Tag: investing

how to manage money

I have an account – several, actually – with TD Ameritrade.  I like TD Ameritrade well enough.  The fees are reasonable for trading and they have a fairly user-friendly interface.  I manage my own money so I’m not looking for many bells and whistles.

Yet every time a trickle of money enters my account, they call.  If I make a shift in my investments, they call.  The simple fact?  I don’t need help.  I have a simple investing strategy that anyone can follow.  It’s not original to me, but it’s barely original to anyone else, either.

I split my money 40-20-20-20 between market index funds, overseas index funds, bond index funds and “other” – stocks, odd mutual funds, etc.  I rebalanced today due to the fact that I just rolled over my 401(k).  It’s not rocket science, either.  I looked at my current allocations and built a spreadsheet to tell me what I’d need to do to get back to that formula.

Is that formula the path to wealth?  Beats the hell out of me.  You know what it is, though?  It’s the investment strategy that lets me sleep at night.  It’s the investment strategy that reduces risk to the point I’m comfortable. 

I read a lot of tortuous investment information and a lot of maximize-your-gains type screeds on the internet and I always have to wonder: why?  I want investment that let me sleep at night.  Is investing 20% of my net worth in bonds going to cost me some returns in the long run?  Perhaps.  Is it going to let me sleep at night?  Maybe.  If it does, it’s priceless. 

Don’t over think investments.  Pick a strategy and stick to it.  I did, and it’s worked well enough to date.  I’m not exactly retiring to the Taj Mahal on my investments, but I’m doing well enough for a middle-class American.  Take a conservative approach to investing – a simple allocation or a similar strategy -  and I doubt you’ll go wrong.

linklings, rethinking the linking edition

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I know I usually publish these link roundups on the weekends, and recently they’ve gotten huge. I may try to do two separate posts in the future, rather than one enormous one each week. Or I may do what I’m doing today - write a lot about a few articles and then just link to some other good ones. But they are worth reading, in my opinion - if you have the time. But last week’s did get a little bit out of control, so I’m ramping back down a bit for this one.

What if You were Required to Share your Finances?: I always think pro athletes have to put up with something most of us would find abhorrent - public announcements of their salaries. You’d have to deal with knowing your teammates’ salaries - some of their salaries might make you mad. You might be playing better than another teammate, but making less, and you’d have to know it. Norway’s publishing the tax records of ALL citizens. I think it would be interesting if we could all look up each other’s salaries. It would make life a lot tougher for recruiters and HR and corporations, but it might be a step in the right direction. We require it of our public officials and expect it of our pro athletes, so why not?

10 Steps to Declutter and Simplify Your Finances: It’s easy to overlook the value of simplifying your finances when you’re worried, first and foremost, about making money. Yet decluttering your finances helps you get a clearer picture of your overall financial position, and allows you to spend less time managing your money and more time making it. I went through a huge decluttering process, starting about a year before I got married. It took two years of gradual change to close all the store accounts (dozens!), checking accounts (3! for a single guy!), brokerage accounts (7!) and credit cards (I had gas cards, airline cards, you name it). Having a clear picture of our finances has made it easier to manage our finances and let us spend more time on other things.

Credit Cards To Charge Good Behavior Fees: I’ve written about the demonization of the credit card industry before. I’ve seen some significant grumbling online about credit card companies starting to charge people for paying off their balance in full. I can’t say I’d be happy if they did it, since we pay off our three credit cards in full every month, but I’d understand. It’s a service, like any other, and we’ve used it for free for years. I know the merchants we use are paying a fee and passing it on to us, and some people think that’s how we are being charged. But really, if I make $600+ a year in cash back rewards, does a charge of $35 a year - or something like that - for the use of the card make it a bad deal for me? Nope. Will I get rid of at least one of our three cards? Nope. Bubelah and I like having one “family” card and two personal cards just in our own names.

