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- RT @glassyeyes: 39DollarGlasses extends/EXPANDS disc. to $20/pair for the REST OF THE YEAR! http://is.gd/5lvmLThis is big news! Please RT! #
- @LenPenzo @SusanTiner I couldn’t help it. That kicked over the giggle box. in reply to LenPenzo #
- RT @copyblogger: You’ll never get there, because “there” keeps moving. Appreciate where you’re at, right now. #
- Why am I expected to answer the phone, strictly because it’s ringing? #
- RT: @WellHeeledBlog: Carnival of Personal Finance #235: Cinderella Edition http://bit.ly/7p4GNe #
- 10 Things to do on a Cheap Vacation. https://liverealnow.net/aOEW #
- RT this for chance to win $250 @WiseBread http://bit.ly/4t0sDu #
- [Read more…] about Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-19
Things to teach your kids about money
As parents, it is our job to teach our kids about a lot of things: driving, reading, manners, sex, ethics, and much, much more. How many of us spend the time and effort to teach our kids about money? A basic financial education would make money in early(and even late) adulthood easier to deal with. Unfortunately, money is considered taboo, even among the people we are closest to.
It’s time to shatter the taboo, at least at home. Our kids need a financial education at least as much as they need a sex education, and—properly done—both educations take place at home.
How do you know what to teach? One method is to look back at all of the things you’ve struggled with and make sure your kids know more than you did. If that won’t work, you can use this list.
- Balance a checkbook. This is the most basic of financial skills. The easiest way to teach this is to help him open a checking account and demand he keeps the register current and reconciled. Make him use a paper register. Quicken or an alternative may handle the work, but your kid will never learn the underlying principles if he doesn’t have to sit down with a pen and calculator to do the work. The cheat can come later, when he is capable of handling the task himself. It’s the same reason schools don’t let kids use calculators until the basics are thoroughly mastered.
- Calculate paid interest. Understanding how much something costs after accounting for interest should be enough to scare anyone away from credit cards. I believe that the reason it doesn’t is because most people don’t understand how to figure out what interest is costing them. In case you don’t know yourself, the math is simple: balance X interest rate(as a decimal) / 12. That will show you how much you are paying each month for the privilege of borrowing money.
- Use your money to make money, not to pay interest. The flip side of interest is earned interest. It’s always best to let your money work for you, building your wealth than to struggle to finance a bank’s payroll liabilities.
- Save 25%. My son is required to put a quarter of everything he earns in his bank account. He gets $20 for shoveling the neighbor’s driveway, so $5 goes in the bank. The money he gets for gifts is handled the same way. Everything he gets, whether it be from a gift, his allowance, or work he does—gets divided the same way. If I can establish that habit for him, and impress upon him the value of saving 25% enough that he continues into adulthood, he will never have money problems.
- Always contribute to retirement. At every opportunity, from every paycheck, make a contribution to retirement. At a minimum, a 401k contribution should be made at a level that takes full advantage of any company match. If there is no match, even $25 per paycheck will add up over time. Teach them to work towards the 401k contribution limits.
- Spend less than you earn. This is the shining, glorious foundational principle of successful finances. Not just individuals, but businesses and even governments should learn this lesson. If–at all times–you are spending less than you earn, you will have more options to handle the remaining bits. If you live on the wrong side of this equation, you will never be able to get ahead, no matter how hard you work.
Those are the lessons that I am working to instill in my children, a little at a time. Am I missing any?
How You’re Finding Me
Every once in a while, I like to dig through Google Analytics and see how people are finding this site. Some of the search terms are interesting.
“father of three” mid life crisis
Here’s a free piece of advice. As a father of three, you don’t get to have a mid-life crisis. It’s not allowed. Rather, it’s allowed, but you aren’t allowed to act on it. At a minimum, until your children are out of the house, you need to man up and provide all of the support you possibly can. No sports cars you can’t afford and no 22 year old hardbodies. Be there for your kids.
“payday loans” which accepts guest posts
Payday loan marketing. Just go away. You aren’t running a guest post here.
“slow carb” hungry all the time
You’re doing it wrong. If you are hungry, eat more bacon. Or beans. Beans fill you up longer.
$1000000 business idea
Ideas are the easy part. Execution makes you a millionaire.
articles on why appearance shouldn’t matter?
