who Knows What She's Talking About
In contrast to many financial "experts" in the media who know very little about money management (I noted this in Money 101: How to Measure and Track Wealth and Another Financial Media Mistake), Business Week magazine interviewed Ann Kaplan, a woman after my own heart.
Here's what started off the interview:
The Importance of a Thank You Note
There's a newsletter that gets passed around our office that recently quoted the following:
According to a CareerBuilder survey, 58% of employers said it's important to send a "thank you" after an interview; 24% said it's very important.
We've discussed this issue a lot in the past. Here are some highlights:
How Bad Americans Have It
Money magazine released the following stats in their April issue. This set is for households making below $100,000 a year:
- 55% are living paycheck to paycheck
- 66% couldn't handle an unexpected $10,000 expense
- 47% couldn't live comfortably even three months if breadwinner lost his job
- 47% would find it tough to get new job if laid off
Now here are the percentages for households making more than $100,000 a year:
- 37% are living paycheck to paycheck
- 38% couldn't handle an unexpected $10,000 expense
- 32% couldn't live comfortably even three months if breadwinner lost his job
- 37% would find it tough to get new job if laid off
And my results:
Are You in Your Dream Job?
A reader wrote the following comment to Money magazine in its April issue:
One of the facts and figures packed into your March issue stood out: the Money Poll item that 14% of people are in their dream career. So 43 out of 50 commuters are going somewhere other than where they would like. Wow. If these people only knew that when you like your job, it isn't really work at all.
I have a few thoughts on this one:
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