Not a single one among us is born knowing how to use money perfectly. Our skill with money comes from making mistakes and learning from them. For my part, I’ve made several notable mistakes with money over the years. I’ve written before about how I failed to take action with my investment plan for 5 […]
I’m fascinated by people who oppose the idea of becoming financially independent. Personally, I think that this opposition is borne of the acronym FIRE. Most of us in the personal finance echo chamber know that this is an acronym for Financial Independence, Retire Early. It’s rather unfortunate that so many have twinned the two concepts […]
In a perfect world, you would have started saving with the first dollar that you ever received, i.e. birthday money, paper route money, graduation money. You would have gone to the bank – or your parent would have taken you – to the bank and you would have opened an account. Then you would have […]
Near as I can figure, it takes some time to become wealthy. There are those who manage to do it very quickly, and they generally fall into one of these three camps: Being born into wealth. Winning the lottery. Inheriting money from someone else. And I have to give an honourable mention to those who, […]
I don’t use a budget. I’ve been in charge of my own money since I got my first part-time job, in a grocery store, at the age of 15. Not once since that time have I ever written out a budget in order to allocate a certain amount towards food, towards clothing, towards entertainment, towards […]
Roughly 20 years ago, I landed my first professional office job. It entailed monthly meetings with my manager, wherein I updated him on my current workload. He was an amiable man and most meetings were sprinkled with little nuggets of life advice. One of the acorns of advice that has always stayed with me is […]
Raise your hand if you’ve found some surprise money in your bank account this past month! While a great many people have lost their jobs, those who haven’t might have noticed that there’s definitely extra money in their bank accounts. This is called surprise money because most people are surprised by how much they normally […]
Tempus fungit… which is Latin for time flies. And boy does it ever! In 2006, I was fortunate enough to pay off my house. Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to immediately turn my former mortgage payments into investment contributions. Instead, I didn’t start dollar-cost-averaging into the stock market until 2011. This was on one of […]
Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard people talking about the right of offset. As I understand it, the bank who lends you money has the right to take money out of your bank account, held at the same bank, if you don’t pay your debts on time. Wait! What? Start from the beginning, Blue […]
Right from the get-go, I’m going to ask those of you who already know this to forgive me for stating the obvious. Minimum payments benefit the lender way, way, way more than they benefit the borrower. Beware the minimum payment! When you borrow money from the lender, you’re taking out a loan. And when you […]