Ever get up one morning and decide you just want to take off somewhere?
“Honey! Kids! Come on, we’re going somewhere!”, John yelled as he looked for his keys finally finding them on the small table by the door. “Where are we going?” his wife and kids all yelled back unanimously. John was ready to go, “Just come on lets get going.”
Last week, I listed some some of my poorer financial decisions. Unfortunately, the picture that I inserted into the post seemed to give the impression that I viewed having children as a poor financial decision. That was not the intent and I took a little heat for that decision. But the discussion did start me thinking about the relationship between life decisions and money.
I’ve been talking about the benefits of having an emergency fund for a while now. As a matter of fact, my 7th article here on Gather Little by Little introduced the concept as step 5 of my Getting Your Finances Under Control series.
When I first heard Dave Ramsey talk about the concept it was in the context of a $1,000 emergency fund as baby step #1 in getting out of debt. I’ve maintained at least a $1,000 emergency fund since I first started the process of getting control of my finances.
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…
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.
I have a great fascination for the great philanthropists in our history and the great spirit of philanthropy that permeates our culture. Did you know that Americans give more money voluntarily than the citizens of any other country? We give seven times more money to charity than the citizens of Germany for instance. Another example is the absolute tsunami of cash given to the Asian Tsunami relief effort in 2004. Americans privately gave over $2 billion and our government chipped in another $900 million. The generosity of our country is absolutely astounding. If you would like to learn more about this subject I highly recommend Albert Brooks’ book about charitable giving entitled Who Really Cares?
In the financial world, we often talk about investment diversity and how important it is when investing to not place all of our eggs in one basket. Why? Risk mitigation. If one area “flops”, chances are other investments won’t.
People with even the smallest amount of investing experience recognize this strategy and practice it. What amazes me though, especially in today’s economy, is that these same people work one job, for one company. If by chance something happens to that job, their income stops.
Do you ever feel financially overwhelmed? Over the past two weeks we’ve had to pay property taxes on our rental home, home owners association (HOA) dues for our current home and rental house, our car registrations came due, a few bills were due, and another misc expense.
Under normal circumstances, none of these issues should have been a problem, as I would normally have saved for each of them and had the money in my savings account. But due to us moving and having to float two mortgage payments for a bit, I had to dip into those savings to cover things. I didn’t have to dip too much, but enough to make me have to scramble a bit and tap the emergency fund to cover all of the expenses this month.
A survey done in 2006 by Entrepreneur magazine revealed that “70% of Americans say they are good or excellent at managing their finances.” Did that statistic shock you? It did me. Statistics from a 2006 government survey show that “96% of all Americans will retire financially dependent on the government, family, or dependents.”
“It isn’t what we don’t know that kills us, it’s everything we know that ain’t so” – Mark Twain
I’m currently out of town on business. I don’t travel often, but when I do for some crazy reason a few days before I always begin to think through the question: “How easy would it be for my wife to pick up our finances if died?“ I’m not really afraid of flying and I’ve flown on planes many many times over the years, but the same thought always runs through my mind without fail.