Other links:

photo by josef.stuefer

linklings, passion, pongo and the end of the world edition

What defines a perfect job? Would a job that you love, but that took you away from your home half of the year be preferable to one you aren’t crazy about but doesn’t require travel or long hours? Would high pay trump dissatisfaction? Does passion triumph over low pay? I am not really facing any decision like this, but I’m just wondering what the peak trait of rewarding work is. I’m guessing it’s different for everyone. In fact, as I’ve been reading and listening to blogs and podcasts about the Web 2.0 and the future of work and so on, I’ve been startled by how many people seem to dismiss any problems with low pay and say that ‘passion’ will make it all worth it. Don’t get me wrong, I think passion would carry you a long way, but I’m getting tired of the dismissiveness of the “passion movement” towards people who aren’t following “their passion.”

I keep putting it in quotes, don’t I? I have mentioned this in an earlier post, but I’m just beginning to wonder if I would prefer to follow my passion, for example, or do something I’m not crazy about but that offers flexible hours and good pay. If I had to work 14 hours a day at something I enjoyed, it still takes me away from other things I enjoy. Dunno. Something to ponder. Probably should have written a separate post on it…

Something to promote here: Pongo Resume sent me five (5) promotion codes for a free month of Pongo service. You’ll get a full 30 days of unlimited access to Pongo’s resume and cover letter builder, custom templates, job search tool, interview training, and live support. A Pongo subscription typically costs $9.95 a month or $59.95 a year. You are welcome to (but don’t have to) continue your subscription at the end of the free month, and cancel at any time.”

All you have to do to get a promotion code is leave a comment with a valid email address. If you make the comment about a bad experience at a job that made you start looking for a new one the next day, I’ll pick the best for use in a future post, so if you’re a blogger it might be some good exposure. I’ll award the best one a promotion code and pick the other four at random.

Links! Time travel reference at the end.

5 Reasons To Dump Your Strict Budget: Budgeting will drive you nuts, in my opinion (but if you’re in debt it’s probably useful for tracking purposes). Once you’re out of debt, do this: set aside a percentage of your income every month (at least 15%). Doesn’t matter so much where, but obviously tax-advantaged accounts might be helpful. Set aside the money for fixed costs (mortgage/rent, utilities, etc.). The rest can be spent, but if you spend less than the full amount remaining, you’ll start getting richer. My family does need to start budgeting food expenses, though - treating that more like a fixed cost than an as-needed expense. Hm, maybe a budget’s not a bad idea… what if there were online solutions….wait:

10 Free Online Budgeting Applications: Yodlee’s on the list. If you have a Bank of America account, this is what powers “My Portfolio.” I have to be honest that I don’t understand all the hoopla about Mint - it doesn’t seem to have half as many features as Yodlee, but I guess Yodlee’s just boring because it’s more of a “behind-the-scenes” app. I don’t need an online budgeting application that starts giving me “advice” on better rates, etc. I trust sponsored advice about as much as I trust Bruce Willis’ hairstylist.

What Was the Best $100 You’ve Ever Spent?: Good question. I remember during a long winter spell when we just had Little Buddy I went to Kmart and bought a little car, similar to this Fire Engine Scootster (aff. link). It was a bit cheaper - I think it was $40? - but I expected it to be used for a few days and forgotten. Since then it has been used almost nonstop. Little Buddy still rides it and now that Pumpkin’s running around she loves sitting on it and paddling along.

Wokai: Support Chinese Small Businesses through Microfinancing: I guess all of these microfinancing sites (Kiva, now Wokai) serve a useful purpose, but you definitely need to be emotionally involved in the cause. It’s not really a charity and given the troubles here in the States, I think it makes more sense to support American small businesses through microfinancing (preferably in your own community). But I support charities like the Russian Children’s Welfare Fund, too, so I understand.

Best Things to Buy in the Fall - Find the Biggest Discounts and Sales on These Items This Fall: Fall? What is fall? Haven’t seen any indications of fall down here. I suppose winter clothes are sold somewhere in Florida, but I realized there may not be a good time to get a deal on a grill.

