Personal Finance Blog, Your Guide to Financial Fitness
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Erik Folgate
If you haven’t stumbled across the Brazen Careerist blog written by Penelope Trunk, I suggest that you check it out. She gives great career and start-up business advice.
She writes references an article wriitten by Ryan Healy college graduates going back home to live with their parents.
Erik Folgate
Before I begin the topic of this post, I just want to recognize all of the men and women that lost their lives six years ago today, whether they were in one of the airplanes, in the twin towers, or trying to rescue survivors. Your lives were taken by a bunch of cowards, and for that reason, we’ll always remember you.
Erik Folgate
My colleague over at Lifespy wrote these two articles:
How To Make Money. A comprehensive tutorial about the most common ways to make money. My favorite parts were his insights about saving money with other monthly bills rather than cutting out life’s little luxuries and knowing when taking a second job is financially worth the extra income.
Protect Your Money After a Break-Up. Everyone needs to know how to protect themselves from the bitter ex-girlfriend or boyfriend!
Consumerist gives hope to those facing foreclosure
Lazy Man gives us Financial lessons from the NFL
Erik Folgate
I am a strong believer that eliminating your debt is the first step to becoming wealthy. Once you are debt free, there is nothing holding you back from saving a higher percentage of your income. Think about how much of your household income goes to credit card payments, car payments, and other miscellaneous debts. I’ll venture to say that it’s at least 20% of your take home pay. Saving an extra 20% of your income over 30 to 40 years will ALWAYS make you a millionaire, even if you make $35K for the rest of your life. There are three popular ways of methodically paying off your debt. I don’t want to tell you which one that I think you should do, because I think it has much to do with what kind of person you are. Here are the three methods for eliminating your debt.
Erik Folgate
This is not a political blog, but the issues that Ramsey talks about on this video are definitely political issues. My challenge is for you to research the presidential candidates before you vote in a year. Make sure that you choose a candidate that not only agrees with your foreign policy and selsocial views, but also your financial views. The idea of socialism, at its core, does not work and it only benefits the less hard working individuals in society. The idea of working hard to make something for yourself is why this country’s economy has thrived over the past 200 plus years. That’s not to say that the mentally ill and physically disabled should be left to fend for themselves, but there are plenty of other socialized systems in place that drain the congressional budget every year.
Erik Folgate
Here is a question submitted to me from one of our readers. He is having trouble with being upside down on a car loan. He makes $42,000 a year household income. I will post the question answer it based on what I would do if I were in his shoes.
Erik Folgate
As you all know, entertainment can be a very rough on your bank account if you aren’t budgeting out money specifically for it. We’ve become a very lazy culture, and we’ll pay quite a bit of money to be entertained. The fact is that you can have a great amount of fun with your family or friends without spending much money. Here are four things you can do that will not kill your wallet:
Erik Folgate
Adjusting to your first “real” job can be a daunting task. First of all, you have to get into the routine of getting up early every day and being ON TIME every day. Then, you have the task of relating to your co-workers and boss. Then, you have the human resources meeting about your benefits package. If your brain isn’t scrambled after all of that information, then you are a much better person than me when it comes to processing information.
Erik Folgate
If you’re currently running a small business or a home-based business, but you are not writing or managing a blog for your business, there is a problem. Blogs are probably the easiest self-publishing tool to create on the internet. If you already have a website for your smalll business, then you’re already paying for a domain name and a web hosting package to house the domain and its content.
How to Set it Up:
Erik Folgate
The stock market tumbled again today, currently dropping 167 points with only an hour and a half left in trading. The trading volume has been light and much of that has to do with traders being wary over what the Fed will do about inflation concerns. Traders are waiting to see what came out of the latest Fed meeting that occurred recently.
Erik Folgate
You’re in line to pay for some gas at the local gas station, and the cashier asks you, “Will this be debit or credit”. You’re saying to yourself, “I’m paying with a Visa debit card, does it really matter?”. The answer is YES. It does really matter what you choose when they ask you for debit or credit. There are two reasons why you need to make sure to choose debit if you are using your debit card to pay for a purchase.
Erik Folgate
Money Dork has a good article about knowing when to tap into your emergency fund and separating out your emergencies.
I thought he had good insight about the different emergencies that arise. He thinks you should separate out your emergency fund into two different categories: crisis emergencies and life’s little unplanned emergencies. I think this is a good idea, because then you won’t spend too much money on life’s little emergencies and find yourself with less in your fund if you lose your job.
Erik Folgate
Blogs would not exist without active readership. Active readership is when visitors participate in the conversation, topic, argument, or informational article that the blogger presents. I want to know what you want to read about most. This will help me focus my thoughts one what is most important to you. I get a pretty good idea about what you want to read about from my blog statistics, but sometimes those are skewed by some articles that do better from google rankings. Here are some topics that you might be interested in reading:
Erik Folgate
If you are a frequent reader of this site, then you know that I am a big believer that behavior has much to do with having success with your financial future. My goal is to help you understand personal financial issues along with helping you identify the behavioral problems that hinder you from becoming wealthy. I identified my behavioral problems in college. I had no concept of what it meant to carry a balance on a credit card and I was horrible about saving money and looking for bargains. You can spit out every financial equation and explain how the stock market works, but that won’t make you wealthy. What will make you wealthy is focusing on the psychological aspect of changing the way you handle money. Saving first, demanding a better deal when you buy something, and always preparing a monthly budget are behavioral habits that will help you become wealthy.
Erik Folgate
The ETF (Exchange Traded Fund): The ETF seems like it was created for those active traders that like the way mutual funds perform, but they hated the way they traded.
Liquidity: The ETF is very liquid. It trades like a regular, single stock. Whereas, a mutual fund can only be traded once a day. If you sell a mutual fund, you get the price that it ends in at the end of the day. Active traders that trade on a margin or short sell like the ETF and the way its liquidity.
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