.How to Make Better Financial Decisions

By Barbara O’Neill on 1 November 2020

A key financial decision people struggle to make is how to allocate savings for multiple financial goals. Do you save for several goals at the same time or fund them one-by-one in a series of steps? Basically, there are two ways to approach financial goal-setting:

Concurrently: Saving for two or more financial goals at the same time.

Sequentially: Saving for one financial goal at a time in a series of steps.

Each method has its pros and cons. Here's how to decide which method is best for you.

.9 Money Hacks That Took Us From The Poorhouse To The Penthouse

By Mad Money Monster

You might not believe it, but not too long ago (think: a few years) we weren’t prioritizing our finances at all. In fact, not only were we not prioritizing our finances, we were spending money like we had an unlimited supply. Going out to eat a few times a week, spending whenever we felt like it, and dropping $150/month on cable was the norm.

That all changed when we nearly committed financial suicide by buying a house we couldn’t comfortably afford. After pulling our heads out of our butts, we decided we needed a financial reboot. So that’s exactly what we did. Here are 9 money hacks we adopted that are changing the course of our financial future!

1. Tracking Our Net Worth

Tracking our net worth was something we never did before committing to frugality and financial independence. Much to our surprise, tracking our net worth has been our single biggest motivator on this journey.

Growing Up Poor Was My Single Biggest Financial Motivator

By Mad Money Monster

It’s certainly no secret that I grew up poor. And when I say poor, I’m talking 8′ x 50′ trailer livin’ poor. Although I must admit, despite being poor, I never had to worry about having enough food or our home being warm in the winter. So, things could’ve been much worse. For all intents and purposes, though, my family was poor. I was poor. And THAT turned out to be my single biggest financial motivator.

It’s not every day that someone attributes growing up poor to financial success later in life. For me, I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt, that growing up poor had a positive impact on my childhood outlook that lasted long into my adult life…and continues to this day. Growing up in a trailer on the right side of the tracks afforded me some advantages that others in similar situations did not receive. I will own that and admit to it.

.Master Money And Investing 101: Creating Ninja Wealth

By Billy B | Invest, Money

I remember when I used to feel inadequate about money and investing. I felt like I was floating in the middle of a dangerous ocean, with no wind in my sails, and I lost my direction home.

It was a helpless, scary feeling to know almost nothing about how to start investing, because I desperately wanted to master money, but I didn’t know where to start learning how to invest.

I always imagined life would be easier if I understood how to invest, and create money from money, but getting that knowledge felt so elusive. It felt like financial wisdom was reserved for a select club. Unless you were born into that club, or went to school for years to learn it, you’d forever be struggling money, while the few people who did understand money and investing would be passionately living their dream lives.

.7 Wealth Building Tips Learned From Football

By Billy B Mind, Money

I fell in love with NFL football 15 years ago, and it has inspired me in many ways on how to build wealth. Once I understood the mentality, strategy, and toughness it takes to win games on Sundays, I was hooked. A football game is much more than mindless buffalo-sized men running into each other. It is a beautiful chess match with human beings that move like coordinated pieces. Building wealth, like football, is a thinking person’s game. Here are seven secret wealth building tips I have found hidden inside the game of football:

1) Wealth Building Tip #1: Be Patient: Life is long. It’s Ok to make mistakes, and it takes a lot of plays to win the game and build your wealth. There are 60 minutes in a football game, and there’s 60+ years in a normal life. You don’t have to win or be perfect in the first quarter or half to win. Great football teams and players take their time, feel out the challenges that are coming at them, and then when they know what they’re doing, they strike to put points on the board.

.Inheritance Disputes: Avoiding The War When There’s A Will

By William Cowie | Published: 01 December 2015 – Updated: 20 October 2019

The holidays are upon us. It's the time of the year when family moves from the shadows of a busy life to the foreground. That probably makes it as good a time as any to consider one of the most difficult topics to discuss pertaining to family and finances — the subject of inheritances. Nobody wants to talk about it because it is inextricably linked with, well, death. Someone has to die for an inheritance to come about, and none of us enjoys looking a loved one in the eye and saying, “Hey loved one, you are going to go the way of all flesh soon, so can we talk about what you are going to leave behind?”

How Family Disputes Over Inheritances Arise

When a dispute arises over an inheritance, it can help to recognize some of the issues that might be contributing to the problem developing between family members — and there are a number of things to consider:

.Year-End Financial Review and Planning Checklist

By Women Who Money Co-Founders, Amy Blacklock and Vicki Cook

As the weather turns colder and the daylight becomes shorter, you may be busy planning for the holiday season. But something else worth focusing your attention on during this season is your finances. Like your physical health, your financial health needs a check-up at least annually.

Before the year that’s been like no other winds down, take some time to check in on your financial matters.

Review the important items listed below to maintain or improve your financial wellness for the next year and beyond.

.How Your Expectations Destroy Your Finances

By A Lawyer and Her Money October 6, 2020

Being bad at math is often used as an excuse to be bad with money. Never mind that one still needs to learn about and manage one’s own finances. Still, no matter how badly one’s math grades were – money is not about math; it’s about emotions and expectations. This is how expectations destroy finances.

How to Be Good at Math and Bad with Money

We equate being good with money with being good with math because there are numbers involved. But with online calculators, banking and Excel, it’s no longer necessary to do one’s own addition or subtraction.

Even if you don’t do the calculations, your bank will tell you if you’ve spent more money than you have. And if you spent too much, you don’t need math to keep you from spending more.

The problem is not knowing when the math doesn’t work out – it’s continuing to spend more than you can afford to. This is not a problem that can be solved with basic algebra.

.The Number You Can Afford to Lose

By A Lawyer and Her Money December 1, 2020

My family got a $70 parking ticket on vacation in Canada. When she saw the ticket, my mom started cursing, yelling, and crying. This was shocking both because my mother has never been an emotionally effusive person and also because my parents are quite comfortable financially, having lived frugally their whole lives. This $70 fine was a number she could afford to lose with no repercussions and yet she acted as if it was a life-changing disaster.

The only thing that calmed her down was assuring her that Canadian police were unlikely to enforce the ticket (sorry, Canada). Still, the whole experience got me thinking, what’s the point in having money if you don’t feel the wealth emotionally? And how can you finally get that feeling of financial security?

.Why So Much Financial Advice is Wrong

By A Lawyer and Her Money November 10, 2020

The internet is a strange and fascinating place. There is a wealth of information, but not all of it good. Lots of people write content just to sell you stuff. And others are just idiots.

Even good-hearted people trying to impart knowledge can only speak from their own experience. The decisions they made were “good decisions” because they worked out. That, however, doesn’t mean you can or should make the same decisions now that they made in the past.

As much as personal finance bloggers like to say that the path to riches is simple and straightforward, personal finance is personal. Most financial advice is wrong because it fails to take into account how different each person’s situation is and how fast the world is changing. No one’s experience is universal, and the lessons that worked for one person may work for others, but they also might not.