Living for today - Planning for Tomorrow
When I was younger I used to think that the best thing I could do would be to buy a second home in Arizona. Why? Because some day I want to live there in the winter (aka: Be a Snowbird). I was convinced that a key strategy to my investing and saving for the future was to lock in a low price on a place
If you’ve been reading ELYM for any length of time you’ll know I’m a big fan of credit unions. I use one for all of my banking needs and have always been 110% happy with it. As I’ve been reading about all the drama with many commercial banks and lending institutions I started to wonder how my credit union was doing. All I needed to
For the first time in a long time, we spent the weekend at home. We decided about a week ago that we were long overdue for just taking it easy and staying home on a weekend. We had absolutely nothing on the agenda for the entire weekend which was both good and bad. My wife would call it a good thing. She’s much more comfortable
The time has finally come. Our little girl is growing up and is entering kindergarten this Sept. While I am feeling many emotions ranging from fear of the unknown to happiness that my daughter is growing up, I also feel a bit of excitement that we’ll be seeing a very large expense reduced. For the last couple years we have been paying over $800 per
We all know someone that doesn’t save a dime. Maybe that’s you? The reasons people cite for putting off saving are many. There is only one problem with all of these reasons. No matter how good your reason is, your future self won’t accept it. The best reason in the world won’t help you pay your bills when you are older. That really good reason
I have to confess something. More and more these days I’m finding myself thinking about what it would take to check out of the rat race. I don’t care about having the fanciest stuff, or the latest and greatest tech gadget. I really want to have the option to just do absolutely nothing as much as I want. I think it stems from a few
It’s been no secret that our household has been hemorrhaging money over the last 1.5 years as we built a second home out at our favorite lake. Now that we have been in it for a few months and have stopped buying both construction materials and basic furnishings etc, our budget is slowly getting back to normal. How have things changed? -We have increased our
Lately I’ve been looking at all the various gimmicks out there to get me to spend money in specific stores. Frankly, it would be pretty easy to sign up for saver cards and gift cards in lots of stores but I choose to only sign up for things like this in stores I already frequent. Here are a couple of the cards we are using,
Today I went to lunch with a couple friends of mine. One is someone that I currently work with and the other is someone that I worked with for a few years until he retired last year. I’m only 36 but by talking to my friend, I could just tell I’m going to really love retirement. My goal is to get there at 50. My
From the If you don’t ask, you won’t get department: When we bought the lake house property and structure we used some money from a home equity line of credit that we’d set up months before. We didn’t borrow a ton of money but at the time we locked in the interest rate. I’ve read too many horror stories about payments adjusting up as the
