It’s a good idea to keep the skills you use for your job current. There are always new things to learn, and many of the skills you have now have an expiration date on them. Other skills, though, are broadly applicable to almost any career field. This means that they’re portable: you can take them … Read more
Canada has decided to do away with the cent, citing that it costs the mint 1.6 cents to produce one. Transactions will still be tracked to the cent, but if both parties find themselves without cents in a cash transaction, the transaction will be rounded to the nearer nickel. The reason this has come to … Read more
A few days ago I chatted with some financial planners. They were recommending some bond funds as alternatives to holding cash or money-market funds. I admit that I haven’t looked at bond funds too closely. I knew that there was an inverse relationship between the price of bonds and the interest rate: as rates go … Read more
J Money recently sold a web property and is toying with the idea of using the proceeds from that sale to buy a real investment property. Bottom line up front: This is a great idea. My experience with owning an investment property has been great so far. Very smooth. I, like J Money, had heard … Read more
You’ve heard of the magic of compounding, right? If not, here’s a quick version. Let’s say you have a savings account that earns 1% per month. (Don’t laugh too hard. My dad had one that paid this rate at one point.) Let’s say also that you put in $1,000 at the start of 2012, and … Read more
I met Mike Piper of The Oblivious Investor briefly at FinCon11 and he came bearing gifts. (I guess I was The Oblivious Conference Attendee and did no such thing myself.) I snagged two copies of his newest book, Can I Retire? (I’ll offer the second copy to a randomly-picked subscriber of my newsletter soon, so … Read more
A friend and I got to chatting about investments over lunch recently. After lamenting about the stock market, 401(k)s, and so forth, we talked a bit about precious metals. Like most people whom I’ve talked with about this subject — including myself, I suppose — we wish that we would have bought more $300 gold … Read more
This Kiplinger feature on MSN has a number of good ways that we waste money. Slide 12 of this series (these aren’t my favorite ways of presenting things, but I see how it generates more ad impressions for MSN!) has the following suggestion: If you’re stashing your cash in a traditional savings account earning next … Read more