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…
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?
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…
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
