Money Tips Network
What’s the Best Measure of Financial Success?
The following is a guest post from Aaron of Personal Finance for Beginners.
If you’ve just started to focus on your personal finances, it can be difficult to know where to start. There are many important areas of money management – debt, budgeting, saving, investing – that make it hard to decide where to prioritize your attention and how you should measure your progress.
In this post, we’ll take a look at pros and cons behind four of the most popular numbers used to evaluate your financial success:
- Credit score
- Income
- Savings rate
- Net worth
Improving any one of these metrics has the potential to improve your financial wellness – but is there one number that rules them all?
Credit score
6 Common Homebuying Myths, Debunked
You're ready to own a home. And you think you know the basics involved in finding one, working with a real estate agent, and applying for a mortgage. But buying a home for the first time can be a confusing process.
7 Little White Lies That Can Save You Money
Sometimes you have to fudge the truth a bit to get out of spending money. There are so many demands on our finances that it helps to get creative in order to save a few bucks now and then.
Best Deals for Monday 05/28
Link for teaser title:
http://www.wisebread.com/bestdeals/today
French Press Coffee & Tea Maker Complete Bundle, 60% OFF, and more...
The Biggest Retirement Risks and How to Prepare for Them
Over the past century, life expectancy in the United States has dramatically increased, a fact that has profoundly impacted the financial security experienced during our golden years.
After World War II, the first generation of retirees were generally expected to live less than a decade after leaving the workforce. Now, the average American is living to be about 78.8 years old, and as a result retirement can last anywhere from 20 to 30 years, with some people spending more time retired than they did working.
That sort of longevity is wreaking havoc on the best of financial plans, particularly when combined with the rising costs of some of life’s most significant expenses.
“About half of Americans are at risk of not being able to maintain their standard of living throughout retirement,” said Michael Gerstman, CEO of Fort Lauderdale-based Gerstman Financial Group.
How I Get Things Done
One of the most regular questions I get from readers centers around how I manage my time and focus. The questions tend to focus on some specific element of my overall system for managing all of the things that I need to get done in my parallel roles of writer, father, husband, coach, involved community member, child, and all of the other roles I fulfill in a given week, along with some time left over for self-care.
I’ll be the first to admit that it’s hard to juggle all of those things. There are constantly things to be done, appointments to remember, places I’m supposed to be, tasks that need to be done. It is utterly relentless.
Over the years, I’ve tried all sorts of tactics and techniques for managing my time and focus and energy to get as much value out of each day as possible. My systems for doing this have evolved over time, in ways I’ll mention below, but here is my system for getting things done and staying sane.
Life insurance: What to do when you’re ready to self-insure
Life insurance is a vital consideration in financial planning. Thing is: You might not need as much as you think, if anything at all …
This is a guest post from my friend Eric Rosenberg, a personal finance blogger and podcaster at Personal Profitability in partnership with Mason Finance. He writes about personal finance, credit cards, entrepreneurship, and technology.
Life insurance is an important part of a personal finance plan, as it protects your loved ones from a loss of income in a worst case scenario. But your life insurance needs may change over time. If you follow a good savings and investment plan, you can eventually build up so much in savings that you don’t need life insurance any more. That’s a great situation to be in, but what should you do when you reach that point?
Meeting an Old Friend: Strategies for Low Cost Meetups
Yesterday, an old friend of mine, one that I’ve known for more than 20 years and talk to online regularly but rarely get to see face to face, came through my area in the midst of a long road trip with his family. We were both excited that our paths were going to cross and we made plans to meet up.
Ordinarily, one might expect that we’d just identify a restaurant somewhere and meet for lunch there. It’d be convenient, right? Well, after some back and forth, we came up with a different plan.
First of all, we decided to meet at a park instead of a restaurant. There were several reasons for this. One, it settled the issue of figuring out a restaurant that everyone would like and that would meet all dietary requirements. Two, it put us in a position where we’d arrive with food already in hand so that we wouldn’t waste our window of time together ordering food and reading menus.
How to Respond to House-Shaming
You've heard it at the dinner table when visiting Mom and Dad. You've heard it from your cousin Phil. You've heard it from friends out at Happy Hour. "Why are you renting a home when you should be buying?
