Every week I write about money. Sometimes in a roundabout way. But ultimately, this website is about growing wealth by making better financial decisions. Life is not about money, but money can help us live a better life. When you’re living paycheck to paycheck, unexpected expenses can be extremely stressful. The news of a major home…
In personal finance, excess cash flow is the money that’s left over in your checking account at the end of each month. Your success with money is heavily dependent on creating and doing smart things with it. If you don’t have any excess cash flow, you may need to change shit up. Each of my quarterly…
Achieving success in personal finance is simple but not easy. Make more money. Spend less than you make. Invest the surplus. That’s the formula to become wealthy over time. The Nintendo fanboy in me calls this the Triforce of Wealth. But doing those things requires habit, persistence, and a steady income. If personal finance were…
It’s summer break for our kids. They don’t have much to compare this summer to, but life is good. No school. No homework. No job. No workday calendar. No bills to pay. They had Lucky Charms cereal for dinner Saturday night. Parenting fail. This is the best dinner ever. – My 4-year-old daughter The marshmallows are way…
Are you living paycheck to paycheck? If your monthly budget is tight already, any recession or economic fallout will make matters worse. Now is the time to break the paycheck to paycheck cycle and start building wealth. For years, I’ve assumed most of my readers don’t live month to month. But according to a recent…
This week’s article is a guest post featuring Beau Mueller. Beau is from Hawaii and a proud father of two young boys. He is also the founder of The Moneywise Teacher, a site where educators can find useful information, advice, insights, resources, and inspiration to help them make and save more money. I’m personally looking…
My latest article on U.S. News & World Report recommends tips to simplify your finances in retirement. Retirement isn’t the only time to simplify. Anytime is a good time to simplify. But I’m a bad role model for simplifying finances because I’m on the far side of the spectrum with multiple personal investment accounts and bank…
Back in January of 2017, most personal finance professionals, advisers, bloggers, and just about anybody willing to give you money advice said to avoid investing in crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoin at the close of 2016 was $963.74 per $1 USD. On the last day of 2017, the price was $14,156.40. That’s…
Very few decisions during your time on this earth actually change the trajectory of your life. After a party in 2007, I scanned the huge Evite email list to try to find a woman I met there. Then I ‘stalked’ her on Facebook and asked her out. We have three kids together now. Though truly…
If you own a home, you might be contemplating how extra mortgage payments may or may not fit into your overall financial plan. As is with all personal finance choices, your mortgage payment strategy is personal based on many factors. You don’t find many people who paid off their mortgages and regret the paid off debt….
The financial firm UBS publishes a quarterly report called Investor Watch that analyzes investor behavior. One of these reports has remained on my mind since publication in 2015. The report was called When is enough… enough – Why the wealthy can’t get off the treadmill. The premise is that more than half (52%) of millionaires surveyed…
We sometimes see friends on Facebook asking about local daycare facilities or looking for a nanny to watch their kids while they work. It must be stressful to find high-quality affordable daycare. We’ve never had to deal with child care because we started thinking about how to live on one income before we were engaged,…
After two years of begging, I finally received a classic Nintendo NES Game Console from Santa in the sixth grade. One of the original video games for the system was the masterpiece, The Legend of Zelda. The Zelda franchise is an enduring global video game phenomenon enjoyed by gamers worldwide. To date, Nintendo has produced 18 titles…
One striking revelation from the 2016 presidential election process was the sharp contrast between people who think the U.S. is in pretty good shape and those who feel the country never recovered from the last recession. Politics aside, the U.S. was in an epic economic expansion until COVID-19. The longest post-World-War-II economic expansion WAS from…