I took the first steps and committed to selling my car. I’m ready to move from a “car I love” to a family car. Now I’m moving to the planning and research phases. I revisited my old criteria that I set in the fall and updated it to reflect our needs instead of wants. Here’s my […]
So you’ve got a debt? What’s the first step in getting rid of it? Let’s take a look at one of my hot-button items in our budget and work through it. In the fall we decided not to sell my car just yet. However, now that spring is almost here it’s time to do something […]
It’s not possible to do everything. In every area of life, we’re forced to prioritize and skip doing those things that fall at the bottom of our list. This includes financial strategies. I find that I’m eliminating more items each year, essentially leaving money on the table! In balancing our life mix I showed how […]
Just as I was finalizing our budget we got hit with some unexpected expenses. While the expenses themselves weren’t completely unexpected, the dollar amounts were. Adding in large ongoing expenses can completely throw off a sound financial plan if you aren’t careful. Here’s the big three expenses that we just recently found out about:
Assess the balance in your life by creating a pictorial representation of your life. Using a pie chart you can easily see if your priorities in life are being met. Hang it up somewhere that you can see it. How does it look? Does it look the way you want it to? I completed this exercise three […]
In our million dollar credit limit article, readers asked how I keep organized with 89 credit cards. I introduced the series of my organizational system in my billpay and anti-filing system. As I shared, Microsoft Money is the center of my strategy. Here’s my tips, tricks and troubleshooting for using Microsoft Money Home and Business […]
We just finished putting together our goals for 2008. Each year after finalizing our goals we put together a new budget for the year. In this series, we’ll take a look at how we budget, how we use it and our budget by category. How We Create the Budget We use last years budget as a […]
It’s February and I’ve finally decided on our goals for the new year. Last year, outside of our main dollar plan goal I made just one new years resolution: to stop couponing. This year, I’m putting together a few more that I’d like to work on. Instead of rushing into them on January 1, I’ve […]
Tax time is getting closer! I actually enjoy doing my taxes and find it a fun challenge to make sure we’re taking advantage of all the tax savings strategies available to us. I’m almost done collecting tax papers according to my organized list. I’m now ready to start entering my data. Usually I use either TaxCut or TaxWise […]
