"Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one." –Marcus Aurelius
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…
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…
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…
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…
‘Net worth‘ is a concept that most of us have heard of even if we don’t know anything about finance. I’ll suggest that everyone should know their net worth because it’s a useful benchmark for financial health viewed as a single number. If you aren’t into personal finance, you probably have heard it used to…