Free High Yield Checking Accounts: Get one, then forget about it. Don’t chase rates.

Joining Pentagon Federal, Real Estate, and Investing: That having been said, the Pentagon Federal Credit Union sounds like a pretty good deal.

Why Don’t Most Financial Planners Plan Finances?: Why are doctors the worst patients? Because humans be kooky sometimes.

Should Parents Have a Financial Double Standard For Sons and Daughters?: Fascinating question. My mother was an only child, my dad had a brother and I had a brother. In my nuclear family, therefore, this wasn’t really something to worry about. My parents have kept a careful ledger of gifts and assistance they’ve given to my brother and me and kept it balanced between us. I have a son and a daughter, though. If she has a $20,000 wedding, should I give my son a check for $20,000 to balance it out? Guess I’ll cross that (expensive) bridge when I come to it.

Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009 (HR 1207): Audit the Fed! I can’t even begin to understand counterarguments. The most common one (“it will hamper their ability to make decisions”) was used ad nauseum by Dick Cheney. As an auditor, I’m a little biased, but if you are making trillion-dollar decisions that affect the entire country, I think you need some oversight. Promising that you will be good doesn’t work for Corporate America and it sure as hell doesn’t work for the pseudo-governmental bodies like, say, Fannie Mae or the Fed.

Why Relying on Overtime Dooms You to Failure: Yep. If you have a salaried job you probably don’t think about this, but if you work on an hourly basis it’s easy to start thinking “wow, if I work just an extra few hours a week I could…” Nope. I don’t even plan based on working 40, because almost every week includes a day that needs to get cut short for one reason or another. Hope for the best but plan for the worst.

Don’t worry about not being able to contribute more to your 401(k): Yeah. If you sock away the max, you’re doing better than 95% of your countrymen. Or is that countrypersons? Doesn’t have the same ring, does it.

Via kottke:

Phil Greenspun’s finance buddy explains how JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs made $6.8 billion in profit last quarter. Basically they borrowed money from the US Govt at 0% and then bought bonds from the US Govt that paid 2-3%.

What kind of bonds are they buying? Are they investing the money in American business? “No, they are mostly buying Treasuries.” So the money is just being shuffled from one Federal bank account to another, with each Wall Street bank skimming off $1 billion per month for itself? “Pretty much.”

Fortunately it’s not going to matter, because the Higgs boson is going to travel back in time and destroy any bank involved in financing the Hadron Collider. Er, what?

how to market contract consulting services

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As a contract consultant for the past five years, I’ve been amazed at the common perception that I must spend 90% of my time marketing. I do have some help - the staffing firms I work with identify some clients. But if you’ve ever thought about being a consultant, don’t assume it means hours and hours of evening work trying to land the next job.

If you are a freelancer or what I’ll call an “on-demand consultant” you need to market yourself on a constant basis. You may have hundreds of clients. 80% may be one-time clients requiring a few hours or days of work. 10% may be longer projects that may or may not recur. 10% might be clients who request recurring work: once every two or three weeks they drop another 20 hours of billable time in your lap. Those percentages are just examples, but if that was your situation, you would need to spend a lot of time finding a new batch of clients every few weeks to replace those that you finish off. You are better off concentrating on work you can perform in long stretches of time.

“Whoa, Steve!” you may be thinking. “Aren’t you always talking about creating new streams of revenue? How does focusing on one or two clients at a time help with that?”

For one thing, it frees up the time you’d be spending on marketing. If half of your business is work, and half is finding new work to replace completed work, you’re going to spend a lot more time generating the business that a contractor can generate with one client who gets most - or all - of your time over a period of several months. Having long periods of time with minimal marketing activity means you can spend your spare time on life, or a side business, or studying investing - whatever you’d like.

So how does a contract consultant market?

