I used to be a McDonalds junkie. According to the video “Super Size Me“, McDonalds would have considered me a heavy-consumer, frequenting a McDonalds restaurant more than 3 times a month. Fortunately for my budget (and health!) I’ve reduced my eating out habit to almost nil. One of the most common budget-breakers is eating out too often. This occurs for a number of reasons.

• We make ourselves so busy, we can’t (or won’t) find the time to prepare a quality meal.
• We don’t grocery shop and meal plan very well so we end up with lots of the same thing night after night. Eventually we get same-meal fatigue and want to eat-out for variety.
• We are either too tired or lazy to prepare a meal. Even if we have the time, we’d rather watch TV, or do a myriad of other things. More…

Last year, an unexpected complication happened in my wife’s pregnancy which ended up with her hospitalized for 2.5 months and I had to take an unpaid leave from work to care for my other children. That left us with no income, living off our savings for that time. Luckily it all turned out well in the end, but while it was happening, we were fortunate to not have to worry much about the finances, because we’d heeded counsel to have a “rainy day” or emergency fund. We kept about $4000 in this account, which we had saved over a period of a few years, along with our regular retirement savings. More…

Good question. Having just grappled with this, let me share some pointers.

Being an entrepreneur, especially starting out, is challenging. Much has been written about startups. This blog entry is about how to afford it.

Chances are you are a bright, self-moivated individual, working for some large corporation or a mid-sized company, earning a reliable paycheck, but frustrated. You are frustrated because you don’t have enough time to focus on your own business ideas and you just can’t build momentum with your full-time job taking so much time. Furthermore, you are noticing that management in your full-time job are not as competent as you once thought and this too is frustrating you, making you start to dislike your job.

More…

Answer: It depends.

If you have extra money, reducing your debt is a great idea for several reasons.

1. You never know if interest rates will go up and thus your mortgage payments may become unmanageable.
2. Having no debt is one of the nicest, freest feelings available. You will be much happier.

There are several ways to do this. More…

A short, 4 minute video describing CalendarBudget’s features has been posted and is available from the main CalendarBudget homepage.

Demo Video

I was excited to hear recently, that with my modest savings of $65,000, that I’ll have 1 million dollars in 36 years (without saving anything else). Thank you compound interest and the rule of 72!

For those needing a refresher on the rule of 72 (or if you’ve never heard of it), it goes like this. Take the interest rate you are getting on your savings (investment) and divide it into 72. The result is the number of years it takes for your money to double in size.

More…