Money Tips Network
Your financial family tree: What our parents teach us about money
Last weekend, Kim and I flew to Utah for a reunion with friends from the 2016 chautauqua in Ecuador. While in Salt Lake City, we met up with Jesse Mecham (the founder of You Need a Budget), visited Utah Olympic Park, and attended a Sunday morning performance of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Questions About Insurance, Marriage, Coffee, Thanksgiving, and More!
What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to summaries of five or fewer words. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. Insurance billing issues
2. Cheapest city-to-city travel
3. Buying new for baby?
4. Husband too frugal
5. Other people’s situation as inspiration
6. Emptying out 401(k)
7. Concern about national debt
8. Burning out on financial improvement
Seven Ways Black Friday Can Save You Money All Year Long
The National Retail Federation expects us to spend as much as $720.89 billion this holiday season. That’s a lot of dough.
But the annual shopping kickoff isn’t necessarily just about buying holiday gifts. A savvy consumer can boost the bottom line year-round, rather than just the holiday budget, by taking advantage of great deals on Black Friday.
(That is, if they are great deals. More on that below.)
Here are seven non-Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa reasons to stock up on Black Friday, followed by some smart consumer tactics for shopping on Nov. 23:
Shower gifts are in your future.
If you’ve received save-the-date cards for 2019, Black Friday is all about the affordable presents. Towels, luxurious sheets, small appliances, cookware, and other gift-able items will be available at prices that are sometimes startling.
How to Get Rid of Your Credit Card's Annual Fee
You look down at the credit card in your hand. It's one of your older cards, and you've bought plenty with it. The problem is, it charges an annual fee, and you're sick of paying it. You're tempted to cancel the card to eliminate the fee altogether.
The Best Career Advice I’ve Ever Received
When I was first starting to get a good idea of the bad financial situation Sarah and I were in, I wrote an email to my professional mentor at the time. This person was a pretty well known person in our narrow field, with a high paying job and a lot of respect within the field and lots of professional options on the table before him. He was not my boss, though I had worked with him in the past and it was potentially possible that I could work for him again.
Financial Success Is a Lifestyle Outcome, Not a Skill or a Fad
When I first started making financial changes in my life, I believed at first (and for a surprisingly long time after that) that the changes I was making to my life were largely short term changes. Sarah and I would “get ourselves on a good financial track” and we’d basically go back to the lifestyle we had before.
As I started making changes, however, I began to realize that a lot of the changes I was making to my life were strictly better than the way I was doing things before.
For example, we started buying a lot of store brands, and we learned that for the most part, they were basically identical to name brands in every way other than perhaps the aesthetic appeal of the packaging. We just switched to buying store brands for most things, and we probably buy an even higher percentage of our items in store brand form today.
Upcoming money events that might be of interest to GRS readers
A lot of things have changed in the world of money since I founded Get Rich Slowly in April 2006. Nowadays, for instance, there are many more opportunities to meet up with like-minded folks in Real Life. From annual retreats like Camp Mustache to monthly meet-ups with Choose FI local groups, it's never been easier to connect with other money bosses!
In fact, today there are almost too many events to keep track! I have a stack of invites and announcements in my inbox. Rather than write about each one individually, I thought I'd take this time to share some of my favorites all at once.
Here are some upcoming money events that might be of interest to GRS readers. (At the end of this page, I'll include my planned public speaking gigs for 2019.)
An Iterative Approach to Improving Your Finances (and Your Life)
My previous career (before “freelance writer”) was in software development. I worked in a research lab where I wrote custom software solutions for research scientists who wanted nice interfaces to do basic data mining tasks into a pretty large database of scientific information. This required me to not only know how to code, but to have a pretty robust understanding of the data and what kinds of questions the researchers were asking.
This was a big project, and I was pretty much the lone programmer working on it (there was also a “data farmer” who did a lot of the data collection and organization). The scale of the project was far beyond what I had ever learned about in computer science and software development classes, so one of the things I had to teach myself was software development strategies. How do you even manage a project like this?
Three Ways to Raise Your Credit Score Fast
Building good credit doesn’t happen overnight, and it can take years to establish a solid credit history. But if your credit score is in bad shape, there are a few things you can do to potentially raise your credit score fast – in as little as a month.
Depending on what your credit report holds, quick credit-boosting strategies might include addressing the issues that are causing your low score in the first place, or adding a lot of positive information at once. These methods won’t turn bad credit into great credit overnight, but they can potentially lead to a noticeable improvement – and fairly quickly.
Here are three legitimate options if you’re looking to raise your credit score fast.
5 Financial Accomplishments Millennials Can Be Proud Of
Millennials get blamed for a lot of things. Often, they're accused of being spendthrift and irresponsible. Critics assume that Millennials are unable or unwilling to save money or invest smartly.
Much of this criticism is unfair.
Join Our Tweetchat on Thursday 11/15, 12pm Pacific for a Chance to Win Prizes
Join our Tweetchat this Thursday at 12:00 pm Pacific for lively conversation and a chance to win one of two $10 Amazon GCs! Use #WBChat to participate.
This week's topic: Having a Frugal Thanksgiving! Learn about saving on decorations, food, drinks, travel, and more!
Challenge Yourself! 12 Simple Frugal Challenges You Can Do This Week
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.
Fiology: The online encyclopedia of financial independence
Fiology is a brand-new site that I believe will interest many Get Rich Slowly readers. It's an attempt to gather in one place related articles about a variety of common topics from the world of financial independence and early retirement.
Here's how Fiology founder David Baughier describes his goals:
My motivations for Fiology are simple – to share the message of Financial Independence while highlighting some of the best and brightest in the Financial Independence community on the internet. At no point will a visitor be charged by me to access the information on the site.
The majority of the material Fiology uses is free and readily available elsewhere on the internet. The value of Fiology is that it takes that information and organizes it into an easy reference that we can share with those interested in the concept of Financial Independence.
8 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Home Inspector
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.
Feeling Rich and Feeling Poor
One question that I left out of the mailbag yesterday is this one, from Dana:
Cancer Patients Can Now Defer Student Loans Without Accruing Interest
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.
Ask the Readers: What Is Your Favorite Holiday Dish?
Editor's Note: Congratulations to Matt, JE, and John for winning this week's contest!
There are many holidays to celebrate during the fall and winter seasons, and more often than not, food is a big part of the festivities.
What is your favorite holiday dish?
How Constant Rejection Can Actually Lead to Success
Rejection is no one's idea of fun.
Questions About Checking Luggage, Funeral Expenses, Altruism, Roth IRAs, and More!
What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to summaries of five or fewer words. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. What is wealth?
2. Logistics of multiple savings goals
3. Cost of unexpected funeral
4. Changing goals
5. Shipping items verus checking luggage
6. “Get what you pay for”?
7. Retire early for altruism?
8. Can’t reduce debt
9. Emptied out 401(k)…
How to retire early: Early retirement by the numbers
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.
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