First of all, I don’t even have a business card. I don’t spend four nights a week at Chamber of Commerce meetings, and I am a lightweight in the online promotion business. I’ve stayed active in LinkedIn and Twitter, but other than that most of my business takes place using the ancient art of email. I don’t have a well-developed professional website (unless you’d count my LinkedIn site).

I have only two tips for anyone who’d like to do contract consulting:

1. Understand what your client REALLY wants

2. Be useful

Understanding what your client REALLY wants

Early in my consulting career, I was full of ideas. I worked for a Big 4 firm, and a large part of my time was spent “consulting”: going into a business, finding the highest-ranked employee I could wrangle a meeting with, and proceeding to tell him what he was doing wrong and what I’d do instead. Advising someone who works at a job eight (or more) hours a day, year after year, what you’d do after you’ve spent one or two days studying their process takes a quick, sponge-like ability to soak up huge amounts of information - but it also takes a bullish amount of arrogance and disdain for the client. I had it. I knew how to do ‘my stuff’ and I was convinced I knew how to do ‘your stuff’ too.

Wrong. My second contract was a small subsidiary of a Fortune 500 corporation. I was put to work on a small project which had two feet firmly planted in the world of paper and binders. The organization was lacking, to say the least - the files were chaotic and working with them was unpleasant. But my client set me to work on documentation and testing and handed over the binders.

I was sure that the client would be thrilled if I could organize and streamline the process. All I had to do was pull everything out of the files, clean it up, make it nice and neat and clear out the fluff. Who WOULDN’T like that? When I handed the files back, I found out who - my client, that’s who.

After being yelled at almost non-stop by an almost incoherently angry client for a few days - with abrupt spluttering insults thrown my way after an initial trip to the corporate woodshed - I was lucky enough to be called up to the corporate headquarters for an emergency project and get away from my mistake.

What I learned was that you need to understand what your client wants. If you’re hired as a ‘real’ consultant, the client wants you to make some suggestions. If you’re hired as a contract consultant, you’re there to be a meat robot: do task X until it’s done. Don’t rethink it, don’t improve it.

Be useful
Contract consultants are expensive. There’s nothing that’s quite as useless as an expensive tool that lies on the shelf. I know that every time I go to the client, there’s a good chance that they think they need a hammer, but what they actually need is a screwdriver, or a pair of pliers. Most clients understand that they need something, but oftentimes they think they need short term help when what they actually need is training - or they think they need training, but they actually need short-term help. Try to identify the need, not the ‘want’.

I’ve known for years that any time I’m hired as a consultant, I’m probably going into a bad situation. Not many companies need help for a well-oiled, efficiently operating department. Not many companies want short-term consulting help if they are confident, well-staffed and fully budgeted. A consultant comes into a tough situation and often hopes for little other than to make it slightly less tough.

I’ll sum it up this way: the key to good contract consulting is not to think of yourself as a ‘real’ consultant. You should apply yourself to serving a client while recognizing that they didn’t want/need/hope to lay out money on a “real” consultant - someone who would reorganize everything and reconfigure their lives. They just wanted someone who could stick their thumbs in the dam for a few days, and give themselves a few moments to recover. Sometimes it’s enough.

photo by lin padgham

re-engineering your thinking

I spend a lot of time working on business process re-engineering (famously promoted in Keith Ferrazi’s “Never Eat Alone,” a great book), or business process management, or whatever you want to call it these days. If you aren’t familiar with it, I’ll define it this way: you take a company organized along function lines – accounting, sales, distribution, and so on. You take that company and reorganize it by process: the process of selling, accounting for and distributing a particular product is studied and roadblocks to efficiency are removed. So instead of spending management time worrying about the accounting department’s systems, you spend management time making sure a product “moves” through the process of production, sales and accounting to a customer. To me, it’s like organizing all of the food you need to make a meal so that you can prepare it quickly and well, rather than buying a new stove to cook it faster.

