Running your household takes a lot of money. From your mortgage to your car payment to your groceries, it all adds up. And we haven’t even mentioned the other expenses you have to pay for to maintain your lifestyle like daycare or eating out or entertainment. Now imagine trying to pay for those things without an income and with no ability to earn. How long would your savings last? What would happen once you spend down your emergency fund?
Guide to Employee Benefits Open Enrollment 2020: Health Insurance
8 minute read
Choosing which employee benefits will be best for your family for the next year can be intimidating and there’s often little to no education to help you make those choices. On one hand, you could end up wasting money that would be better used elsewhere on benefits that are highly unlikely to be used and that may not provide much value even if they were.
Should I Refinance My Mortgage?
5 minute read
With record low interest rates many people have been asking themselves lately if it makes sense for them to refinance their home mortgage. A rule of thumb that’s often thrown around is that if you can refinance and lower your mortgage interest rate by 1%, then you should consider doing so. As with many personal finance rules of thumb, this generalization leaves out too many other factors that should be used to guide your decision making. Here are some guidelines to help you figure out if refinancing your mortgage makes sense for your personal situation.
Why Should We Practice Portfolio Diversification?
5 minute read
If you owned a fruit stand and you only sold oranges, then you would be in a bad spot if a hurricane wiped out all of the orange groves that you get your fruit from. However, if you sold a bunch of different fruits alongside oranges like bananas, apples, and berries, then you would still be able to make money when you couldn’t get oranges to sell. You could also use different fruit suppliers so that if something were to happen to the fruit crops in one place you would still be able to get fruit to sell from one of your other suppliers. This is a simple example of the concept of diversification.
You Need Permission to Play
3 minute read
“Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” – Warren Buffett
Please Quit Taking Investing Advice From Celebrities
4 minute read
Please stop relying on financial advice and investment tips from celebrities.
Questions Answered: Rolling Over A Roth Employer Retirement Account
3 minute read
Today, I wanted to take the opportunity to clear up the answer to some questions that I’ve been asked a couple of times over the past month regarding whether you can rollover an employer retirement account to an IRA and also make a contribution to the IRA in the same year. The answer to this question isn’t exactly clear without a good understanding of retirement plan rules and evidently there isn’t anything on the internet that does a very good job of explaining it.
Reverse Budgeting
3 minute read
In January, Amanda and I bought airfare and started making plans for a 2-week trip to Italy in May to celebrate our 1-year anniversary a little early. That fell flat on its face. Instead, last week we went to Savannah to celebrate. We went on the trip without an itinerary, list of things to do, or a budget.
2020 Mid-Year Check-In
3 minute read
We’re halfway through a crazy year. In normal times, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of life and not pay attention to your personal finances. It’s been much easier to do that this year with everything that we’ve been facing. Ideally, you’ve been monitoring and tracking your progress towards your financial goals on a consistent basis throughout the year. If you have, then this may be a good time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. If you haven’t then this is a great opportunity to start.
Investing In Individual Stocks
5 minute read
Lately, quite a few people have been mentioning to me that they’ve purchased individual stocks sometime during the past couple of months on the back-end of the fastest plunge into a bear market in US history. I think a lot of people used the famous Warren Buffet quote of “be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful” as an excuse to justify this. However, I’m not sure that they’ve heard the stories of evidence-based investing yet.