Money Tips Network
Ask the Readers: Do You Use a Workout Plan?
Doing whatever exercises you feel like, whenever you feel like it, keeps you active, sure. But if you have fitness goals you'd like to achieve, using a workout plan will make your exercise sessions much more effective and allow you to reach your goals more quickly.
Do you use a workout plan?
10 Simple Yet Life-Changing Personal Finance Strategies
In past years, I gave a series of personal finance talks for local organizations. As my kids got older, I stepped back from doing this, but I still keep my deck of slides fresh with content that lines up with everything I’ve learned about personal finances.
Most of my slides are just pictures of my family or of friends or of my home. They feature one, two, or three bolded words on them. I want people to listen to what I’m saying, not reading the words off of a slide and drowning me out. The only slide I use that has more than three words on it is an early slide that says “SPEND LESS THAN YOU EARN” on it, and the title slide that’s on the screen at the start.
One of my favorite segments in the talk is when I start talking about spending less, a segment that’s centered around “10 simple but life-changing personal finance strategies.” Again, these are all slides of something from my life with just a few big bolded words on them, usually along the bottom or top.
How to Use Airline Shopping Portals to Cash In On Rewards
Airline shopping portals offer an easy way to earn "extra" miles for every dollar you spend, but too many people don't even know they exist, let alone how to use them.
Budgeting tip for weekly and biweekly paychecks
Have a weekly or a biweekly paycheck? Do you get bonuses in your paychecks? I guarantee you do. Here's a budgeting tip for you.
Get biweekly paychecks, or even weekly paychecks? Then this budgeting tip is expressly for you …
Getting a regular paycheck is a blessing in many ways. There's a stability in being an employee.
A regular paycheck makes budgeting fairly straightforward. Straightforward enough that you can budget with pen and paper!
I've earned a paycheck every two weeks from my day job — the same day job — since 2000. (I've been told it's uncommon these days to work at a job that long.)
A paycheck every two weeks gives me 26 or 27 paychecks a year, depending on when the first payday falls during the year. Most of the time, it's 26 paychecks per year.
With 12 months in the year, most months I receive two paychecks per months.
Questions About Car Seats, Leftovers, Medical Insurance, Budget Brands, 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. Early or late retirement contributions?
2. Purchases for infrequent use
3. Used car seats?
4. Excessive leftovers
5. Friends want me to spend
6. Value of “one bag” living
7. Buying a house on $35K
8. How to avoid drive-thrus
Tips for Getting a Mortgage
Obtaining a mortgage can be one of the most stressful and exhausting parts of the homebuying process.
Since the subprime housing crisis and the market crash that kicked off in 2007, mortgage applications and reviews have been more detailed and rigorous than ever, requiring seemingly endless paperwork and extensive income verification.
There are also many variables to consider when shopping for a mortgage that can impact the success of the entire process and ultimately how much you spend — not only to obtain the mortgage, but on your home over the long run.
To help first-time homebuyers navigate all of these hurdles successfully, we asked mortgage industry experts to share their top tips for obtaining a mortgage.
How Journaling Practices Have Helped My Financial Situation
I’ve mentioned often on The Simple Dollar how journaling is a daily practice for me and has been off and on (but mostly on) since middle school in various forms. At times, it’s taken the form of simply cataloguing my day; at other times, I’ve written in response to various prompts; today, it’s completely different (and I’ll write about that in a bit). In any case, writing in my journal – simply put, getting thoughts out of my head down on paper – is something that is a daily part of my life.
Why have I kept up with it for so long? How has it helped me in any way that’s made it worth the time investment? And what does that practice look like? That’s what I want to share today.
Let’s start with the why.
The Benefits of Journaling, Financial and Otherwise
I keep up with a daily journaling practice for a lot of reasons.
Hobbies and Hustles
I recently read this great little article by Molly Conway entitled The Trap of Turning Hobbies Into Hustles. In it, she makes the astute point that when you attempt to start earning money from something that’s a hobby, it ceases to be a hobby any more – rather, it starts to seem like work:
Who’s In Control of Your Life?
Let me tell you three stories. The first comes from my own life, while the other two are things that I’ve observed recently.
* * *
For my own tale, let’s roll back several years.
At that time, I worked as a research assistant focusing on data mining. My job mostly revolved around writing tools for researchers to explore a very large data set in a simple fashion, essentially enabling them to make connections within the data at a click of the mouse, and I also spent a significant amount of my time digging through the data myself, looking for useful patterns and trying to make sense of it all.
I really loved the work I was doing. When I was actually doing the data mining, or when I was working with researchers to come up with ways to help them explore the data on their own, I deeply enjoyed the work. It was intellectually challenging, interesting, and meaningful. I also dearly loved the small team I worked with at the time.
