Personal finance, my story, mistakes, and what I've learned
Last night, I was reading through a personal finance book (one of the upcoming ones in the 52 Weeks… series) when I dozed off to sleep. In my dream, I was playing catch with Suze Orman in the outfield at Wrigley Field, and she kept shouting at me in that distinctive tone of hers that [...]
Continue Reading Is There Something Wrong With Me If Suze Orman Appears In My Dreams?
Recently, the subject of cash gifts came up between my wife and I. Her grandparents both give us moderately sized cash gifts each year (between $50 and $1000, to give a range) as a Christmas gift. In years past, we have almost immediately spent these gifts on some sort of material item, often contributing some [...]
Continue Reading Handling Small Cash Gifts
Ever since I was young, I have had a number of daily goals for myself. Most of them seem rather mundane: commit a random act of kindness, read for at least half an hour, brush my teeth and use Listerine twice, and so on. Most of them have a clear metric for success. However, since [...]
Continue Reading Setting and Meeting Daily Personal Financial Goals
While I was reading a thread at The Consumerist on ways to get started with credit, I found myself repeatedly shaking my head at the number of extremely questionable ideas that people were coming up with. Buying CDs and using them as loan collateral simply to improve your credit seems like financial suicide to [...]
Continue Reading Getting Started With Credit By Buying Textbooks
As an exercise, I made a list of every single material thing I would like to have if money was no object at all. My list was pretty basic: a nice five bedroom home (because I would like to have three children and a guest bedroom), a very reliable automobile, a computer that wasn’t literally [...]
Continue Reading Dreams and Wishes – and Reality
As a young man still more than a year away from the big 3-0, I have most of my adult productive years ahead of me. What are my goals during these years? Here, I intend to break them down by age. For the record, I will turn 30 in one year and eight months.
At age [...]
Continue Reading Defining My Long-Term Financial Goals…What Are Yours?
The peak-end rule is a psychological phenomenon that indicates which parts of a past experience we recall and use to define that experience. From Wikipedia:
According to the peak-end rule, we judge our past experiences almost entirely on how they were at their peak (pleasant or unpleasant) and how they ended. Virtually all other information appears [...]
Continue Reading Applying the Peak-End Rule to Personal Finance
Although I (really) like to bloviate about all sorts of personal finance topics, I keep many more thoughts on my own finances to myself. I’ve found that keeping a handwritten diary of my non-numerical financial thoughts has been invaluable (for the numbers, I use a computerized ledger).
I personally use a Moleskine daily planner for my [...]
Continue Reading Building a Financial (and Personal) Idea Diary
My wife and I live more than four hours away from our hometowns, so when we visit our parents and extended family, we spend a lot of time in the car. Over the years, we have developed several techniques for optimizing the cost of the trip. Here’s what we do:
Perform some basic car maintenance before [...]
Continue Reading Saving Money on Road Trips
When I was young, my best friend’s family used to give him and his siblings an allowance based on their age (I didn’t have an allowance, mostly because there simply wasn’t the money for it). When you were ten, for example, you would multiply your age by a certain factor (in their case, $1) and [...]
Continue Reading Investing A Young Child’s Allowance
