My fellow blogging and non-blogging citizens: I write here today, grateful for the trust bestowed up on me to host this 1st edition of the revived Carnival of Money Stories. First and foremost, I welcome you to the carnival and also to Gather Little by Little. Similar words of welcome have been spoken throughout blogging history: during rising tides of prosperity and still waters of peace…
Photo by: My wife
First and foremost, Happy Mother’s day to all of Mom’s out there. I sincerely hope you have a wonderful day and that your children and significant others show their appreciation for everything that you do and have done! If not…well, take a few days off and I’ll bet they will real quick ;-)
I wrote about a using a firewall account with ING Direct sometime back. Using a firewall account is a concept I use to insulate my ING savings and ING checking accounts from the outside world. Any income I receive comes to my ING firewall account and then I transfer it to the appropriate ING savings account. My firewall account has a $0 balance 99% of the time or at least it did…
“Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. The man who had received the five talents went at once and put his money to work and gained five more. So also, the one with the two talents gained two more. But the man who had received the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.
I’ve been on a quest for the past few months to to find a better way to manage my blog accounting for my blogs and business accounting for my Empty Cabin Media blog consulting business. I’ve been using a mixture of spreadsheets which were marginal, but didn’t offer some of the automation I was looking for such as invoice creation, payment tracking, and integration with Paypal.
Thanks to an article in Daily Blog Tips I discovered Outright and subsequently Freshbooks.
Outright.com is simply: simple online bookkeeping software and offers the following capabilities:
My favorite blog carnival, The Carnival of Money Stories, dropped off the face of the earth a few months back. I loved this carnival because it shared posts that involved personal stories about people and money. I love factual and helpful articles, but the articles that really motivate and inspire are the personal stories shared by others. The Carnival of Money Stories focused on the Personal aspect of Personal finance.
I enjoyed reading the M-network answers to the question posed by Leah last week. There is a lot of good information in the M-network responses and you will find an argument for almost every viewpoint in the comment thread. I have discovered that the comment threads here at Gather Little by Little are a great resource themselves. The articles seem to just be the place where the discussion and advice begins. Great job, GLBL readers!
First off, you are in a great position financially and I am going to assume that you got there with no help from your boyfriend.
We interrupt this regularly scheduled Money saving Monday to provide you with one of he coolest giveaways I’ve done here on Gather Little by Little.
Those of you that have been reading for a while know that I am a huge proponent of budgeting. Personally, I think a budget is a foundational tool for controlling your finances and being financially successful. I started budgeting monthly 2 years ago. I first used a piece of paper, then a simple excel spreadsheet which then developed into a more complex and easier to use excel budget spreadsheet, then I discovered You Need a Budget Pro (you can read my full review over at my You Need a Budget Pro review article). I’ve waffled back and forth between my spreadsheet and YNAB Pro, but both are great tools with their own set of advantages and disadvantages. Regardless, YNAB Pro is a great piece of software that does one thing very well: budgeting.
It’s been a while since I’ve solicited any feedback from you, so I thought it was about time to do it again. I created Gather Little by Little for one single purpose, to help others. I wanted to share my financial learnings with others in hopes that they could begin their join me in my journey to get my finances under control. I have not deviated from that purpose other than to hope that maybe someday I can do this as a full-time job. That would truely be a dream come true.
This article is part of the Ask the M-Network series. Leah submitted a question and asked:
I’m 28. I have 9% of my income going into a 401k, no credit card debt, a paid-off 9-year-old car, and 5 months expenses in savings (some of that earmarked for the next new-to-me car). I also have a student loan of $11K at 2.5% interest. I want to start aggressively paying down the student loan, but because of the low interest rate my boyfriend is urging me to put that money in savings instead to earn interest and act as a larger emergency/irregular expenses fund. Am I better off holding on to the cash, or getting rid of the debt?