Most people think of their lives as independent little blocks: health, money, career, family, kids, friends, fun, etc. We try to focus on one area. Let’s think about some of the written-in-stone truisms of personal finance:

  • I need to save for retirement!
  • I need to be more frugal to save more money!
  • I need to invest in the market because people who stay out of the market are missing out on the 7% returns we know as gospel, because the market always does well!

A lot of time is spent on the function of making money. Save. Be frugal. Invest. All good ideas, but let’s face it: if you save money and you’re frugal and you’re investing, you may increase your net worth a bit, but to what end? You have increased your personal system’s ability to put money in your pocket, but the process of making money can still be broken. Why save? Why be frugal? You may bake your own bread, for example, but why? Financial freedom? I thought I wanted that for a long time, but as time has gone by and I’ve thought more about money, I’ve realized that wanting financial freedom is somewhat meaningless. You have to think more about how you make money (or manage your health, or career, and so on) in relation to your whole life. Or, to put it more simply, freedom from what?

Why save for retirement? Should you save money on food, or medical care or on things that make life more enjoyable (and less stressful) to ‘save for retirement?’ Which one of those three jumped out? Saving money on medical care can make sense to a certain extent but you don’t want to economize in that area if you want your retirement to be enjoyable. I’d rather work a little longer and have extra money for dental care, or routine exams. Think about the process: living a happy healthy life until you are old involves more than just accumulating money.

These days I’m trying to think more and more about how to spend money in meaningful ways, and how to make my career meet my goals instead of trying to make my goals fit my already-developed career. You want free time? Don’t be an employee or a small business owner: those are time suck careers. Be a consultant or an entrepreneur with a franchise-model system (read the E-Myth Revisited if you don’t know what I mean). Want to retire early? Answer two questions first: (1) is it really necessary to achieve what you want, and (2) is it just the work you hate or are you hoping for a different life in retirement? Are you hoping free time gives you the answers? It won’t.

If you pick up a financial magazine, they’ll tell you whether to get a Roth or a traditional IRA, and they’ll tell you why you need $1.8 mil socked away by age 56 to retire early. What they won’t tell you is that - if you look deep inside yourself - your idea of sailing the world might actually bore you to death when you do it at age 57, and maybe you would have enjoyed fishing with your kids a few weekends and working until 62 instead. Focusing on the end game all the time can be frustrating, demoralizing and ultimately self-defeating. Learning to enjoy the process is a better way to spend your money, time and effort.

photo by toolfan.hess

linklings, wanna be in the roundup? edition

I had a few things to say about health care, and the climate in the US this week, and about the state of the NFL’s Michael Vick. I wrote them all, deleted them all, and instead decided to share some music I like. Hope you like it, too. If not, hope you enjoy the links. By the way, when I’m putting together link roundups I usually ask for contributions on Twitter. Follow me and you could end up included in the next linklings!

  • How to Brew Your Own Beer and Maybe Even Save Some Money - Introduction: Mmmmm, beer.
  • Sun talks about lending with Lending Club: Lending Club Loan Portfolio Update
  • Madison points out the obvious: girl babies are more expensive than boy babies simply because the clothes are much cuter (I agree!): Life as a Family of Five
  • When to Take Two Pages on Your Resume: This has always bugged me. I have enough experience to fill up two pages on a resume… really. If you don’t have meaningful experience, one page is plenty, but if you can fill up two pages with good experiences, by all means do so.
  • Financial Regrets: This post speaks for itself.
  • Interesting MonaVie Story: Ugh. I shed a few man-tears myself.
  • stay at home mom or working mom? | the ¢entsible life: Wow. A very heart-felt post about balancing work and kids… which as anyone knows who has kids is a tough, tough question.
  • 20 Scam-Free Ways to Make Money Online Fast: I think #10 has great potential, honestly - I need to do that myself. I just can’t seem to get around to it. Great list of resources.

how much emergency fund is enough?

