Living for today - Planning for Tomorrow
Have you seen this? It’s GREAT! Vanguard has a very “simple to use” tool that lets you slide a few bars and get an idea of whether your nest egg will last long enough to fund your retirement. They use the Monte Carlo simulation, which is a basically a really big math equation with lots of variable inputs. Since I have a bachelor of arts
If you haven’t already done so, now would be a good time to check your retirement accounts to ensure they are balanced appropriately and that you are contributing as much as you can. The maximum contribution amount for 2012 is $17,000 and if you’re 50 or older, you can contribute up to $22,500 to your retirement account. I have tried to keep our contributions maxed
Have you seen this great website for “America Saves Week”? It has a ton of great information about saving and I especially liked reading about people who have started saving and overcome their financial problems. Here are some great highlights of the site: Saver Stories: http://www.americasavesweek.org/read-savers-stories Assess Your Savings Progress: http://www.americasavesweek.org/assess-your-savings-progress Are You Saving Enough for Your Retirement: http://www.choosetosave.org/ballpark/ Mortgage Payoff Calculator:
In what is becoming a very commons occurrence in the US, Bank of America announced that it will be freezing it’s pension plans for existing employees starting in July. This means that worker’s pensions will only pay out whatever they’ve accrued until July. After July, Bank of America will start adding an additional 2-3% to their 401K matching for workers. http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/23/news/companies/bank_of_america_pension/ I have to admit,
Lately I’ve been spending some time looking over our budget to see if we have any areas that we can shave our expenses and I thought I’d summarize a few key data points. We have always strived to minimize our expenses for things that don’t matter to us. The result has been that we don’t have much of what I’d call “leakage” to our monthly
Tonight I was sitting in my office at home when my daughter came in with rubber gloves on. She looked at me and said, “Daddy, I’m starting to clean the bathrooms so I can get my allowance!”. I told her, “great job” and she headed in to the first bathroom to start cleaning. About 5 minutes later she came back in with a funny smile
I will confess that I really like Business Insider. Their latest article that caught my attention was a pretty long set of instructions on how to keep your money after winning the lottery or making millions as a professional athlete. It won’t be a surprise to most of you that it simply requires spending less than you make and creating a revenue stream from the
I must confess that I love watching consumers exercise their right to shop where they believe they’ll get the best value. The latest article on MSN highlights that online banks are seeing large increases in new members as people, fed up by the latest fee hikes at commercial banks, shop around for better deals. While I still think credit unions are the best place to
I read an article today about Danny Kofke. He’s the author of the book: A Simple Book of Financial Wisdom, available at Amazon for $12. In the article, Danny talks about how he and his family live on $40,000 per year. There really wasn’t any new information or advice on how he does it but it’s definitely worth reading. A few things caught my eye
I realized a long time ago that the various types of media companies out there really weren’t very good at helping me be financially successful. It seemed that each article I read contradicted the previous article and you could pretty much find any article to tell you anything you wanted to hear. I guess it was a long slow process that I lost confidence in
