Money Tips Network

I’m a big fan of using the 30-day challenge to try out a particular daily routine or behavioral change in my life. It’s a big part of how I view life as being something of an experiment, one in which you’re constantly adjusting and trying new things. The goal is to introduce incremental improvements to your daily life until it hums like a well-tuned engine as it pushes you forward toward your goals and dreams.

However, there are some adjustments and changes to your daily life that work really well as one-off challenges. Do them once or maybe twice and it becomes really obvious how useful those are, and those changes often just become the new norm for you immediately.

It's important to get a home inspection when buying a house. There are many hidden issues that can emerge after you buy a property that are expensive to correct.

During the height of my three-year battle with breast cancer, a diagnosis that required one dozen surgical procedures, eight months of chemotherapy, and eight weeks of radiation treatment five days a week, I was scraping to get by on disability payments and whatever odd jobs I completed when my energy allowed.

Needless to say, I wasn’t saving a dime for retirement during those three years (which is worth a discussion of its own), and I wasn’t paying off any of the bills I had accumulated prior to the diagnosis. Chief among those debts that I shelved were my graduate school student loans amounting to about $27,000.

Rejection is no one's idea of fun.

More and more, I'm meeting people who want to know how to retire early. There's been a lot of buzz in the media lately about early retirement, and that's led folks to wonder how much money they would need to quit their jobs — or if early retirement is even something they should consider.

Why retire early? Well, for most people a job is a necessary evil. We work because we have to. Early retirement gives us the flexibility to choose how we spend our time, whether that entails sitting on the beach drinking margaritas or it leads to new work that provides meaning and fulfillment.

Lots of us dream of leaving the workplace in our forties or fifties instead of sticking it out until age 65 — but we keep working to support the lifestyles to which we've become accustomed. We like our iPhones and Playstations and Priuses, so we surrender to the idea that we'll have fifty-year careers.

The following is a sponsored post from EquityMultiple.

Maybe you’ve heard of “real estate crowdfunding” and associate the term with Kickstarter and GoFundMe (and investments that don’t inspire much confidence). Perhaps you’re unclear on how the concept differs from REITs. Or, perhaps, you haven’t heard of real estate crowdfunding at all.

Real estate crowdfunding - an evolving set of online platforms for direct, private real estate investment - has emerged as a new alternative asset class, and viable means for individual investors to access private real estate on a level that was unavailable even 5 years ago.

Let’s take a step back and review why real estate is an appealing asset class, and worth taking a look at for all individual investors already exposed to the stock market and bonds:

When Sarah and I first started our financial turnaround, our long-term goals were clear.

First, we wanted to buy a decent house to raise our family in and do the best job we could raising our children with the values and skills needed to be independent.

After that, we wanted to achieve our own financial independence as a couple as rapidly as possible.

Over the last 12 years or so, since we reached that financial turnaround point, we’ve felt ourselves move through what I would describe as a series of “stages,” where our financial freedom and opportunity has notably expanded. While the line between each stage wasn’t incredibly stark and clear, there were times when it was clear to us that things were significantly different and significantly better than they were beforehand.

In late 2018, American Express released a refreshed version of the . While the card issuer bumped the annual fee up to $250 for this new offering, they introduced an intriguing combination of perks and earning categories that could be ideal for consumers who love dining out and eating fancy foods.

For example, this newer version of the card lets you earn 4x points at U.S. restaurants and on your first $25,000 spent at U.S. supermarkets each year, then 1X. You can also receive up to $120 in dining credits at participating partners each year along with other food-related perks.

Without a big welcome bonus, however, the American Express® Gold Card could be a hard sell. In this review, we’ll share how we rate this card, its bonus structure, and why the annual fee could be well worth it.

A few readers pointed me to a Bloomberg article entitled How Much Money Do You Need to Be Wealthy in America? and wanted to know my thoughts.

Before I dig in, I want to point out that the author of this article, Suzanne Woolley, did a good job of reporting on the results of the survey in question. My issue is with the results of the survey, not the survey itself or how Woolley summarized it.

Let’s back up for just a second. This Bloomberg article provides a summary of the 2018 Modern Wealth Index, a study done by Charles Schwab in which the company surveyed a thousand Americans on their financial state and financial goals.

Schwab’s summary of the survey results is pretty on par with what I’d expect: