Money Tips Network

service started in 2012 with CEO Stephen Dash. Dash’s mission was to help borrowers manage large amounts of student loan debt by partnering up with lenders and displaying those lenders one dashboard. Since then, Credible has added personal loans, mortgage refinance, home loans, credit card balance transfers and more for its customers. Credible is based in San Francisco, has 157 employees and works with more than 280 partners.

One of my goals in 2019 is to get back to basics. I feel like I've succumbed to lifestyle inflation, so I'm taking the time to track my money in detail (using my fave tool: Quicken 2007 for Mac) in an attempt to identify problem areas. When I find money leaks, I need to decide whether to eliminate them or accept them.

While I'm skeptical that sharing my monthly spending report has any real value — and it invites unnecessary judgment (I'm already judging myself!) — popular opinion from GRS readers seems to be: Do it!

You folks like looking at my struggles with money haha.

So, here's a quick look at how I spent my money in February — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

February Spending Report

In January, I spent $4819.27 to support my lifestyle. In February, I spent $4556.49, a decline of $250.

This is the third entry in an eight part series exploring the connections between your finances and other areas of your life.

A few weeks ago, I started a series exploring the connections between personal finance and the other “spheres” of my life. The first entry covered the connections between one’s physical life and financial life, the second entry covered the connections between one’s mental and spiritual life and financial life, and today we’re looking at one’s intellectual life and financial life.

It’s kind of a Friday night tradition for our family to have pizza and watch a movie together. For our family, the regular plan is to make or order two large pizzas so that we have plenty of leftovers for weekend lunches. This typically costs somewhere around $30 if we buy it at the store. However, if we make it at home, the price drops to somewhere around $10 for both pizzas combined. That’s a $20 savings, and thus it’s well worth discussing here as a cost saving measure.

It’s worth noting that we don’t make pizza every single Friday; sometimes we do order it when we’re under a particular time constraint. Sometimes there are activities late Friday afternoon or early evening that interfere with actually making the pizza, which does take a while. Having said that, if one plans ahead, you can definitely make a pizza ahead of time and store it in the fridge, to be popped in the oven when needed.

Back when I was in my early twenties, my professional mentor at the time would often tell me something that didn’t really click with me until the last few years. He would tell me, “Trent, you can either have a good day, or you can have a good trajectory.”

At the time, I really took his meaning the wrong way. I thought he was telling me that if I focused too much on long term things, I would fall flat on my face regarding the things I was working on today. I took it to mean that I should really focus on succeeding at the task at hand, because if I succeeded at the challenges before me, things would always turn out good.

That’s not what he was saying at all. I didn’t understand it then, but it’s much clearer now.

When I was a boy, my heroes were athletes and astronauts. I dreamed of playing pro football one day. Or, better yet, walking on the moon.

As an adult, my heroes are more mundane. They're the people who make personal finance accessible to average people. Long-time readers know that billionaire investor Warren Buffett is one of my heroes. So too is Dave Ramsey, who has helped countless people — including me — get out of debt.

But perhaps my biggest hero is an unassuming 73-year-old woman in cat-eye glasses who lives on Whidbey Island in Washington's Puget Sound.

La Tomatina always takes place on the last
Wednesday of August in the sleepy village of Bunol some 40kms west of Spain’s
third largest city, Valencia.

This is an EPIC food fight of proportions
you just won’t believe, with seven trucks dumping over 200,000 pounds worth of
ripe tomatoes into the streets for a food war that has to be experienced to be
believed.

Here we cover our top tips for surviving intact, getting the most out of your tomato battle day, and enjoying the festival to its fullest potential.

Let me start things with a story, recently told to me by a friend that we’ll call Tammy.

Tammy has a reasonably well-paying job in a corporate research lab. She’s still paying off student loans and a car loan. She goes out with friends a lot, for meals and for drinks. She basically spends what she earns and enjoys her young, single life.

At work, however, things are a bit tougher. She’s at the first or second rung on a ladder of career progression that can lead to some great places. However, there aren’t a ton of jobs open all the time in her field, and reputation has some value. She’s also living paycheck to paycheck.

What this adds up to is some rather… difficult… treatment from her boss. She is constantly given far more work than she can complete in a reasonable amount of time, meaning that she’s often at work until very late, coming in on weekends, and so on. Her boss ignores her input and suggestions, and criticizes everything she does.

Royal Ascot racegoers are certainly accustomed to dressing to impress for this most social of events and in what is a stunning turnabout in policy, as part of what’s being called a ‘diversity drive’, Ascot has relaxed some of the dress codes to be more ‘inclusive’ for some race fans. Co-ordinators of the event have announced that guests will be able to pick a sex clothing regulation they ‘feel most comfortable with’ meaning for the first time ladies will be permitted to dress like men and of course, the other way around – providing the garb they choose still adheres to the Royal Ascot guidelines.