Finance

RANT: Our Personal Finance “soft-lies”

The folks over at Our Next Life recently posted an article entitled "The Retirement Lie."  As with most of their articles, I found that it paralleled a lot [...]

5 Reasons to Payoff Your Mortgage Early

Before I get into my reasoning for early mortgage payoff, let's talk a minute about the view from the other side.  This is an age-old argument - probably [...]

Investing – Where Your Extra Money Should Go

So, you've gotten out of debt (hurray!) and, in doing so, created a budget.  Now what do you do with all of this extra money that is no longer going to things [...]

Middle Class on FIRE

The folks over at OurNextLife (a fantastic blog on the topic of Financial Independence / Retire Early ("FIRE") issued an interesting challenge recently that [...]

Why the Thought of Not Being Middle Class Scares Me to Death (and Should Scare You Too!)

I've shared before that some of my biggest financial mistakes of my 20s were not budgeting, becoming comfortable with debt and not saving.  It turns out, this [...]

Good Health, Sports and Personal Finance

Okay, this may be one analogy too many, but stick with me here..... Good Health = Diet and Exercise My exercise of choice is running.  When you run [...]

Personal Finance Basics – Part 1: Reading Your Paystub

This is Part 1 in my Personal Finance Basics series. It doesn't get much more basic than understanding the numbers on your paystub.  It's amazing how much [...]

Trial By Fire / On-the-Job Training – How We Learn Personal Finance

In the preceding post, I shared my thoughts around the Trial By Fire / On-the-Job Training that is how we learn parenting.  Despite how monumentally [...]

Debt: How to get out (9 Steps) and STAY OUT!

Debt. Is there a more foul four-letter-word for us in the middle class? Soul-crushing, marriage-ruining, ulcer-inducing DEBT. Debt is your enemy and [...]

Defining “Middle Class” and How to Get There!

Let me get this out of the way first: If you choose to define middle class by income level, most guidelines returned by Uncle Google will indicate that I moved [...]