Budget Blog

I have a treadmill that most often is our largest and most expensive clothes hanger. However, I do get into spurts of desire to get in shape again and use it. Here' s what it teaches me about money: Owning a treadmill makes me feel like I am doing something about my health, but if I don't use it, it's no use. Only regular, consistent use of the treadmill will keep me in shape. Same goes for your budget. If I turn on the treadmill and it automatically goes.. it does me NO GOOD unless I get on and use it. [...]

Much concern has been raised by consumers about online bank security risks - specifically using 3rd party money aggregators, such as Mint.com and Yodlee, which automatically connect to your bank and try to track all for your accounts in one place. People are asking questions like, "is mint.com safe?" If we ignore the reliability issues (which are many) and look only at the security concerns, here's the problem in a nutshell: When you sign up for one of these services, you have to give them your online banking username and password (credentials) so they can go and collect the information [...]

One of the benefits of signing up with CalendarBudget is that it makes creating a spending plan and sticking to it a part of your daily routine. How does it accomplish this? With the revolutionary Habit Installer system, a series of 21 short videos and tutorials sent to your inbox every day for three weeks. My wife Debra and I used to blame the economy, our age, or our lack of effort for our failure to create a workable spending plan. None of these factors was the main cause of our lack of results. Instead, we had to shift how [...]

Years ago, my wife and I came to the conclusion that slow and steady is probably the best bet when it comes to formulating a spending plan that will allow us to build wealth and riches. It takes consistency and learning to have a truly good wealth building system to fund retirement, especially one that’s going to be as spectacular as ours, and we want to make our funds last (in case we live to be 100) Below are some of the reasons why getting rich slowly is the better bet: It enables us to have cash available for when [...]

My family consists of five persons: my wife and I, and our three children. When the financial crisis hit us, and we ended up “upside down” on our home mortgage, we knew we had to create a spending plan that included low-cost but nutritious food. We quickly found out that feeding our family on a budget would call for proper groundwork and restraint (on my wife’s part). Fortunately, I received some good advice from other dads who are feeding their families on $100, $50, and as low as $45 per week. I’m happy to share these ideas with you! 3 Tips [...]

Owning a house has become cheaper than renting in twelve major cities, including Orlando, Miami, Chicago and Atlanta, now that interest rates are floating around the 4% mark on a 30-year fixed mortgage. “Home prices and mortgage rates have fallen so far that the monthly cost of owning a home is more affordable than at any point in the past fifteen years and is less expensive than renting in a growing number of cities,” states the Wall Street Journal. Should you include owning a home in your spending plan for the near future? Here are the questions we asked ourselves when we [...]

Since February 1, the typical cost of regular gasoline has leaped by 28.5 cents to $3.76 a gallon across the country, and already tops $4 in some markets. Could $5 gas be looming in the future? My wife and I are already using budgeting software programs to trim our spending, and so I thought it would make sense to find ways to cut back on gas consumption, so we can have the best of both worlds. My research turned up a lot of ways to make the rising cost of gas fit into our spending plan. I’m happy to share some [...]

Just this Thursday I read that nearly 250 students from a high school in Newark, NJ were to have a mentoring experience with 57 employees from the Verizon Leadership Development Program. These employees were to share their life experiences and discuss various topics with the students. The topic that caught my attention was financial budgeting. My happy-go-lucky fourteen-year-old does not know a thing about creating a spending plan or living within a budget. And so I decided to do some research, and come up with three different ways to teach my teen about using a budget planner to live within [...]

Your response to money is mainly determined by your personality, like nearly everything else in life. But have you given much consideration to how you act in regard to your finances and what effect those actions have on your bottom line? Money personalities have been examined in various ways and a lot of people can relate to aspects of quite a few profiles. What’s your money personality? Read on to find out: Spendthrift: openhanded, impulsive and fun-loving, you don’t even know what a spending plan is. You don’t let money fears hold you back from living your life. You consequently have [...]

With typical expenditure projected to increase over 8 percent to almost $200, the Toronto Sun anticipates romantics will be spending more this year to purchase gift cards, flowers, and chocolates on Valentine’s Day. And together with these increasing costs, four million people in the US are likely to ask someone to marry them or be proposed to on 14 Feb. About half of the consumers that were surveyed plan to buy Valentine’s Day gifts this year, and 46 percent plan to eat at their favorite restaurant to commemorate the holiday. Business Wire reports that Sonali Chakravorti, Vice President at American [...]