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The term “emergency fund” is misleading. Is a new tire for the car an emergency? Is a new TV, when your last good one dies? Most of us have a good idea what an emergency means when we consider the extreme case: a sick child, a roof with a gigantic hole allowing the rain to come in, a car that won’t start. When you get to the more “iffy” emergencies it gets a bit tougher. Is it an emergency when you need a new dryer? I mean, you COULD hang clothes out to dry for a while.

I’ve read many times that you should have $1000 in an emergency fund, or that you should establish a three month or six month or eight month emergency fund before investing. Should you start thinking about Roths versus traditional IRAs as soon as you have $1000 in an emergency fund? Should you even be thinking about paying down your credit card debt that quickly?

We just went through seven months of a “zero-income” household, although we did have a few sources of alternative income. Neither my wife nor I were working jobs or earning money in our fields, and although we had to tighten our belts to a small extent, we were able to live more or less normally the entire time. Why? Because we had an enormous “emergency fund”, equal to more than a year of expenses.

I know there are people who can live on the razor’s edge, dancing around on margin and leveraging their next income-generating venture. If you’re that type of person, more power to you. I’m not. I’ve been able to rest easy and take my “mini-retirement” thanks to saving whenever we could in our emergency fund. It’s a lifestyle choice, but I’d argue that if you’re the type of person who gets nervous when the money runs out, you’re better off having an adequate stash laid by when times are good. When times are bad, you won’t be sorry you have enough - or even more than enough - saved up.

The argument against this might be that you can’t build wealth by keeping your money in cash (or “almost cash”). You need to put that money to work. True - but nothing is more of an impediment to building wealth than hitting a hard patch that causes you to go back into debt. In this economy it can happen quickly, and the length of time without income can be extensive. Nothing would derail your future prosperity worse than going into debt during a sudden but protracted unemployment.

So think twice before accepting the idea that a three-month or six-month emergency fund is enough. It’s never really enough. I’d love to have a three or four YEAR emergency fund. Cash in the bank is, well, cash in the bank.

photo by Paul Keleher

there is no cost to good health

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One of the things I come back to again and again in my conversations with family, friends and colleagues is that there is no way to waste money on good health. Organic food can be pricey. A gym membership can be expensive compared to working out at home. Vitamins or medications can be burdensome. But if you can spend your money on one thing in this life, don’t let it be education, or your family, or your belongings. Spend it on health.

Warren Buffet is 78 and the second richest man on this blue dot. Do you think he’d be getting the accolades for wealth and investing acumen if he had died at 42? Maybe. Many rich people have died young. Many poor people have died old (and unlamented). Wealth and health have long been completely unrelated. I’m sure every one of us knows old poor people and young rich people, and the opposite, and many variations. But age has long been seen as a virtue, at least as valuable as wealth.

But the key question is: would you rather be old and moderately well to do, or die fabulously wealthy at a young age? I doubt many of us would wish to live a highroller lifestyle and die at 40 versus living a moderate middle-class lifestyle and dying at 80. Health is, in a sense, the ultimate prize.

If you consider a long life a valuable thing to pursue, it’s doubly amazing that so many people don’t bother. I pursued my career at the expense of my health for the best part of my twenties. I wasn’t thinking about life in my sixties - it was my money and I wanted it now. How many times have you told yourself that you’re just too busy at work to take some time to exercise?

I don’t exercise as much as I should. Four years ago I was running competitively, lifting weights 3-4 times per week and eating a 90% vegetarian diet - I was in the best shape of my life. But work, kids and life got in the way and I slid waaaaay back on the health scale. It’s easy to do, and if you’ve ever gotten in shape you know how simple it is to slide back. But that’s no excuse. Your health is the only thing - other than your mind - that you can control in this life.

Don’t neglect your health. I lost 100 pounds (actually a bit more) and it’s possible for anyone. Remember that your health is worth more than all the money in the world. Just ask someone who’s not healthy, and you’ll get a straight answer.

