They say that saving your first $100,000 is the toughest. Or saving your first $1,000,000. Or your first $10,000,000. Or any other impossibly large number of dollars that wealthy people like to talk about. I completely agree with them. Personally, my wife and I have a net worth between $100,000 and $1,000,000, so I would say something stupid like “Saving our first $100,000 was the toughest. Each additional $100,000 wasn’t as bad!” Although what I just said is completely true, it doesn’t help people who aren’t in my situation. Maybe it doesn’t help you if you are living paycheck to paycheck or if you are in huge amounts of debt…
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The 10% Solution
When many people are looking to make a change in their lives, they often make a huge change. Some people go from a completely sedentary life to working out for one hour each day. Others may vow to cut their spending budget in half as they try to get out of debt. Still other people may quit their jobs as they try to gain control of their crazy schedule. We often go all in when we try to make a change in our lives. And honestly, this can be a good thing! Sometimes the best way to make a change is to make a big change. However, we don’t always…
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4 Non-Sophisticated Things That You Should Do With Money
There are many sophisticated things that we could do with our money. We could: Create a CD ladder for money that we want to save. Use tax-loss harvesting to save on taxes when we invest. Convert our IRA to a Roth IRA by using a backdoor Roth conversion. Each of these sophisticated financial techniques could save us anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars throughout our lives. Because they are so valuable, I definitely encourage you to become educated about each of them and see if you can use them either now or in the future. While each of these are very valuable techniques to save money, they…
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The Easiest Money Saving Challenge Ever!
My wife and I always seem to make a lot of big life changes at the same time. For instance, in the span of 40 long hours, we each started new jobs, sold a house, bought another house, and moved. That was probably 40 of the most difficult and exciting hours of my life. Even when we first got married, we waited only two weeks after our wedding to buy our first house. Just like any young, newly married couple, we did not have a lot of money saved (we had not participated in the easiest saving challenge ever). We also were not extremely experienced at fixing things around the…
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The Stock Market is Tanking … Now What?
One of the toughest things in life is to do something that goes against our intuitions. After all, our intuitions help guide us through many important decisions that we make every single day. However, sometimes, our intuitions can be wrong. One of the times that our intuitions are often wrong is when we are investing in the stock market. We may think that we should sell all of our stocks right before the stock market goes on a five-year rally. Or, we may know that a stock is going to double in value, right before the company files for bankruptcy. Again, our intuitions are often completely wrong when it comes to…
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The 4% Rule and Investing for Retirement
Many retirement planners like to use the 4% rule when trying to determine the amount of your portfolio that you can safely withdraw in retirement. The main concept of this rule is that you can withdraw 4% of the money that is in your portfolio when you retire, every single year of your retirement. For instance, if you have $1 million invested when you retire, then you can safely withdraw 4% of this amount, or $40,000 per year. Not only can you withdraw it every year, but you can also increase the amount withdrawn for inflation, and your portfolio will continue to grow. Of course, the 4% rule is not actually…
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Index Funds Can Save You Over $200,000!
It’s a pretty outrageous claim that I made in the title of this post. Index funds can save you (and me) over $200,000 throughout the course of our lives …. Hmmm … that certainly doesn’t sound true. But, just in case it is, let’s explore the statement. Since I started writing this on Black Friday (the ultimate shopping day here in the United States), this could actually be the biggest Black Friday savings ever! Before we dive into saving money with an index fund, it helps to know what it actually is. Basically, an index fund is a collection of stocks put together to make up a mutual fund. This…
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Planting a Money Tree
Earlier this year, we planted a small, rather pathetic-looking, maple tree in our backyard. This tree was about 6-feet tall when we planted it and it really served no purpose except to provide a little bit of food for the deer who came by to eat its leaves. It does not provide much shade and currently only serves as something extra for me to mow around.
