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Can you grow your family on a shrinking income?
This article is by staff writer Lisa Aberle.
Our two kids came with an almost two-year gestation, similar to an elephant’s gestation, actually. (Here’s where I would make a joke about now our salary feels like peanuts, or something, but I’m not that funny.) Between starting the adoption process and taking custody of the kids, we had much longer than most parents do to prepare.
Financing your bucket list
This is a guest post from Mitch Anthony. Mitch is a sought-after financial services consultant, popular speaker, and host of The Daily Dose radio program. His RetireMentors column appears regularly on CBS marketwatch.com. Mitch earned Financial Planning Magazine’s “Mover & Shaker” award for his pioneering retirement and financial planning work. He has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, and The New York Times. His book Storyselling for Financial Advisors was acclaimed by Financial Planning magazine as its No. 1 essential read.
The opportunity fund: How to be prepared for lucky breaks
Note: This article is from J.D. Roth, who founded Get Rich Slowly in 2006. J.D.’s non-financial writing can be found at More Than Money, where he recently wrote about how to retire early.
The first step on the road to financial freedom is to eliminate debt. The second is to save for emergencies. Your emergency fund acts as self-insurance, cushioning you from small disasters.
Life is full of unexpected surprises, many of which cost money — a thief smashes the windshield of your car, your son gets sick, your water heater overflows. When people live paycheck to paycheck without any savings, they’re at the mercy of these small crises. Sometimes a tiny problem becomes a huge one because the victim didn’t prepare for possible trouble.
5 car maintenance services you can get for free
This article is by staff writer Kristin Wong.
We get a lot of pitches at Get Rich Slowly. Despite the underlying marketing agenda, sometimes these pitches contain useful information that is worth sharing. Case in point, Pep Boys emailed us a whole array of free services they offer. My ears perked up for a few reasons:
- I was impressed with just how many services they offer.
- It made me wonder about other places that offer free car maintenance services.
- A Pep Boys shop just opened downstairs from my building (selfish, sorry).
Not every city has a Pep Boys store, I know. But there are a handful of other places that offer free services too. At any rate, I thought I’d find out more and put together a list.
Tire repair & rotation
Why home prices are climbing again, and what you should do about it
This article is by staff writer William Cowie.
Chances are home prices in your neighborhood have been rising lately. Strangely enough, that only made the news when, for last November, Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller index of home prices in 20 top cities fell the grand total of 0.1 percent.
The Federal Reserve tracks a national composite home price index for the country, which looks like this:
Speaking of hobbies…
This post is by staff writer Honey Smith.
In my last post, I talked about picking hobbies strategically. There, I suggested that it might be a good idea to choose hobbies that fall into three main categories. Those three categories were:
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Hobby as side gig.
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Hobby as “something you have to do anyway so you might as well be good at it.” (I’m nothing if not pithy.)
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Free or super cheap hobbies.
I’d like to take that discussion one step further, because there’s a hobby I’m considering that doesn’t fall into any of these three categories. This makes it the fourth category of hobby, which I didn’t name in my original article, but which I think we can call “splurge hobbies.”
Reader Story: Looking ahead pays off until “boom”!
This reader story comes from JenB. Some reader stories contain general advice; others are examples of how a GRS reader achieved financial success or failure. These stories feature folks with all levels of financial maturity and income. Want to submit your own reader story? Here’s how.
I thought I had it all figured out, but the middle-of-the-night panic attacks have started again as a result of a little piece of mail I received this week. You see, I’d finally made the scary decision to quit my job and stay home with our first baby (for at least a year) when – BOOM! – our annual escrow account disclosure statement arrived in the mail.
How to spring clean your financial house
This article is by staff writer April Dykman.
It’s almost spring, you guys. I don’t know about the weather in your neck of the woods, but that’s a welcome thought where I’m at, and I live in Texas!
(Northerners, feel free to make fun of my idea of a cold winter. I don’t care. I did not sign up for anything colder than highs of 50 degrees.)
At any rate, I’ve been on a cleaning and organizing kick, a bit of early spring cleaning, if you will. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. Maybe it’s that the days are getting a little longer and that we’ve finally had some consistent sunshine around here. And those might be the reasons we spring clean in the first place, according to TLC’s How Stuff Works:
8 investing ideas that avoid the stock market
This article is by staff writer Jeff Rose, CFP. Be sure to check Jeff’s latest project Operation: #investNOW where he’s encouraging 1 million to start investing in themselves.
Investing in the stock market requires resolve and a long-term vision. In fact, looking back over the last 14 years or so — a relatively short period of time — the stock market tested the resolve of many. The S&P 500 shed 46 percent from August 25, 2000, to October 4, 2002. Just five years later, during the housing bust, the S&P 500 lost 56 percent of its value from October 12, 2007, to March 6, 2009.
Even if you LOVE to invest in the stock market, the last 14 years might have shaken your confidence. I always thought stock investments were supposed to gain about 9 percent per year. What happened? And what other options are out there? Do you have to stick to stock mutual funds and ETFs? Not quite.
Too much emergency fund? Spend it
This article is by staff writer Holly Johnson.
Growing up, I learned all kinds of money lessons from my mother. An avid saver, she socked away every cent that she possibly could. She cut coupons, shopped at garage sales, and drove cars without heat or air conditioning. She even paid for our family piano with money she got from refunding (people often earned extra money sending in for small rebates in the ’80s), and paid off my childhood home in 17 years instead of 30 just by making extra payments religiously, every single month.
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