Photo by ~ggvic~

fear of money

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If I was going to search deep within my (financial) soul I’d admit that most of my money decisions are based on fear. Fear’s a negative word, and I don’t think that in this case my decision making is always a negative process. I am often quite happy with the result. A great example has been my investing philosophy. A little more than a year ago I got nervous about the direction the market was headed. I took about a third of my retirement accounts’ total out of the market and put it into cash. Good fear, right? That chunk of my retirement savings would have been wiped out.

But after a year, I’ve only redeployed about a quarter of that third. You could make the argument - and I do, to myself - that holding onto cash is a defensive position. Nothing about the current propped-up-through-stimulus-and-bailout money situation of the US economy should encourage a reasonable investor to get back in…should it? Yet again and again we’ve seen these market drops come back. So some of my reluctance is fear-based.

I’ve written about the reasons why I don’t talk about real estate investing. I said I don’t like “investing” in a primary residence, I don’t much about real estate or the business of real estate, and that the New York market - where I lived until recently - was too competitive. I should have added that it usually seems like BIG chunks of money are needed for real estate investing. Fear of investing in big chunks keeps me diversified in the stock market (index funds, right?) and keeps me afraid of real estate.

Fear of wasting money is good, certainly - but at least as far as investing goes, some fear and uncertainty are necessary to have any sort of reward. I’ve always dreaded a doomsday that seems unlikely to come - a final day with money and then a penniless dawn. It could happen, of course - but with the ability to make more money (which I have) and good health (which I hope to continue to have) and a supportive family, it seems that I won’t face that doomsday. So the fear is something more than trivial but also less than a doomsday event.

Does Warren Buffet fear loss? Probably not at this point - he’s old enough and seemingly content enough to be free of financial fear. Does Bernie Madoff? I guess now he will face his own doomsday now, and learn whether that fear should have been stronger. How do you control fear of money? Here are the things I try to do:

  1. Remember that money is infinite. YOU may not have infinite amounts of money, but there is a lot of it out there, if you can just figure out how to get it.
  2. You cannot anticipate every disaster, but you only need to anticipate one success. If you invest in a property, a billion things can go wrong - title problems, a fire, a sewage plant groundbreaking the day after you close, etc. etc. You can’t prepare for everything. Try to aim for success, not dodge failure.
  3. Fear comes from you. Fear is not an externally-caused reaction. Sure, we all get a jolt of adrenaline when we’re jumped by a cave bear, but you can control fear. It’s not like being poked with a stick, where you have a reaction determined by nerves and muscle reflexes. Fear is neurons firing off in your brain, and you can control your thoughts - they are the only thing in the world you CAN control.
  4. Doomsday may come, true… but let fear of that day go. I do sometimes worry about all of my index funds and various other investments going to zero… but as I’ve often told my friends and family, if my retirement portfolio, invested in index funds that span the US market, goes to nil we’ve got bigger problems that worrying about retirement. We’ll be reverting to a currency based on canned foods and shotgun shells. Worry about your 401(k)’s fees, or your consumer debt with 21% interest rates - things you can do something about. Don’t worry about the end of the world. If the aliens come, you’re not prepared anyway.

Fear of money - worrying about its scarcity, or its disappearance - can cripple you from making more and even more importantly from enjoying life.

Photo by DownTown Pictures

linklings, finally, again

I doubt they have been sorely missed, since link roundups are not always the most exciting parts of a blog’s weekly schedule, but I am finally back into the swing of roundups. Roundups are a little tougher than regular posts, simply because they do have to be created “real time” - you can’t create them weeks in advance. But I do appreciate being included in other blog’s roundups and I therefore feel I owe it to do the same.

I made a bad mistake in yesterday’s post -I should have thought that one out a bit more before posting it. That’s what you get for writing too quickly, before researching.

Our recent move has been a slight disappointment in one sense - I haven’t found that grocery store prices are much lower than they were in New Jersey. Prices are a little lower here and there, but not enough to reduce our bills any significant amount. I thought they might have been a bit lower. That’s really the only negative, so far. Otherwise, the change in our daily lifestyle - nice weather, pleasant surroundings, good public services (parks and libraries) couldn’t make for a more dramatic change.

