This may be hard to hear. Middle-class millionaires (according to the book of the same title) do not agree that if you do what you love, the money will follow. More than 73 percent chose a career because of its prospective financial rewards. But that doesn’t mean they’re walking around hating life. They just put [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Planning'
Do You Want What it Takes to Be a Millionaire Today: Seeing Opportunity
November 5th, 2008 No Comments
Tags: match skills to opportunity · The Middle-Class Millionaire · think big
Do You Want What It Takes to be a Millionaire Today: Career First
October 31st, 2008 4 Comments
Thanks to The Sun’s Financial Diary for posting this at this week’s carnival of personal finance. Thomas Stanley’s “Millionaire Next Door” approach to building wealth is sane, simple, and basically foolproof if you’re consistent: Save, invest, and wait. There’s another path that, as a self-employed person, I find more provocative. Earlier this year, authors Russ [...]
Tags: career · financial independence · hobbies · Lewis Schiff · Russ Alan Prince · The Middle-Class Millionaire
Getting to 60% Part 2: More Details
October 10th, 2008 1 Comment
Husband here, chiming in with a more detailed picture of our progress toward 60%. We used “creative accounting” to get down to 79% from something crazy like 89%. Nothing fancy, just moving newspaper subscriptions and Netflix into the fun category, and moving the car payment and home equity loan into the debt/savings category. Grandma (my [...]
Tags: Cash Husband post
Getting to 60 Percent: Progress So Far
October 10th, 2008 No Comments
Here’s our progress to date on getting our fixed household expenses to equal no more than 60 percent of our budget. Right now our committed monthly expenses — utilities, mortgage, taxes, gas etc. — stand at 73 percent. (I think this might be an accounting adjustment from the previously reported 79 percent. Cash Husband can [...]
Tags: cuts · new habits · pet peeve · progress to 60 percent
Cleaning Service Verdict: Compromise
October 9th, 2008 No Comments
The votes are in: We had 4 votes to cut the cleaning service, 3 votes to keep it, and 4 to compromise — to reduce the cleaning to once a month if possible. We decided to go with the compromise, since our cleaner said she’d be willing to do that. Savings: $55/month. Now we’ll see [...]
Tags: compromise · polls · votes
Cleaning Service: Stay or Go? NEW Vote!
September 26th, 2008 10 Comments
Tug-o-broom Image from PicApp: “Couple Holding Brooms” Since we did the 60 percent exercise — that is, trying to get our committed monthly expenses closer to that number than to the current 79 percent — we’ve been ping-ponging around what we could cut out of our monthly budget. We’ve hit our first snag over our [...]
Tags: 60 percent solution · sidetaker.com · Stephen Colbert · time value of cleaning
The 60 Percent Solution and Mint.com
September 19th, 2008 5 Comments
Given the tsunami of bad on Wall Street right now, it seems a little odd to be blogging about how we’re going to rebuild ourselves a safe haven with savvier saving, budgeting, and investing. Kind of like hammering away on the frame of a house in the middle of Hurricane Ike. But, not everyone can [...]
Tags: 60 percent solution · committed expenses · Mint.com · pie charts
Deemphasizing Retirement Planning, For Now
September 15th, 2008 No Comments
One of the top financial goals on my to-do list has been to start maxing the contribution on my IRA for retirement. We haven’t actively contributed to it in a few years, since I started working less than full time, and I assumed, given the constant “Save for retirement” drumbeat, that this was very bad. [...]
Tags: retirement
It’s Not the Cash, It’s the Flow
September 8th, 2008 1 Comment
Author’s husband here, guest-posting. After broadcasting this blog’s existence to some friends and relatives, Sara received some concerned e-mails about our solvency. So listen up: I am the keeper of the books, and I say we are OK. To clarify: We are not broke. We are not avoiding calls from creditors. We are not staring [...]
Tags: Cash Flow · husband post
Why So Dumb: Second in a Series
September 5th, 2008 1 Comment
In addition to expenses going up and income going down, here’s another reason why sometimes we’re spending more than we earn. My husband and I took a money attitude quiz the other night that asked us to rate money’s importance to us on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being “the root of all [...]
Tags: money management · parasailing · scale of 1 to 10
