If you want to be financially successful, there may be no better skill to build than the ability to avoid distractions. Distractions are everywhere on the road to what you really want — and you won’t just need to learn to manage them once or twice. Financial goals take a long time to get to, which…
Life After Debt: When You Stop Paying Down Balances and Start Building Wealth
When you can gain control over your cash flow and aggressively pay down loans and balances, you know it’s only a matter of time before you pay everything off and reach debt freedom. That’s an exciting proposition if you’re already on this path and have spent some time chipping away at student loans, credit card…
How to Leverage an HSA Account to Grow Your Wealth: A Real-Life Example
Have you considered a high deductible health plan, or HDHP, as an option for your health insurance? It might be worth switching to one so you can use an HSA account. An HSA account is a health savings account — meaning, it’s a place that allows you to save and even invest money specifically for…
Trying to Chase the Best Interest Rates? Here’s Why That Might Backfire
A few years ago, countless headlines (and a whole lot of real estate agents) were crowing about how you HAD to BUY NOW because interest rates were DEFINITELY going to rise. Better get in now now now before it’s too late! Turns out, it wasn’t too late. Interest rates today, in the summer of 2019,…
Managing Lifestyle Creep: A Real-Life Example of Keeping Expenses Low (Even As Incomes Rise)
The term lifestyle creep describes what happens when you spend more money as you earn more money. You might also hear this referred to as “lifestyle inflation. It means the same thing: you inflate your lifestyle to match your income. There’s never much of a gap between what you earn and what you spend. If…
Don’t Have Specific Financial Goals? That’s Okay If You Have One of These Instead
It’s hard to plot out every goal you want to accomplish in your long life — especially if you’re in your 20s, 30s, or 40s right now. You have decades of life to live ahead of you, and these are the prime years in which to experience and enjoy some major life milestones and changes….
Saving for College: What to Consider and What Tools to Use
Worried about saving for college and having enough to fund your kid’s education? Then let’s start with the good news: there are so many ways to pay for college. You have a lot of options to explore. Now for the tricky part: you have a lot of options. There are a lot of variables and…
Why Investment Returns Don’t Matter (If You’re Not Saving)
Ever heard someone brag about how much they made off their amazing investment? Or talk about how they got in somewhere early and made a killing because they gambled on an unknown company before it blew up? People often talk about great investments they’ve made or the incredible investment return they’ve received. But this is,…
Make Little Money Details Add Up to Big Financial Impact
The next time we go out to eat, we’ll get $20 off our meal just because we have a habit of making reservations. We use OpenTable to book spots at restaurants when we plan to eat out. Even if we know we’ll get somewhere at a slow time when there won’t be a wait, like…
When to Start Financial Planning (and What to Think About First)
A lot of people I talk to aren’t sure of when to start financial planning. Do you have the same question, about when you should start? I could really sum up the entirety of this blog post with a single-word answer: Yesterday. That was the best time to get started. The second best time, of…