For all of you that missed the Friday edition, we were taking part of the Yakezie blog swap. Basically what takes place is that we sign up for the blog swap and we are partnered with a fellow blogger. We post an article about a particular topic, which this time the topic was the best investment advice I ever received. I traded posts with my buddy over at Short Road to Retirement. Be sure to stop over there and check out his site and also to check out my article! I don’t know if you have been following along in...
The rule of thumb is that bonds are for retirees. I am 35 years old and I love bonds. When I was really young, I remember receiving savings bonds for my birthday. I had no idea what they were at the time. I was told by my father that they were going to be worth “a lot” of money some day. Every year I would get these pieces of paper that were going to be worth “the number listed at the top left corner”. Fast forward to the 90’s and the Internet boom. The Internet boom created a huge jump...
Sure we would all choose take it today, but there is a finance theory behind why you may want to take it today. Ever heard of the expression a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow but less than a dollar yesterday. Well if not, now you have today we look at the time value of money. What the time value of money calculation and the principle means is that a dollar today is not equivalent in value to a dollar tomorrow or a dollar yesterday. It is a very simple principle to understand, but can have big...
Oh no here come the financial concepts, time to clear the cob webs we are going to talk about derivatives. Want to sound smart at work today, drop the word derivative in some random sentences and wait for the looks you get. This is how my wife fell in love with me. Except this was back in college and I was a Chemistry major at the time. I started dropping some names of the elements off the periodic table and the rest is history. What is a derivative? What does the word mean, let’s take the root, derive. Derive means...
For as long as I can remember it has always been 1. McDonald’s 2. Burger King and 3. Wendy’s. Well that is not the case any longer as it has just been announced that Burger King was surpassed in US sales volume by Wendy’s. This change up brings makes me reminisce of those days back in college and that Nelly song “Number One.” You know you remember Nelly, he sung Country Grammar! Google it if you forgot who, but make sure you come back to finish up this article. As I digress….. Hey hey hey hey hey hey – now...
While not directly related to personal finance, it can have big implications on your job search should you burn the bridges behind you. Let’s face it if you are looking for work and there are burnt bridges out there it can make it a little more difficult and that my friend will affect your finances…badabing! Let me share with you a little story of something that happened at work this past week. Jerry was a happy employee of my company (1),his boss left the company to go work elsewhere. His boss contacts Jerry and recruits him to work there with...
Well here it is the Five For Friday: March Madness Edition. This week we have had an explosion with traffic. Out of left field we must be getting noticed. Thank you and I appreciate you stopping by, hopefully I haven’t bored you too much that you come again or subscribe. Now to take a look at the sites that caught my eye this week: I wrote an article about your emergency fund the other week, but here another blogger, Frugal Portland, poses the question to the world. Great we have an emergency fund, now when can we use it? Anthony Thompson over...
Childhood….Ahhh those were the days of no responsibility where my only recollection of money was that my parents had it and I needed it to buy candy or that new toy. But what I do remember as a youth was that my parents subscribed to Encyclopedia Britannica. I asked my mom a while back how they ended up with the encyclopedias and she gave me the spiel where a salesman came door to door saying something about how it was going to be the way of the future. They had just had me as their first child and they didn’t...
Now that I have your attention, you are probably scratching your head wondering why that would be on a personal finance website. Shame on you for thinking that!! What would your mother say? The word is in the news all over the world now. That magical word is BUDGET. The congressional budget, state budget, city budget, your personal budget, budget for that trip, some websites use that as part of their web address…this budget that budget… What in the world does the word budget even mean? According to my good friends over at Merriam Webster here are the origins of budget: Middle...
The bulk of us that read and blog have regular full time jobs. Many of us do this for fun or as a side hustle trying to make some passive income. I have been an avid reader for a few years and have seen some interesting side hustles over at Budgets Are Sexy side hustle series. This one that I am about to tell you about takes the cake. A New York marketing firm, Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s Labs (BBH), created a stir at the South by Southwest Music Conference and Festival (SXSW) recently. The festival held in Austin, Texas is...
I don’t know where this one came from. I was sitting there yesterday thinking (not thinking in the bathroom) and I started rattling off ways to save some money in the bathroom. These ideas are not going to require any major design changes to your bathroom. Sure you look at the picture above and think where can I possibly save any money. The bathroom is probably one of the most frequented locations in the house and these simple changes can add up over the year. Water Saver – add a water saving showerhead to your shower and this can cut up...
Well here it is the Five For Friday. Another week has come and gone and we continue to pump out the articles. It has had its share of ups and downs over there past month and a half, from late nights to early mornings. A lot of great comments and plenty of feedback received via email. Thank you and keep those suggestions coming. I really appreciate it. Here is what I have been reading this past week that has really kept my interest and even provoked some commenting. Homeownership may not be for everyone but here are some lessons learned. ...
