In Part 1, you added up your income. Part 2 had you tally up your expenses. Now, before we look at the difference between those numbers, let’s talk about your savings.
Here in the United States, the amount of money Joe Citizen saves is non-existent. In recent years, the statistics have shown the nation’s savings rate at 2% on the high end and a negative 2% on the low end. In other words, our citizenry saves, on average, nothing. Are you an average Joe? [Read more →]
If you have a partner in your life—a spouse, someone you live with as a committed couple, anyone who affects or is affected by your financial decisions—please do everything you can to make sure that both of you stand on equal footing when it comes to money. By “equal footing”, I don’t mean that you have to both work and earn the same amount of money in your paychecks. Equal footing is when you both know everything about your individual and joint financial situations and you make decisions for the present and the future together. It is not when one of you earns the pay and the other receives an allowance determined by them because “it’s my money and I will decide what you need”. It is when all household income is pooled and it goes from being mine or yours to become simply ours. [Read more →]
I’ll bet that you regularly carry around more than a dollar in change in your pockets or purse, rarely pulling it out to make a purchase. Most people simply rack up coins, drop them in any convenient place, and forget that they actually have value as money. Do you have coins on your dresser, your desk, on the floor of various rooms in your home? Are they cluttering up the console and door handle of your car? Are you surrounded by money? Then why don’t you seem to have any when you need it? [Read more →]
If your employer traditionally pays Christmas bonuses, you may still receive one this year, depending on what the company has had to cut in order to keep up with the current economy. If you do get that extra money, what are you going to do with it? Will you do the same thing you always have? Will you spend it on Christmas gifts or the post-Christmas sales? Will you splurge on a big ticket item? Will you use it to pay on your debts?
Most people view bonuses as “free money” and they race to spend them. [Read more →]
How do you teach your children about money? It’s an especially tough question when what you learned as a child left you totally unprepared for life in the adult world. And it leads to many more questions… At what point do you tackle which questions? What bad habits do you have from your own childhood that you want to make sure they don’t learn? What’s the right way to go about this? [Read more →]
When I first started trying to figure out how to create a budget, I was lost. I didn’t know how much I spent each month on pretty much anything, nor did I have any idea how much I shouldspend. The whole idea of trying to figure that out intimidated me to the extreme. As a matter of fact, I had several false starts with my budget. I’d put one together at the beginning of the month, figure out that I wasn’t meeting it at the end of the month, and decide it was hopeless and convince myself that I really didn’t need a budget anyway. I think I did this several times over the course of a couple of years. At that time, money wasn’t tight and I could afford to be reckless. Or so I thought.
Had I taken the time to learn—really learn—how to effectively budget in those days, I might not have ended up more than $30,000 in debt when my first husband and I split up. [Read more →]
If you’re just starting out on learning how to manage your cashflow, here’s a technique that can work to curb overspending: use envelopes to allocate cash to certain categories. This is often useful when you tend to overspend on things like eating out, groceries, clothing and entertainment.
The technique: [Read more →]
If you don’t live an extra busy life, I want to know your secret. Most of us are living life in the fast lane, whether we want to or not. We’ve got work and family and friends and classes and parties and team sports and… and… and… and we still need to make time for ourselves, somehow. It seems like there’s never enough time to do everything we need to, much less those other things that we still want to do.
One way to make handling your monthly finances easier is [Read more →]
Maintenance is a word usually prefaced by “car” or “auto” for most of us. We maintain our vehicles with regular oil changes because we know that if we don’t, our transportation will be sitting on the side of the road getting us nowhere. The added benefits of regular maintenance is long-term savings: fewer trips to the mechanic, longer vehicle life, higher resale or trade-in value.
What about other areas of maintenance? [Read more →]
Have you ever thought about the fee they take with that cash withdrawal in terms of the percentage of the transaction? Most people don’t. Folks pay $2 or $3 and think nothing of it. But if you’re getting $10 out of the ATM and you pay a $3 fee for it, you just paid 30% for getting YOUR OWN MONEY. And unless you’re lucky enough to bank where they will reimburse you those fees, you’ll never get that money back. [Read more →]