Appearances do matter, and always will. Your appearance is what makes the initial impression when you meet someone new. You don’t have to be a model, but basic grooming and fashion sense is necessary. Take this with a grain of salt. I’ve got a week’s growth of a beard and I wear a different plaid, button-down shirt every day.
are push ups supposed to be hard
Only the first 50. After that, I kind of go on blissed-out autopilot. If you can do 100 pushups, you can probably do 200.
acceptable place to put tattoo
If you wear clothes there, you can put a tattoo there. Visible tattoos are called “job stoppers” for a reason. If you put a tattoo on your face, the only job you qualify for is “drug dealer’s girlfriend”. Or possibly prison janitor.
burning bridges with toxic people
If you must burn bridges, filling them with toxic people first isn’t a bad idea.
candied pork butt
Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it. Interesting side story: while double-checking the rule number, I stumbled across My Little Ponies doing things they never advertise on the box.
cut my wife’s hair
I did this once. Pro tip: In the back, at the bottom, cut small chunks and leave them longer than you think they should be. You can always cut more, but uncutting hair is really hard.
f***** on the roadside by your mechanic
He probably deserves a tip for that.
girls fart for money and girls live farts
See the bit about the pork butt, remove the funny, and…ewww.
how to be a successful debtor
I recommend starting by paying your bills. When the debts are gone, you win. Success!
i ate bacon on slow carb diet
So did everyone else, sweetie. It’s the biggest draw to the slow carb diet.
in memory of pets tattoos
When I get a pet, I get it with the understanding that I’m going to outlive it. The day I bring it home, some small part of me is preparing for the day when I have to dig a hole in my backyard. Tattooing that day? Not gonna happen.
thickening felt behind testicle
Why are you on google? Go to the doctor. Please?
Interesting. Between girls farting and my post about being well-trained, there is a significant amount of fetish traffic coming through here. Maybe I need to explore a new advertising strategy.
4 Ways to Change Your Finances for the Better
Finance is made out to be difficult, but it’s really not. All financial advice really boils down to 2 sentences: “Spend less than you earn. Save or invest the rest.” Everything else is an unnecessary complication, unless you need to be told that commemorative plates aren’t actually an investment. Unfortunately, we’re all people. (Except for you in the back. I see you, and you are not people.) People make mistakes. People sometimes need things spelled out, or at least explained in a way that makes it seem less intimidating to get started.
With that in mind, here are four steps that will get you out of debt and, over a long enough timeline, make you rich:
1. Lower your interest rates. If you’ve got debt, particularly credit card debt, you’re paying too much interest. It doesn’t matter what the interest rate is, it could be better. It’s time to pick up the phone and politely ask your credit card company to lower your interest rate. If they refuse, mention that their competitor is offering you 3% interest on a balance transfer with no transfer fee. Mention a competitor by name, but don’t worry about a specific offer. There are always offers being tossed about.
If they won’t lower your rate, find a company who will. 5% on a 10,000 balance is $500 per year. That’s 3 months of payments for free.
2. Lower your monthly payments. Do you have a cable bill? A phone bill? Any other bills? Put them in a stack and call them. Every. Single. One. Ask if there is any way you can lower your bill. Can you get put on a new customer promotion? My electric company offers a saver switch for my air conditioner that will lower my bill by 15% just for giving them the ability to toggle my AC on and off. When we had that installed, I never noticed it in use.
3. Save $1000. When you’ve got no money, every unexpected expense is an emergency. When you’ve got a little bit socked away, you can ride out the problems without much worry. $1000 may not be enough to ride out an extended bout of unemployment, but it does a pretty good job of taking the sting out of car repairs. Do whatever you have to do, but get some money in an emergency fund. Then, don’t touch it!
4. Categorize wants and needs. I want a vacation. My kid needs braces. I want a big screen TV. My gas bill needs to get paid. I want a new car. My family needs food. Are you sensing a theme? Pay attention to what you spend. Ask yourself if it’s something you need, or just something you really, really want. Just the act of categorizing it can make it easier to avoid buying whatever it is.
5. Use the savings from 1-4 to pay off whatever you owe. Don’t blow your new-found savings on spinner rims or soap made from rich-people tallow. Use it to finally get ahead of the game.
The Do-Over
This post is from Kevin @ DebtEye.com. Kevin is a co-founder @ DebtEye.com, where he helps consumers manages their finances and find the optimal way to get out of debt. . This is guest post is part of a blog swap for the Yakezie, answering the question “If you had one financial do-over, what would it be and why?”.
I usually look on the brighter side of things. There’s never an incident where I wish I could go back in time and change things. Everyone will eventually make mistakes, but it’s up to them to learn from these mistakes and make sure it never happens again. However, if there was one moment in the past I could change, It would be not buying a house straight out of college.
Throughout my college days, I have been fortunate to have saved up enough money for a down-payment on a house. That’s not enough to maintain debt-free living. I worked with several internet gaming companies and acted as an affiliate for them. I saved up around $25,000 and decided to buy a condo with my brother.
I thought it would be cool to own a condo in the city. I was really looking forward to turning this new place in a bachelor’s pad. This was probably the worst decision I’ve made. I always believed that it was better to buy a property instead of renting one, since some of the payment would go towards paying down the loan. Of course, I realized that this wasn’t the smartest of ideas.
