Do you deal with money in your household? Have you ever found yourself at odds with a family member or partner when it comes to money? Has that tension seemed like it started when you got together? There is more to the use of money than just what appears on the surface. Why You Spend And Earn Money The Way You Do In the same way personality and habits are […]
The Inflation Reduction Act recently passed by Congress is being touted as government working to reduce the rate of inflation that has spiked in 2021 and 2022. I’ll leave it to the politicians to go into the details of how this will or won’t help with bringing inflation down. One of the benefits of this Act is that it will raise more funds than the expenditures it authorizes with the […]
Our lives seem to be so busy these days. One source that keeps us busy is dealing with both postal mail and email inboxes. It may not be getting so much from friends, but instead from businesses and spammers. Here are a few ways to help clean things up. Postal Junk Mail Credit Card Offers If you don’t want to get credit card offers in the mail, then you can […]
Coordination Apps When it is more than just you helping to care for someone, a major issue becomes how to keep track of who said they would do what and when. Scheduling people for needs is another aspect of the coordination. Applications have been developed to help with the coordination of all of these tasks. These can be helpful both with long-term caregiving, as well as for short-term when someone […]
Inflation. The big “I” word that everyone is hearing about this year. A large portion of our population has not experienced high inflation, since the last time the rate of inflation was this high was back in the 1970s and 1980s. What Does It Mean? Although I’ll have another blog post that goes into more of the economic ideas behind inflation, the important concept is to understand that with a […]
If your spouse currently handles all of the household finances, have you ever thought about what you would do if your spouse was not there to do those tasks? People become widowed, divorced or for other reasons find that suddenly they are responsible for personal finances. What would you need to know in order to suddenly do this? What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know Donald Rumsfeld, during a department […]
As you know, I offer services as a Daily Money Manager (DMM) and support my clients by helping them with their household financial tasks. If you should find you or someone you know needing someone like myself, how do you go about finding someone who can do this? That’s the question that I help answer when I present the topic to different social groups. I thought it would be useful […]
During our lifetime, we make financial goals. These might be short-term goals such as having enough money around to spend on car repairs or a summer vacation. Or they might be longer-term goals such as saving for retirement. Of course, a spending plan is the key to having success with both of those. But that’s a different topic. The canal of a spending goal is that one is keeping track […]
If you’ve said to yourself that you wanted to get a better handle on your household finances, I’m sure you’ve seen the suggestion that you should create a budget. Are you dissuaded because you feel that it is too much work? Because budgeting doesn’t sound like fun at all? Because it sounds constraining? Then let’s get rid of that word. Instead, what we want is a plan to answer two […]
Earlier this year, I wrote about a way to save money that involved reviewing and removing subscription apps on your phone as well as other auto-renewing subscriptions that you might not be using. I suggested cancelling those subscriptions that are note being used as a method of getting more money back in your pocket. For those auto-renewing subscriptions, I also recommend setting a future calendar reminder for a year out […]
If you received a bill in the mail tomorrow, that you were not expecting, and it said you owed $400, would it be a financial hardship to pay that bill? In 2013 nearly 50% of adults would find paying that bill a hardship, and 20% said they would totally be unable to pay that. The silver lining is that with the boom in the economy since then, the numbers have […]
If you could put all the information needed to communicate your health history into one place, where would be a good place to keep it? Perhaps in a filing cabinet? On a desk? On the nightstand? The basic concept is that the information is stored in the medicine bottle and this bottle is stored on a shelf on the refrigerator door. In other versions, the bottle is placed in a […]
A couple of decades ago, the U S Army had a promotional ad on television that ended with “We do more by 9am than most people do all day.” There is another category of people for whom this is true as well: caregivers. Caregiving is not for the feint of heart and not all people can take this on. Being a caregiver for another person is something we probably don’t […]
How would you like to be able to pay all of your credit card statements in full each month? How cool is that to know that it is possible? Even if you have a lot of credit cards with balances on them, it is possible to get there and within just a few years! What does this have to do with snowballs? Want to know how? Read on! Two-Pronged Focus: […]
During the tax season we are forced to address paperwork we have collected since it is necessary to gather all the required paperwork to prepare taxes. This might also be a good time to deal with a lot of the financial paperwork that may be stored away in who-knows-where locations from drawers to boxes or worse. Hanging on to Too Much or Too Little How Long to Keep Those Records? […]
Identity theft in the USA continues to be a problem, with more and more people reporting to the FTC’s complaint database. I define identity theft as having someone not you using your personal and financial information to create new accounts in your name, or using your existing credit. There have been enough computer breaches of American’s identification information that everyone should assume that someone can obtain your identity and use […]
There is the old joke that when you want to find some spare change for something you look under the cushions of the couch and chairs and head out to the car and look under and around the seats. With so many transactions happening online these days, the chances of carrying around pocket change to lose in the furniture or car are much smaller. But it is still possible to […]
The 2021 tax season is here and it could be an ugly season. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) continues to face budget cuts and staffing issues due to covid. In addition, they have been tasked with distributing the federal checks to taxpayers during Covid as well as the child care credit checks. It has overwhelmed them and they are very much behind in processing tax returns on a timely basis. […]
The week of February 21, 2022 is the beginning of America Saves Week, a week devoted to encouraging Americans to save some of their money for what they will need later. For example, there are still too many families who would have trouble coming up with $400 in an emergency situation. Saving money will help end that risk. Here are some options for saving for each day of the week. […]
What Can We Learn From the Data? Since these surveys were done at the end of January, I suspect the answers are more likely reflective of relationships in the previous year which would be 2021 and 2020. This makes me wonder how much of these changes are related to the pandemic and our level of social interaction than any significant changes in feelings about talking with money with others? I […]
Smart people don’t make dumb mistakes with their money. Or do they? See how many of these traps you might be falling into. Time Vs Money Nearly all decisions about money are related to time. Spend more to save time, or pay less but do more yourself. One money saving idea is that if there is a gas station further away from your usual one that has gas for less […]
One day I was having coffee with a friend whom has two children who had just graduated from college and were excited about the possibility of getting a job and moving out of mom and dad’s house. One of his concerns was that regardless of how he tried to talk about the subject of money, the children (boys!) weren’t really thinking about the financial implications of being independent. It wasn’t […]
You may have money leaking out of your accounts and not even realize it. Here are a number of possible ways you are letting money drain out of your accounts and how to stop these leaks. Bank Fees Other fees that you can avoid are minimum balance fees by making sure that your balance is always over the minimum amount. Several tools such as the bank’s own mobile apps or […]
In our parent’s generation, it was pretty much assumed that if you had valuables that you wanted to hang onto, you didn’t keep them at home, but you would rent a safe deposit box from your local bank. After all, if the bank vault was good enough to keep the bank’s cash safe, it would be safe for your things as well. When told that irreplaceable papers such as a […]