Today’s post comes courtesy of a blogging friend I met a few years ago at FinCon in San Diego. At the time, she was anonymous, working in politics (I’m sure you can understand the need for anonymity!), but well on her way to early retirement (another good reason to remain hidden!). In the couple years […]
6 Ways to Give to Charity Without Donating Money
As we near the end of the year, charities will make their big fourth quarter push to drum up contributions. Many folks think about donations near the end of the year because it’s a charitable time around the holidays. It’s also the last time you can make a donation and deduct it from your taxes. […]
How I Balance My Career with Raising Children
Today’s article comes courtesy of Doria Lavagnino, co-founder of CentSai.com, an educational website that looks to teach personal finance through storytelling. As our kids are getting older, I’ve always wondered how we could best juggle our careers and their needs. When I was working at Northrop Grumman, I remember one of the executives left his […]
What are the Federal Poverty Level Guidelines?
I grew up with a relatively privileged upbringing in the 1980s. We were what I still consider solidly middle class. My parents owned a single-family home in the suburbs on Long Island, my dad had a stable white collar job, my mom also worked part-time while we weren’t in school, we never worried about food […]
7 Lessons I Learned About Money & Life from Chess
When I was younger, I remembering playing chess with my dad and always losing. I didn’t play a lot and I was never more than a casual player. Starting around Thanksgiving of last year, I started playing online a little bit more. I’m somewhere around a 1200 on Chess.com (15/10 time controls), which puts me […]
Stealth Wealth: Why True Wealth is Best Kept to Yourself
When I read The Millionaire Next Door by William Stanley, I was amazed at how many millionaires lived in plain sight. If you think about popular exposure to wealth – it’s pretty flashy. We’re trained, by television and social media, to think that millionaires live a life of excess. Big mansions, expensive cars, lots of […]
These 5 Research Studies Will Forever Change The Way You Spend Money
For nearly ten years, we do the same exact thing every New Year’s Eve – we rent a large vacation house with our friends. It started as a reunion of sorts and, as each of our families grew, evolved into a four-day vacation rental. The first year we rented a house that had just four […]
Best FIRE (Financial Independence, Early Retirement) Blogs You Shouldn’t Miss
Behind every mainstream story about a couple retiring in their 30s and traveling the world is a story of struggle, sacrifice, and smart trade-offs. The idea that you could retire early, that is to say before you were in your 60s, has been around for centuries. This History of F.I.R.E. published on Rockstar Finance is […]
12 Clever Places to Donate Your Used Old Books
If you’re like me, you know there’s nothing quite like cracking open a book. For decades us bookworms have amassed impressive collections of books to expand our small slice of the world. However, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with books. I used to have an entire room in my house just for my books. It […]
How to Maximize Chase Ultimate Rewards (2019)
Ask a lot of travel hackers for the best rewards program and they will likely all say the same – Chase Ultimate Rewards. (for what it’s worth, I’m not a travel hacker, I just play a bad one on the internet) I wanted to see what the hype was and I got the Chase Ink […]