Join Our Tweetchat on Thursday 5/23, 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: Financial Tips for New Grads! Learn about career advice, saving on housing, tackling student loan debt, and more!
Why Spending Less Doesn’t Reduce Your Quality of Living
One of the biggest mental obstacles that most people face when it comes to turning around their financial life is the perception that if they cut into their spending, they’re going to reduce their quality of life.
Typically, a person’s mind flashes to the non-essential things that they care about most. So, for me, when you talk about cutting spending, I imagine cutting into my hobby spending. I imagine cutting into my quality food spending. I imagine cutting into family vacations.
To tell the truth, that’s a pretty unpleasant vision. Those are the things I care about in my life. I don’t want to cut them out. I don’t want to lose those things that really bring a lot of joy and value to my life.
Is Loan Protection Insurance Worth the Cost?
When signing on for a loan, whether it’s a mortgage for a new home or a personal loan to consolidate credit card balances, you’re often offered insurance that promises to make the debt payments should anything happen to you.
At first blush this sounds like a great idea, right?
After all, such insurance is designed to step in and cover monthly loan payments and protect you from default in the event of anything from job loss to debilitating illness and even death.
While there are benefits to this type of protection, there’s also a long list of reasons to think carefully before signing on the dotted line, including the fact that there are better options out there that will protect you and your family more directly and thoroughly in the event of the unexpected.
Beyond wealth: What happens AFTER you achieve financial independence?
In their classic Your Money or Your Life, Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin argue that the relationship between spending and happiness is non-linear.
More spending brings more fulfillment — up to a point. But spending too much can actually have a negative impact on your quality of life. The authors suggest that personal fulfillment — that is, contentment — can be graphed on a curve that looks like this:
Clearlane Auto Refinance Review
Clearlane, an online auto lending platform that’s powered by Ally Bank, offers auto loan refinancing and lease buyout options for borrowers with nearly any type of credit score. They do so by utilizing a nationwide finance network and offering fast and easy online quotes. They even let you get pre-qualified online and without a hard inquiry to your credit report.
If you’re curious about refinancing your car or buying a car you’re leasing, this online lender may be exactly what you need. Keep reading to find out how Clearlane works, where it falls short, and why you might want to consider it.
The Seven Factors: Behaviors That Lead to Wealth
In the book The Millionaire Next Door, the authors Thomas Stanley and William Danko surveyed more than a thousand households that had accumulated more than a million dollars in net worth, looking for traits among them that were decidedly different than the mainstream population. What did people who had accumulated wealth do that others do not, and vice versa?
The entire book discusses the results of that study, but very early in the book the authors efficiently boil down the differences in financial behavior between those who are able to accumulate wealth and those who do not down to seven key factors. These seven factors are the key things that people who are effective at building enough wealth to be financially independent do that are different than most people.
Don’t Make These Seven Car Insurance Mistakes
When it comes to shopping wisely for a car insurance policy, perhaps the number one rule to keep in mind is the age-old adage about not being a penny wise and a pound foolish.
Cliched as that expression may be, buying too little coverage is one of the consumer mistakes most frequently cited by insurance professionals.
Unfortunately, it’s just one of the many things consumers do wrong when shopping for what can be a particularly critical insurance policy in your portfolio of coverage. Each year there are millions of vehicle crashes in the United States. In 2016 alone, there were about five million crashes that involved property damage and about 2.2 million that caused injuries.
Ask the Readers: What Are Your Best Travel Planning Tips?
Travel should be fun and relaxing, but the planning part isn't always so. If you've ever planned a trip or two, then you know how stressful it can be...but you probably learned a few things about how to plan your next trip!
What are your best travel planning tips?
Questions About Child Rearing Costs, Laundry Services, Unused Media, Aldi, 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. $250K to raise a kid?
2. Long term care?
3. $20 bill budgeting
4. Expense of laundry service
5. Backlog of unused media
6. 403(b) risky?
7. Cheap or expensive bag?
8. Thoughts on Aldi
9. Is renters insurance necessary?
Why Having a Positive Money Mindset Can Help You Become Wealthy
The following is a guest post from DollarSprout.
When it comes to building wealth, there are many technical steps and strategies you can follow. And if those technical strategies are what you are lacking, there is no shortage of expert information available.
One piece that is often forgotten, however, is the impact an optimistic money mindset can have on your financial success. It’s an important topic to discuss, as more and more research is showing just how beneficial a positive money mindset can be for building wealth.
What is a Money Mindset?
In general, your mindset is made up of your attitude and beliefs. Therefore, your money mindset is the attitude and beliefs with which you approach money.
Your money mindset is at the core of how you make financial decisions and whether or not you achieve your financial goals.
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