Living for today - Planning for Tomorrow
I have to confess something. We’ve been running with a dangerously low emergency fund balance for quite some time. It all stems from building the lake house and all the costs associated with doing that. We have finally caught up with everything from construction and are working hard to start building our emergency fund back up. How bad is it? Well, we are currently running
Okay, I know. That’s a little harsh. I’m trying very hard not to be bitter about having to spend upwards of $1 trillion dollars to rescue our economy. As hard as I try not to be a little bitter about it, I’m not having a lot of luck. Maybe it’s because I’m not confident that this "rescue" will really save anything. Regardless of whether they
My wife, daughter and I were sitting at the breakfast table this morning when my daughter, who’s 5, randomly told my wife, "There are a lot of advertisements that are just trying to take our money." Over the last year or so when we are reading the paper and looking at advertisements I’ve tried to make a point to our daughter that sometimes you can
What a horrendous market this week. I guess it’s not really a surprise that things are headed south. I’ve been worrying about the overall economy and all of our country’s debt for a long time. So, if a simple guy like me is worrying about it, there must be a real problem. I’m actually not all that terribly worried about the market. I have $10,000
Over and over I read about various people’s plans for creating retirement income. You know the one thing that they have in common? They all have different approaches. There is no “one size fits all” approach to retirement out there. Many of us do not know what will happen after retirement, we may be fine financially, but illness can occur and the need for a philadelphia home
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