Time sensitive contest: » Win a $100 Home Depot Gift Card for Father’s Day!

We’re Moving: Another one of The Money Writers gets ready to flee New Jersey…

How To Do a Mid-Year Financial Checkup - Things to Think About This Summer and Seven Ways to Save Money on Your Summer Family Trip: I don’t know about everyone else, but I can’t concentrate much on personal finance once summer comes. I am easily distracted by biking, wandering around outdoors and lazy evenings. I guess I’ll have to get over that now that I’m in Florida, won’t I?

Alternative Income Streams - June 2009: As always, interesting to take a peek at other people’s finances…

The Prepaid Funeral: Advantages & Disadvantages: And yikes, back down to earth. I have wondered about whether planning your own funeral is something we should do just as seriously as making a will or buying insurance.

Extreme Saving When You Are Young: How Much Is Too Much?: You have to live your life. Save 15%, 20% of your income but after that, please, spend. Just don’t spend it on “stuff” - spend it on a nice house, a life-altering trip overseas, your education, your kids. Don’t buy an iPhone or a Wii.

The One Thing that Makes a Winning Resume: I need to update mine. My resume is not nearly “punchy” enough. I have a lot of accomplishments in it that are weakly described as “led implementation of…” etc.

Can Stock Trading Software Make You Money? versus Stock Market Technical Analysis - Loads Of Bull Crap And Bear Crap. If you want to judge for yourself, try 4 FREE Videos for INO TV by clicking here. That’s an affiliate link, by the way. INO’s an interesting site, particularly if you’re a blogger or interested in stock trading.

Readers Share Lending Club Returns: I have been a proponent of P2P lending for a while and Prosper (where I was a writer for their blog) and Lending Club in particular. I’m not sure where P2P lending is going, but I think they are a definite investing niche for investors who want to diversify.

And finally, another great article from one of my favorite blogs: How to spend very little money. I can’t say I always think the same way - I do spend money on things. I bought a bike trailer for my kids, for example.

linklings, countdown now edition

This week Bubelah and I have been furiously packing. You never know how much stuff you have until you try to organize it and put it in boxes. Another challenge is trying to decide whether or not to - for example - throw out an old bathroom mat. You’ll need it, of course, but it’s just one more thing, and it’s old. At least for now we’ve decided to go with the take-everything-possible theory, in order to minimize the amount of new stuff we’ll need to buy immediately.

But since we’re moving this week, don’t expect roundups for a week or two. I’ll keep the posts coming, but the “real time” updates like these will have to wait. I was trying to decide whether moving or having a baby was more disruptive, and I think moving is!

On to the links:

Some dry reading, but worth checking out if you’re looking for a federal job: Government Careers - Applying for Federal and Security-Related Jobs.

Save Money by Turning Off Your Television?: We have canceled satellite altogether this week. We have digital TV (broadcast) and Netflix, and that’s it. I have to be honest - signal quality is fine, we were already down to basic satellite so we didn’t lose much (mainly Nickelodeon and the Food Network) and Netflix is the only TV I really care about watching, anyway. It’s not the point of this article - it’s more about how you will be more successful and wealthy without watching TV - but we’ll see how our experiment in satellite/cable-less life helps us.

How To Save Money - The 1,001 List Of Money Saving Tips And Ideas: A huge list of money-saving tips, and unlike Wisebread’s new book (which, don’t get me wrong, seems like a good idea although I haven’t read it), it’s free!

Credit Card Rewards Programs Illusion Myth: Mr. ToughMoneyLove, who had a few harsh words for me about my post on credit card rewards (see his comment here) has his own opinion. I disagree with it, but see what you think about his take on it.

You can have whatever you like…

And some other articles I enjoyed:

photo credit: roland

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