Think Your Way to Wealth is noticing the same thing that I’ve noticed: Gas prices are sneaking back up. For a while they were down in the low-$2 range here (yeah that qualifies for low now) and now they’re testing $3 again. “RC” caught that the former president of Shell Oil, John Hofmeister, predicts $5 … Read more
A cash-only budgeting system can be the ticket to reining in spending and getting away from the temptation of credit cards. The idea is this: Pull out the total of your weekly (biweekly, monthly) budget in cash. Separate the cash into envelopes by category according to how you’re budgeting that money. Spend down the envelopes … Read more
Bart, over at the Personal Finance and Money Stack Exchange site, lacks discipline with tracking his finances. He asks: I have had very little success with managing money. I have gone bankrupt once ($50K in credit card debt) and since then I no longer have credit cards (just a debit card) but my spending is … Read more
Hopefully I didn’t let the cat out of the bag to anyone reading today. If so, I’m sorry. (As long as I’m at it, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and the Great Pumpkin don’t exist, either.) The impossibility of such a character is easy to argue. Let’s say that there are about two billion … Read more
This year we started our daughter on an allowance. It’s probably a generous-ish allowance for a five-year-old: $2.50 per week. For “spending money” this actually amounts to $1.50 per week because we have her tithe 10% and save 30%. I’ve gotten into giving this to her each week for the past couple of months. When … Read more
My wife was online helping me to find a replacement cell phone. My contract expired long ago and the phone is starting to show signs that it won’t last much longer. She took a detour when she noticed that our bill was higher than it usually was, and investigated why. It was about $13 difference, … Read more
Chief Family Officer and I go waaaay back: we both started blogging in 2005. She, being the consummate CFO, has been far more regular with monitoring her routines than I have. (By contrast, if you were to count the number of times I start something up on here, and then never hear about it again, … Read more
A couple of days ago I went to a one-day financial planning class. I got a few nuggets out of the class and I’ll share one with you here. The instructor spent a few minutes on creating a working budget. This part was pretty standard. If you don’t have Quicken fired up, then Take a … Read more