Budgeting
12 articles
If you’ve ever searched for advice on how to meet your financial goals, there’s one tip you’ve probably heard over and over: You need to make a budget. No matter what you’re trying to do – get out of debt, buy a house, save for retirement – financial experts all seem to say you can’t do it without first creating
Ever daydream about switching to a single-income household so you or your spouse could stay home with the kids? It’s not as old-fashioned as it sounds. In fact, more millennial parents (21%) are staying home with their children than Gen-X parents (17%) did when they were the same age, according to a 2018 Pew survey.
According to a 2017 CareerBuilder survey, 78% of all workers say they live paycheck to paycheck. It’s not just low-wage workers who have this problem, either. Nearly 1 out of 10 workers making $100,000 or more say they always or usually live paycheck to paycheck, and 59% of them are in debt. Living paycheck to
How do you manage your personal budget? Perhaps you’re a fan of old-fashioned envelope budgeting. Maybe you use computer spreadsheets to track your income and obligations in one place. You might even use prepaid debit cards to control your spending. Mint is a powerful, interactive budgeting option that costs nothing to set up and use. Backed by Intuit, the same
Saving money is a lot like eating right. We all know that we should save for emergencies, retirement, and personal goals, just like we know we should eat more vegetables and fewer cookies. But doing it isn’t so easy. That’s where automatic savings plans come in.
House hunting is a bit like dating. Sometimes, you fall for the wrong person – or the wrong house. It’s not at all unusual to fall head over heels in love with a house that’s way out of your budget. You feel like you just have to have it, so you pull every string you can to get approved for a bigger mortgage. But
Whether you’re purchasing a prefab dwelling, building a new construction home, or planning to fix up an older house, you’re probably excited about the prospect of closing the deal and moving in. Not so fast. Buying a home is an expensive proposition – the biggest investment that most families ever make. While you aren’t required to cover the
When you’ve recently graduated from college, the world can seem like your oyster. After four years of unpaid internships or part-time jobs, you suddenly can see full-time employment with a full-time salary on the horizon. But sometimes, finding a full-time job can be more difficult than you thought it would be – and you may find
I remember watching my mom pay bills each month when I was a child. She’d sit at the kitchen table, surrounded by a mound of paper, envelopes, stamps, and her checkbook as she wrote out the amounts, balanced the budget, and kept all of those slips of papers and bills in a huge folder. Today,
Are you a chronic overspender? If you start each month with great intentions and spend according to a set plan, but eventually find yourself making mindless purchases justified by that ever dangerous “a little won’t hurt” attitude, you’re likely facing an empty bank account and severe buyer’s remorse by the end of the month. Once
As my 30th birthday approaches, I find myself thinking about what I accomplished in the last decade. My 20s saw me get married, build a house with my husband, have two amazing kids, and start my career. And while I feel great about all those successes, there were definitely a lot of mistakes along the
As one of five kids, allowance meant everything to me as a child. My mom bought everything we needed, so it was only through allowance that I was able to purchase the things I really wanted. While I earned my allowance by doing chores, I was given little instruction on how to responsibly spend my
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