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Five Reasons Your Budget Isn’t Working
Deciding how to cut up your financial pie is key to making your budget work. Photo: Chris Potter
If you don’t use any kind of written budget, you have lots of company. According to a Gallup poll, only about a third of Americans prepared a detailed household budget in 2013.
That’s not to say everyone succeeded. The fact is, using (and sticking to) a written budget can be a huge chore, especially at first. And no matter how dedicated you are, it almost always takes a while to get used to creating a budget and living within predetermined spending limits.
A Look at My 2015 Resolutions
Rather than sweeping goals that are hard to estimate, focus on daily actions, like practicing guitar. Photo: Simon Music
At the end of a year, I like to look back on the year that’s gone by, both in terms of my achievements and failures. What good things have I done? What things have I left undone? How can I make the coming year better than the previous one?
What to Know Before Buying Insurance Stocks
You’d buy insurance for your home, but would you buy stock in the company that sold you the insurance? Photo: James Thompson
Promises, promises.
Insurance is all about promises. Policyholders promise to pay their premiums and insurance companies promise to pay claims in a timely manner. On the surface, it’s a straightforward proposition, unless the insurance company can’t afford to pay all its claims.
Policyholders are not alone in that fear. For many investors, particularly casual investors, the insurance business is just too uncertain to merit investment. Insecurity about insurance companies tends to center on the idea that the amount that can be paid in claims is uncertain.
Seven (Extreme) Ways to Go to College for Half Price or Less
Earning a degree abroad — say, at the Humboldt University of Berlin, shown — could save you tens of thousands of dollars in tuition. Photo: Francisco Anzola
College-bound students can be excused for their looming fears of dealing with student loan debt after graduation. We’ve talked about ways to get your student loans forgiven, but what about not having student loan debt at all? Here are a number of options to drastically reduce your tuition costs:
How Volunteering Can Help Your Business
Volunteering can help build a sense of purpose for a company and its employees. Photo: State Farm
Small businesses are always looking for ways to strengthen the culture, empower employees, find new clients, and build goodwill in the community.
Many companies will invest time and money in outside consultants, training, and company outings hoping to improve the business environment and achieve these goals.
But what if there was a low-cost or no-cost way to achieve these same results? Few opportunities provide as much value to a small business and its employees as volunteering, especially as a team.
Let’s take a quick look at the benefits of volunteering for your small business and employees.
Healthier Employees
From volunteering? Yes.
10 Steps to Rid Yourself of Credit Card Debt Forever
Want to attack your credit card debt? Stop carrying credit cards! Photo: Jeff Rose
No one likes being in credit card debt. It’s one of the easiest payment methods for overspending, and yet is the most difficult to pay off because of the high interest rates and other fees.
So how can you pay off credit card debt and remain free of it forever? These steps will show you how.
Step 1: Face the Facts
This will likely be the most difficult step (aside from staying motivated during the debt payment process). But before you can move forward, you have to know where you stand.
Eight Times It Pays to Be a Quitter
If your relationship isn’t headed in the right direction, it may be time to quit. Photo: Katie Tegtmeyer
As children, we’re taught only the strong survive. Quitters are weak and cheaters never win.
Those who take shortcuts in life usually fall flat on their faces. But sometimes, it really does pay to walk away, or quit.
The Secrets Behind Successful Budgeting
Budgets are like training wheels: They won’t solve all your problems, but they’ll get you off to a good start. Photo: Richo.Fan
Budgeting is one of the trickier issues of personal finance. It can be very tricky to make a budget work for you.
For starters, you don’t need a budget to be financially successful. I like to compare a budget to a power screwdriver. You can definitely get that screw into the wall without that power screwdriver, but it can be much easier in many situations to simply use the power screwdriver. In much the same way, you can get rid of debts and achieve financial independence without a budget, but it can be much easier in many situations to use a budget.
Insuring the Sharing Economy
Are you covered when a stranger rents your car, or you rent theirs? Photo: Thomas Anderson
Any doubt about the depth of wisdom of a mother’s time-honored aphorism to “share and share alike” has been laid to rest by the meteoric rise of the sharing economy.
From Airbnb to Zipcar and an ever-growing list of collaborative enterprises, the opportunities for consumers and entrepreneurs abound almost equally. No matter whether you attribute the expansion of this market segment to a resurgence of savvy consumerism or the natural evolution of an on-demand, pay-only-for-what-you-use mindset, the peer-to-peer and sharing economies look to be around for the long haul.
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