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
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.
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.
