"Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one." –Marcus Aurelius
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…
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…
The second type of insurance I want to discuss for financial awareness is Disability Insurance. This is coverage that will continue to pay you if you suffer some kind of temporary disability due to accident or illness and are unable to work. How long ‘temporary’ will be covered depends on what you buy, and Disability…
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.” –Charles Dickens Your cash flow is simply the amount going in, and the amount going out. When we spend less than we have coming in, we can save, invest, or pay off…
If you’ve spent too much time around economists like I have, you know that the word arbitrage means ‘to take advantage of a difference in price that does not reflect a difference in value’. Geographic arbitrage, in the financial independence and related spheres, means taking advantage of the fact that the ratio of salary to…
And now we come to the last main article in the Budget Series – housing. I saved this for last because it is the biggest thing in almost anyone’s budget and the hardest to change. It’s best to have a more disciplined approach to money before making decisions about this. And there are a lot…
Suppose you are taking the next step in adult life and getting married. If you followed the advice in a previous article, you’ve had a lot of the hard conversations. But now let’s talk about money, specifically. Should you merge your accounts? Or should you keep your finances separate? This can generate strong feelings, but…
Welcome back to our Budget Series. The topic today is transportation. The US is still a car country, and probably will be until fleets of self-driving robot cars make car ownership unnecessary, simply because of the geographic realities. It is hard to get around on public transportation in most of North America (as well as…