"Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one." –Marcus Aurelius
Every time you borrow money, you’re robbing your future self. –Nathan W. Morris Never spend your money before you have it. —Thomas Jefferson When the tide goes out you can see who was swimming naked. –Warren Buffet Aside from it’s potentially (and looking ever more likely) high direct human cost, the Coronavirus epidemic is playing…
The Stock Market is designed to transfer money from the Active to the Patient. –Warren Buffett There is a lot of anxiety in the FIRE community about the stock market dropping. It has dropped faster than it has in generations and as more information becomes available about the effects of the virus and the measures…
The Internet is full of examples of stores being cleaned out – and of the weird things that people are buying or (by contrast) not buying. We’ve all seen them. We know that this is because people are panic-buying things. And it feeds on itself. If you see someone panic-buying things, you start to wonder…
A lot of Americans don’t have any savings, and many more don’t have any real investments. Remember, your home is never an investment <link>. But if you’ve been working to gain financial literacy and turn your situation around, you might start to have savings. And you might then start to wonder, how should I invest…
In the budget series, we discussed housing as an item. Let’s revisit the housing discussion. It’s not clear a house is always better but this time we are assuming you have decided to buy a house. Let’s further assume you are a young couple (or individual). What kind of house should you buy? I’m going…
There are a lot of people you’ll interact with when you make purchasing decisions who will try to influence your decision. Mostly it’s easy to understand where they are coming from. Your friends and family want what’s best for you, but that may be influenced by their own preferences or desire to have you be…
Let’s talk insurance again – this time, life insurance. How does it work, and who should have it? Life insurance is, of course, something you get because you are betting that you will die soon (or your wife wants to make that bet…). Just kidding. It is still based on life and death. Like all…
Having discussed health and disability coverage, let’s move on to long-term care insurance and who needs it. Long-term care, or LTC, coverage is not exactly medical insurance. It doesn’t pay for medications, surgery, or doctor’s visits. What it does pay is for the cost of aid you need with daily living. Basically this means nursing…
In a previous article, we talked about knowing your cash flow and how its possible variations might affect you. One way to mitigate the risk of needing a lot more money than usual in one month is to have an emergency fund. This shouldn’t be news – I know of no school of thought in…
This is the first in a series of articles about insurance, which is a large expense that everyone has to deal with. Everyone meaning us Americans, as much of this doesn’t apply to other developed nations. In much poorer and less developed nations your safety is your friends and family; in other developed nations it’s…