Once in a while I see advertising that is very manipulative and that makes me angry. As in, the anger caused by watching one person taking advantage of another person’s ignorance for their own gain. Today this happened when I opened the mail to find a “Certificate” from Gerber Life to offer me the opportunity to pay for life insurance for a child or grandchild.

I've been thinking about the root causes of many of the systemic problems we have in this country and what needs to change to fix the problems, instead of addressing the symptoms - police brutality being the biggest symptom - it is not the problem. Changing strangle laws won't fix the problem, it can only fix a symptom.

Unemployment insurance is our backstop for when people lose their jobs through no fault of their own. As the Covid-19 crisis has shown us, you don’t have to be a bad employee or not show up to work to no longer have a job, many of our friends and family members have been affected by workplace closures before, but none of us have ever seen anything like the number of industries that have been immediately affected this month.

Most of the posts we try to put out are to present information like it would be in a classroom setting or as part of a college course. But continuing to talk about buying a car or marginal tax rates hasn’t felt right over the past couple weeks, so we took a break to try and absorb what is happening in our world. This is truly an unprecedented time in our lives. We, nor our parents, have ever seen anything like this before.

Assuming you are following along with this series, you’ve read or listened through the buy or rent discussion, as well as that on leverage, and you’ve decided buying a home is a good decision for your financial future. Now what? You have followed all the steps in the planning process to buy a home and you have now found the home you want to buy.

Assuming you are following along with this series, you’ve read or listened through the buy or rent discussion and leverage and you’ve decided buying a home is a good decision for your financial future. Now what? Start looking for a home! Not quite yet, but I’m guessing that you’ve already done that and you might even have a few places in mind already…

Prelude to the Problems: I am not against college. However, I do question the value for many families of spending over $120,000 for anyone to get a college degree. There must be a cost benefit analysis done before entering school and there should be considerable financial education required before tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans are issued to someone who cannot smoke or drink legally and whose brain is not finished developing.

Leverage is one of those financial words that gets thrown around a lot that most people don’t really seem to understand.  People say things like “I’m over leveraged” or “leveraged to the hilt”.  We more commonly understand physical leverage such as a teeter-totter or using a stick and a fulcrum point we understand how to physically move things.  We talk about “leveraging our relationships” or contacts or followers.

Honey!! The toilet is running again.  The sink also leaks, and the fence needs to be re-stained before winter.  Sometimes the Honey-DO list seems infinite and exhausting when you own a home, especially when vermin are in the walls or appliances are breaking.  When you rent, you may have some of these issues in your life, but when something goes wrong… 

In our last article, we discussed Free Market and Supply and Demand.  Free Markets create wealth for all by creating incentives for new ideas, new products and overall innovation.  Supply and Demand dictate prices based on what consumers want to buy and the amount of it available.

In our last article, we discussed Free Market and Supply and Demand.  Free Markets create wealth for all by creating incentives for new ideas, new products and overall innovation.  Supply and Demand dictate prices based on what consumers want to buy and the amount of it available.

One of the reasons that most people hate dealing with their finances is that somewhere along the way things became way too complicated. Too many accounts, too many reports to look at and all it just seems to take up way too much time and mental effort. But how does it ever get any better if we don’t take the medicine and make the effort to simplify?

 We have discussed and will continue to discuss the role of your personality and what matters to you and how that relates to your financial decisions.  Know thyself!  This is extremely important if you want to create real change in your financial life.

Financial scams are nothing new and have probably been around since the invention of money.  New scams pop up every year whether claiming to get you rich quickly, reduce your debt, eliminate or reduce your student loan payments.  The same is true for all of them, the only people they making rich are the people selling them.

When people come over to “my house”, which my wife has done a wonderful job turning into our home, they are usually very complementary and say things such as “What a wonderful home you have,” or “Congratulations, what a beautiful home you have,” or, “We love your home.” Depending on the person, I usually just say thank you…

Buying a car can be a momentous but stressful occasion if you’re unprepared. There are many things to consider throughout the process, from the research phase through to signing on the dotted line. Here are some things to consider to help you become a savvy buyer and get most bang for your buck.

Whether you are in despair or happy with your current financial situation, if you have any desire to create change you will need a starting point from which to measure success.  Sitting down and putting to paper your financial life is not fun for anyone.

Over the course of your life you will deal with many financial transactions, and based on your credit score alone, these transactions can be a fair deal for you, or you can spend 20% or more than everyone else.  You get to choose! In this article we’ll discuss the benefits of having good credit.

To begin a financial conversation about the future with a new client requires first that we establish the starting point, simply, where are we at today.  For many people this can be a painful exercise of bringing up all the emotions surrounding prior decision making and the related feelings of guilt and remorse for potentially not making the right decisions in the past. 

While age 11 has been traditionally the marker of the passage into adulthood in eras past, age 14 is typically the first age at which you can officially have a job, earn income and potentially even pay taxes.  So 14 can also be the age at which you should begin learning about money and how capitalism works, as it’s the system you have been born into and you are going to live in it fo

After completing the prior podcast and discussing with the community, it became very apparent that not all parents can afford to help their children through college.  Many parents struggle to pay rent and keep food on the table and often times families can lose housing benefits when a child turns 18, so for many families providing room and board for the student isn’t possible, even though I’ve yet to meet a parent that doesn’t want to help. 

This week’s news from the WSJ tells us that students at historically black colleges (see The Student-Debt Crisis Hits Hardest at Historically Black Colleges) are graduating with disproportionately more debt than other students, who are also graduating with record levels of debt. 

When it comes to the student loan debt crisis, let’s not leave out the responsibilities of parents, many of whom are not acting like the adults in the room.

We all know how to spend money. In fact, it’s quite easy to do, and possibly one of the things you do best!  When we examine spending habits up close, however, we need to ask ourselves a few questions about how well those habits actually serve us.

There are two ways to calculate interest: simple interest and compound. Simple interest is a set percentage paid each year, while compound means you are paying interest on your interest each year. This can work for or against you, depending on if you are the one lending or borrowing the money.

Two-thirds of adult Americans can’t pass a financial literacy test, according to Forbes magazine. So, before we go on, we’d like to make sure you’re familiar with certain terms that are important to understand when it comes to talking about money.

Throughout the history of humankind, bartering, or trading goods and services, has existed. As early as 9000 BC there is evidence that the ancient Egyptians engaged in bartering, often with livestock or crops. Bartering was an effective system for exchanging things deemed of equal value, even though those values were negotiable.

In this series I will be talking about a lot of things, especially those of an economic and systemic nature that have gone awry in this country and globally. To head off this series, it seems only appropriate that we start with the economic framework under which we in the U.S. live: capitalism.

First off, you need to understand: You are not alone.

The system is not set up for you to thrive as an individual. We are bombarded every minute with reasons to buy more, and that’s what we do.