Increasing your net worth is fairly straight forward. Lower your expenses and/or increase your earnings. There's only two ways to accomplish it. Although increasing your earnings has a much higher potential, the easiest way to start saving money is going to be through decreasing your expenses. For me, that means living like a poor person....
During one of my math classes in middle school the teacher talked about the power of compound interest and asked if any of the students had stocks. Some raised their hands and said they had stock in things like Disney or Coca Cola, nothing fancy, mostly big name companies. However, I was pretty darn jealous. I...
Have you ever had a love hate relationship? It may be with a person, an object, or perhaps a job... but what about the time value of money? Perhaps I'm a bit odd, but the time value of money and I have a unique relationship in which sometimes I love it... and sometimes I hate its guts,...
The definition of net worth has been debated and you'll often find many answers as you search for the meaning of net worth. The standard answer for net worth goes something like this: "Assets - Liabilities = Net Worth" The struggle comes in describing what an asset is and what true liabilities are. Is a house an asset, or...
You'd like to save money, and you'd like to shed a few pounds... what do you do? Ditch the car commute and get on the ol bike is what I say. Crazy? Well... it worked for me and it can easily work for you as well! When I moved to Hawaii I ditched the car. Back...
If you've got a mental fixation with the image you're portraying to your neighbors you should probably heed the advice of this article. Stop keeping up with the Joneses, nobody really likes them anyways! They're probably fake, focused only on what you care about, and they don't really have much sense of self. Or maybe I'm...
It's been said that the easiest way to make money is to keep the money you have. Saving money is a sure way to make sure you have it when you need it, yet so many of us waste it on things we want or spending too much on the things we need. By cutting waste you're...
The career track as you know it is not a permanent condition of human life. It's barely three generations old. Civilization has been around for maybe 8 millennia. And for 7.9 of those, "career track" meant working on the family farm and eventually inheriting it. That's if you were lucky and male. If you were female, it involved a lot...
With so much talk about becoming a millionaire and becoming financially free it can all seem a bit daunting. After all, only 2% of Americans are millionaires and if you're a just starting out in life (myself included) it doesn't exactly seem realistic to come up with a million dollars or become free by next Tuesday. ...
With personal finance everything is relative. Reading through blogs and comparing yourself to others using direct numbers might not be the best way to measure your progress, but using personal finance ratios could be a better indicator as to how you're doing. For example, if you're located in Iowa, your income is going to be significantly lower...