10 Red Flags to Look Out for When Renting Your First Apartment
Are you ready to fly the nest? If it's time to find a new apartment, there are some things to look out for before signing a rental agreement. If you don't know what to be wary of, your first place could put you in financial jeopardy and even physical danger. These are the biggest red flags.
2-Minute Read: What You Need to Know About FICO Scores
FICO scores are the most widely used credit scores in the U.S. According to myFICO.com, 90% of the top U.S.
Best Money Tips: Things That Medicare Doesn't Cover
Welcome to Wise Bread's Best Money Tips Roundup!
20 Ways to Make Family Camping Easy
I like camping with my kids, but I don't like working hard at it. I try to keep the whole trip easy, from the planning, to the packing, to the sitting around the campfire.
Best Deals for Friday 05/25
Link for teaser title:
http://www.wisebread.com/bestdeals/today
AppleRound Space Hopper Ball with Air Pump, 65% OFF, and more...
Stories From Our Readers: How Drew cut his grocery bill in half
“This is going to sound so naive, but I was skeptical about the benefits of tracking my spending.
I had a general idea of where my money was going, so wasn’t that good enough?
No, it wasn’t. After a month of meticulously tracking every dollar I spent, I realized that my grocery spending was double what I thought it was. I couldn’t believe it. I guess all those pints of ice cream and fancy cheeses I was sneaking into my cart really added up.
Before I started tracking my spending, I only made half-hearted efforts at cutting costs. I think a part of me felt like if I didn’t look hard at the details, I wouldn’t have to face the reality that I wasn’t as frugal as I thought I was.
After tracking my spending, I got serious about budgeting. The numbers didn’t lie. I knew I had to make a change.
The proactive homeowner: How to stay on top of home improvement
Yesterday was an exciting day at the Rothwards household! After three weeks of demolition and construction, we installed our new hot tub.
It took six men an hour of maneuvering before we managed to set the spa into place…but we did it. And we didn’t break anything. Now it’s a matter of completing the decking and roofing, then Kim and I will be able to enjoy our remodeled outdoor oasis!
We’re eager for construction to be over. Since buying our “English cottage” last summer, we’ve poured tons of money and time into a variety of renovations. It’s been a non-stop construction zone.
You see, during the seventeen years the previous owners lived here, they performed very little maintenance and upkeep on the home and property. When we had the place inspected before purchase, the inspector raised a lot of concerns:
The inspection report was so dire that Kim and I almost passed on the purchase.
How to Handle a High Stress Work Environment
One wonderful advantage of financial independence (or at least a strong financial foundation) is that you don’t have to deal with stressful or toxic work environments. You can simply start searching for a different job as soon as the environment turns negative and handle any financial bumps in the road that such a search may cause.
However, many Americans aren’t in that situation. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford financial bumps, and other Americans might be in a job that pays very well compared to alternatives or offers some other particular benefit. In both of those cases, sticking with a high stress or toxic work environment might be the only option for them.
If we stick with the assumption that your job is toxic/high stress but a job change is exceedingly difficult right now, how do you handle that challenge?
Five Reasons You Shouldn’t ‘Sell in May and Go Away’
You may have heard the popular idiom that when it comes to your investments, you should “sell in May and go away.”
It’s unclear exactly where this comes from. Investopedia suggests that it may originate with an old English tradition in which aristocrats and other businessmen left London to vacation for the summer — which, if true, would be a hilarious basis upon which modern investors are making decisions. Others suggest that it simply reflects the fact that professional traders have historically taken time off in the summer, leading to lower trading volumes and lower returns.
But is there any truth to it? Are investment returns worse during the summer? With Memorial Day weekend approaching and the month of May almost over, should you be selling out of your investments right now?
8 Fun Facts About Credit Cards
Receiving your credit card statement each month may be the opposite of fun, but credit cards themselves are actually a pretty fascinating subject.
Best Money Tips: High-Paying Careers That Don't Require a College Degree
Welcome to Wise Bread's Best Money Tips Roundup!
Facebook
Become a fan
Twitter
Follow us
RSS
Subscribe