Here are some reasons why I regret it:
- Property Taxes: Property taxes in Chicago are one the highest in the nation. For a $320,000 property, annual real estate taxes were roughly about $5,800/year. Property taxes usually go up every year, it can be difficult for some people to maintain these payments.
- Valuation: Thankfully, the property only decreased 10% in the past 2 years. It’s not as bad as some areas, but the timing to buy a property was poor.
- Cost: Buying a property involves more money to spruce up the place. New paint, new appliances, new floors, etc. Most of us won’t get a free appliance from the government. Many homeowners have to put in extra care of the property, so when they sell it, it’s still in great condition.
Looking hindsight, I definitely wish I rented instead of owning a home. In this day of age, I think most people can make the clear argument that renting is worthwhile to look into.
Side Hustle: The Garage Sale Preparation
We had a garage sale last week, as a wrap-up to the April 30 Day Project. We got rained out halfway through the first day of our 3-day sale, but we still managed to clear $1500. We held the sale in our neighbor’s garage because it had more space and better visibility.
Wednesday night, while carrying boxes over, I missed the step to their property from our driveway and crashed while carrying three boxes. That’s a twisted ankle and a bleeding knee. Naturally, while I’m hopping and swearing, everyone is concerned that I’m okay. The worry-warts. Anyway, it hurt, so we stopped setting up while we still had a few boxes left in the basement.
[ad name=”inlineleft”]Thursday morning, I decided to show them all. At 5:30AM, before anybody else is strongly considering the possibility of maybe thinking about getting ready to hit the snooze button, I decided to get the rest of the boxes ready. They’d all wake up, worried about how I’m feeling, asking if I’m to stiff to carry boxes. The best way to show them they don’t need to worry would be to have all of the boxes dealt with before they woke up. So I started. Up and down the stairs, with a stiff, twisted ankle, gloating to myself about how tough I was…BOOM, down the stairs. I was on my back, sliding down the stairs. I caught a stair-tread in the small of my back and another on the point of my tailbone. Mommy?
After I stopped twitching on the floor at the base of the stairs, I managed to get the last of the boxes ready. Instead of sympathy, I spent the rest of the weekend getting asked if I needed an inflatable doughnut to sit on. There are places I’d prefer not to have bruised.
Unpacking the boxes made me glad that everything was priced. We spent 6 weeks going through our entire house–every room, every dresser, every drawer–to eliminate the clutter. As something went into a box, it got priced, so we didn’t have to do it all at the last minute. That is the most important time-saving step for a garage sale. Price it as you pack it. You don’t want to waste hours pricing stuff while tripping over potential customers.
Another preparation tip to do early: Find tables! Ask around. You’d be surprised at who has a dozen folding tables collecting dust in his basement. It’s better to borrow that to rent. The best price I found was $17.50 to rent an 8′ X 30″ table for a week. We didn’t have to do that, but we thought we would have to. I borrowed a few, found a few, and built a few out of sawhorses.
The week before the sale, we placed an ad in the paper. When I placed the ad, the paper called to suggest we change it from running the weekend before to running just the days of the sale. I agreed, to a point, but their Sunday circulation is miles ahead of the weekday circulation, so why pay to run an ad nobody will see on Thursday? I ran it Sunday through Tuesday, because I wanted the Sunday ad and we got 3 consecutive days in the price. Did I actually know better than the paper’s sales-weasel? Who knows? I think I made the right decision.
The Sunday before the sale, I posted an ad on Craigslist. Interesting fact: little old ladies use Craiglist to plan their garage-sale adventures.
Two days before the sale, we made signs. Bright pink signs with brighter yellow starbursts. They were all simple. “Mega Sale! 8-5” followed by an arrow and our address. Simple, easy-to-read, and bright. The morning of the sale, after the ibuprofen kicked in, I put the signs up. When you make signs out of paper, always include a crossbar. It rained a lot the first day of the sale, so the signs wilted. The second morning, I went out with some duct tape and crossbars and fixed them all.
The day before the sale, we got cash and change. We had $50 in 1s and 5s and $25 in silver change. No pennies. Nothing was priced to make us need them.
The morning of the sale, we set up two canopy tents in the driveway and pulled the prepared-and-filled table out under them. We finished stacking as much as we could on the tables and called it “open”. There were a few boxes we couldn’t put out due to the rain. We simply ran our of room. At noon, $65 into the sale, we decided enough was enough and shut down–cold, wet, and miserable. Lunch and a nap made the day better.
Later, I’ll discuss the other parts of our successful sale.
Note: The entire series is contained in the Garage Sale Manual on the sidebar.
Update: This post has been included in the Money Hacks Carnival.
