"Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one." –Marcus Aurelius
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…
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…
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…
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…
We know that strength and endurance are valuable for many reasons. Of course strength and athleticism are part of health. They are also a part of your mind and personality. Mind, body, and soul is often a false distinction as each aspect of who you are affects the rest. Being healthier and more active affects…
First, let’s imagine that investments, inflation, etc. are not a thing and all you do is stuff money in your mattress. What if you had the life you wanted and still had a 50% savings rate? That would mean for every year you work, you could take one year off. That could mean working…