Peyton Manning – Franchise Quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts is a free agent. I am not a regular follower of football but I have heard who this gent is. Potentially the best quarterback to ever play in Indy or maybe best quarterback ever in all of football. This article isn’t going to talk about all those statistics that he has amassed, but we really could because finance covers stats and various ratios. If he was on the roster at the start of the league year he was to be owed $28 million dollars as a bonus. Did you hear that...
I was reading an article last week that made the motion that adjustable rate mortgages (ARM) are dying. For starters, adjustable rate mortgages are loans where the interest rate changes periodically. Generally they are a good option when you are buying a house and the prevailing fixed rate mortgages rates are high. This notion did not surprise me because interest rates are at historic lows for fixed rate mortgages. You would be silly not to lock in a mortgage at these rates now, the interest rates are likely not going to get any lower than they are in your life...
We just graduated college and just got our first real job. Great! Congratulations! Now what? As we make our way through our first few weeks on the new job we are bombarded with emails, packets of information on everything under the sun from employee discounts to the dreaded RETIREMENT word, eeek. Well you stumbled across the right website to point you in the right direction. I will have you sipping those dirty martinis out at the beach house enjoying the afternoon rays. You are set up at your desk and looking around at the mountain of paperwork that HR has...
Do you buy a new car for looks or based on what you can afford? Hopefully this will help you. I have noticed many friends buying cars that are way out of their price range and struggling to make the payments. Ever heard of the saying “house poor” well that is them except it is a car Cost There are many sites that you can go out on to find the true cost of ownership of the vehicle. There are a lot of factors other than just the price of the vehicle that you need to be concerned with. The...
Welcome to March! It’s the beginning of the third month, and, if you’re like most people you’ve already gone off track on your New Year resolutions. It’s ok. Let’s grab that list and see what we can salvage from it. First, cut the number down by 90%. That means if you made ten resolutions, you will want to save one of them. Change is a process, not a moment of rebirth. If you started off with a small list, of two or three, then pick your top priority. Now, chop that resolution into a three week plan. 21 days. That’s...
What is beta? Why beta? Well it is the volatility of the stock or portfolio to the market as a whole. This conversation can get really deep really quick if we start discussing various financial models and the actual calculation of it using regression analysis. If you would like to know more drop me a line and we can discuss more in depth. What can it really tell us about a stock or portfolio? Well when you look at a stock that has a beta that has a beta of 1.0, this stock would typically move with the market. What...
What an interesting week last week, now back to the grind of things. Today we received a question from a reader who asks, “Is it too late to get an MBA?” Let us define what the reader considers too late, they consider their mid 40’s too late to obtain the advanced degree. What is his dilemma? Mark is a mid level manager who strives to take that next step but all of the upper echilon have advanced degrees. Some organizations only recruit talent for upper level positions if they have an advanced degree, his organization is one of those. Mark...
After nearly 3 days of inactivity on my part on my blog I am ready to hit the ground running. Wow those last 3 days have been hectic. I woke up Monday morning to find my site acting a little funny. I didn’t think anything of it so I went about the day. Monday night I get home and try to check the site to see some the statistics and how things are going. I get a redirect that takes me to Adfly. First thoughts are this could get expensive. I have only been blogging 2 weeks if this gets...
Well today I had my first experience with Malware. I was not able to post a regularly scheduled post as usual. I woke up this morning to check out the website to find a bunch of popups on the site once I logged in. Talk about shell shock and not having a clue what to do. Thankfully my fellow Yakeziers were there to the rescue with some valuable posts to help me though this debacle. I quickly got on the phone to my hosting company to see if they had any products that they offered for free to help me...
Wow a whole 2 weeks into personal finance blogging and I have to say I love doing it. It has been a great journey thus far. I am building some great friendships with the personal finance blogging community. I have found the Yakezie Network great and everyone is very willing to help out. I learned that with blogging or your spouse you have to give love to receive love. I am out there sharing the love as much as I can with my fellow bloggers. Here is it close to midnight preparing the post after a long day of blogging and...
Well I am not new to the rental property thing but I will tell you how it all started. It all started a few years ago about rental properties when we were looking to move out of our furnished apartment for rental because our landlord was driving us crazy. We were aggressively scouring Craigslist to find an apartment. Well we found an apartment, ground level which means no stairs! We decided to grab it as soon as we saw it; we definitely thought the rent was well below market value. Come to find out the gentleman was getting ready to put...
As I slowly reveal more about myself you will see that I have my hand in a lot of things. I am currently on the board of directors for a local non profit organization that works to promote awareness for endangered structures in the community. In particularly buildings that have historic significance, we are the voice for them so that they are not destroyed to make way for a new house or store or whatever. I was elected in November 2011 as a board member. Since then I have embarked on organizing their membership directory into a usable format in...
What would you suggest as the best course of action in this situation? If you have been following my blog for the great length of time that it has been around, ok since last week, you would know we recently became a two income household. Here is where the story starts: One income, two kids and a wife all on a salary of 100k minus 50k. I was earning close to 50k when we had our second child. We have 2 cars and a mortgage payment but to help offset some of this we have a rental unit in the...
