Don’t Let Bernanke Sucker Punch Your Portfolio + MORE

We had our garage sale last weekend and I’m sure you all are anxiously to hear the results! 😉
My wife spent a lot of time making sure we had everything organized and ready to go early on so that the day of the garage sale (and the day before) we wouldn’t be stressed out or scrambling. We had everything priced and sorted in advance of the big day…

“Made you flinch!”
Secretly, I think that’s what Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is saying to investors right now.
In the wake of his Congressional testimony — when he hinted at changing his quantitative easing ways — investors bailed on stocks.
Heck, the exodus was pronounced enough that the S&P 500 Index ended up posting a weekly loss for the first time in five weeks…

In the fourth season of Arrested Development, the audience discovers the troubled Bluth family received a government stimulus bailout during the recession. Rather than using the “stimmy” to fix their troubling real estate family business operation, they used the money to buy 4,000 acres of worthless land in — well, I won’t spoil it…

May Highlights and Lowlights

Net worth – Our net worth is up 0.76% month to month. That’s pretty good considering I got a lot more conservative since late April. The stock market has been doing very well in 2013 and we haven’t had a negative month yet. We’ll see if this bullish trend can really hold for the rest of this year…

This post is by staff writer Honey Smith. There are many personal finance books out there, useful to people in all stages of personal finance. I have a lot to learn before reaching financial independence, and the editorial elves thought it would be useful if I shared some of what I learn with you. So for the foreseeable future, I will be reviewing one PF-related book per month…

Another month, another money update!
It feels quite funny rejoicing about our jump in net worth here when we’re about to unload $18,000+ in the very near future, but I guess for right now we can smile one last time before it takes a dive, right? 🙂 Technically we’re still up since we haven’t paid anything yet! Haha…
All that aside though, May was a perfect snapshot of what an ideal monthly update SHOULD look like…

I subscribe to the promotional emails of hundreds of companies so you don’t have to. I sift through 1,000 deal-touting emails every week. Most are worthless. But some offer valuable coupons, promo codes, sales and freebies — which I collect and organize.Note: Expiration dates are in brackets and special instructions are in parentheses…

Showing Dad you love him doesn’t have to mean sending him on an expensive golf vacation or buying him a new camera. The special day should be all about connecting with him, and there’s no better way to do so than by spending some quality time together…

We don’t invest money in our retirement accounts just to see what happens. We all want high returns, positive growth, and a big pile of cash to retire on. Investing your funds through automatic investments is a great way to start, but at some point you have to do some math to figure out if you are earning a return or not…

Over the last few days, I’ve watched as several of my friends have been completely shocked by the giant twist on the Game of Thrones television series.
Since I actually read the “Red Wedding” scene several years ago, it was very entertaining to see all of the surprise from people. I’m really glad that they saved and built up the surprise on the television series as well as the author did in the books…

I think about cash flow. A lot. As a freelance writer married to an adjunct professor, my household income is sometimes a little unpredictable. In many cases, it’s not about how much we have coming in; it’s more about when the money arrives and leaves.
As I contemplate the coming summer, and the dwindling of my husband’s paycheck, cash flow becomes even more important…

If you’ve ever watched the television show ‘Til Debt Do Us Part, the first thing that Gail Vaz-Oxlade does is confront her clients with their spending record. She will go over their finances for the last couple of months and track every single dollar spent. She then categorizes these expenditures and averages them out so that she (and the client) will have an idea of how much money they are spending, and where it is going…

An estimated 50 per cent of American workers haven’t saved enough money for retirement. A little time spent planning now could mean the difference between a relaxing retirement and working for most of your golden years. Over the course of two years I have written few posts on retirement planning. This guest post talks about the ideal asset allocation in your retirement account as per your age…

To this point, it’s been a pretty good year to be an investor. With the S&P 500 recovering and delivering a return of more than 15.3 percent — many folks are feeling a bit flush, and for good reason.
After all, it’s been more than just lackluster or negative returns over the past 10-plus years that have left a bad taste for risk in the mouth of the average investor…

Getting my Haro mountain bike ready for the 3.1 mile commute each way.A few weeks back I rode my bike to work every day.
I told a friend, who thought I worked from home, this fact, and he got a good laugh from it.
Truthfully, I did ride my bike into work (an office downtown), and then some, each day…

While my wife and I travel the country as I move around for work, we need to be as frugal as possible. And due to our dog, we also need to be creative with our style of living. The big things that we focus on are: how to travel, where to live, and what to eat.
How to Travel
We often think about our method of transportation, as we need to determine how many cars we’ll need, and how to get them there…

If you’ve been reading PDITF for longer than, say five minutes, you’ll know I’m not necessarily the smartest PF blogger of the bunch. But what I lack in brains I make up for in crappy stick figure drawings…right?

Over the years I’ve read a handful of articles about 401k loans…

There’s one simple observation I’ve noticed in my journey towards financial freedom. Rich people make things more expensive for the rest of us. Given the supply of desirable necessities such as homes, schools, food, and even water is finite, the rich bid up prices far beyond what the middle class can afford…

An international team of researchers has put together a series of maps illustrating the relationship between an individual’s geographic location and likelihood to possess an entrepreneurial spirit. In the United States, it seems, the saying attributed to Horace Greely, “Go west, young man,” still holds true for anyone who wants to be in an area with a healthy entrepreneurial spirit…

This is the first post in the Summer of Saving series (by the way, if you noticed something funny in the original edit of the prepper, our ANNUAL expenses are $16,000, not monthly as I had stated – just a… slight difference). For week #1 we’re focusing on saving money on food/groceries and cooking as a category…