Update: Welcome to readers from Consumerist.com! OK, several commenters didn’t buy my plea to shut off your car radio to save gas. (Which is fine. The laws of physics are on my side here.) This new development won’t help you save money on gas, but it can be a big expense for Virginia residents, of … Read more
Trent of The Simple Dollar wrote this article that appeared on MoneyCentral: Retire at 40: Here’s how Trent answers a reader’s question regarding how long it would take to retire at current income levels if he saved 20% of his income. He used the following assumptions: Put 20% of each paycheck into an S&P 500 … Read more
I got some Forever Stamps a couple of days ago. One sheet: enough to mail twenty letters to my twenty favorite organizations awaiting payment for services rendered or taxes assessed. Why, oh why, did this guy buy $8,000 worth of Forever Stamps? Flexo suspected that it might be because he didn’t want to stand in … Read more
No, she’s not mad at me and I’m not trying to get on her good side. If one were to put a salary on “stay-at-home mother” it would be over $138k this year, according to the compensation experts at Salary.com. Between housekeeping, teaching, psychological counseling, van driving, cook, and several other jobs, that’s what a … Read more
A good friend closed on land and a building loan today. He was telling me about the loan process and some of the terms of his building loan/mortgage. It had terms that I hadn’t run across before, but they were interesting terms. The loan is fixed rate, 30 years, but the payment increases after 10 … Read more
There was a discussion over in the Money Blog Network Forums about different ways to calculate how much to save to allow a particular monthly payment during retirement. Some people responded with future value and present value functions and the 4% retirement rule. These are perfectly legitimate ways of estimating what you’ll need in retirement. … Read more
Since our budgeting by using the force isn’t quite working anymore, and since we’ve noticed that our outflows are getting a little large relative to our inflows, we’ve set an allowance for ourselves. The allowance is for discretionary purposes, which include eating out (or getting drinks “on the go”), stuff bought online, vending machine purchases, … Read more
The last post discussing Debt is Slavery dealt with the effect “stuff” has on our finance and on our lives. Part of the accumulation of our stuff is gifts we’ve received. And part of the stuff others have is likely gifts we’ve given them. Michael Mihalik, author of Debt is Slavery, discusses the “giant marketing … Read more