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When my in-laws moved to a different state, the real challenge came when we cleaned out their garage and started minimizing stuff for the move. “Where do you want me to start,” I asked my mother-in-law while looking at her very packed garage.
She thought for a while and spent a good ten minutes telling what not to touch. I couldn’t touch those vintage items because she was going to get appraised. I couldn’t touch those boxes because my father-in-law needed to do through them. Opening up a cedar chest sent her into a huge sidetrack of memories as she looked at her grandmother’s wedding items. She could surely never part with those.
It’s been a few months since that day, and even though my in-laws made the move, the garage still looks the same. They were able to keep their items stored in the garage while renting out the rooms in the home.
Does this scene sound familiar to you? If you’ve ever tried to help someone with a lot of stuff (aka a hoarder), then you know how hard it is to actually get anything done. Everything they own has potential value or sentiment, yet no progress is ever truly made on what items get sold or donated.
If you’re guilty of this, or know someone who is, here are some easy steps to take to overcome your hoarding habits.
One of the most important things you can do is to save enough for retirement. Unfortunately, many Americans aren’t saving anything for their future.
According to a survey from GoBankingRates.com, it looks as though about one in three Americans has absolutely nothing in their nest egg. This is a concerning number since it indicates that many people aren’t preparing for their financial future.
Here are the results of the survey, indicating how much money the respondents say they have saved for retirement:
Many times when people ask me what I do, I get mixed responses when I explain that I’m a stay-at-home mom. Some people are a little put off by it (which is totally fine), while others look at me as if I have stumbled upon this lucky coin in life. “I wish I could stay at home with my babies too, but we need my income”, is usually the response I hear.
For some individuals, staying at home is not a choice because they do need the extra income. However, when another mom tells me how lucky I am, I can’t help notice that they have a nice iPhone, new and trendy clothes, as well as a pricey SUV. None of these things are bad, but my point is that staying at home and living on one income does require a bit of sacrifice. That lucky coin is not be attributed to luck after-all.
Here are the two questions I asked myself when I wanted to stay at home with my kids, and still make sure the bills were paid.
When I first became interested in personal finance, I felt as though I was learning a new language. I started learning new terms related to budgeting, saving, paying off debt, and investing.
I learned the difference between the snowball and avalanche methods for debt repayment, I became educated on the various complexities, terms, and abbreviations that come along with investing, and have at least two or three methods of budgeting under my belt (my favorite is the zero-sum budget, which gives every dollar a job).
A few months after I started my unofficial education, I started seeing another foreign term being thrown around: FIRE.
Have you ever wondered about this but don’t know how to go about it? Here is some help that the folks at GoBankingRates help put together. The first chart assumes that you will be withdrawing $100,000 every year in today’s dollars, and that inflation will be 2.5% (that’s why the later you retire, the more you actually need because if you wait till next year to start withdrawing, you will need $102,500 to have the same purchasing power).
Everyone seems strapped for time these days. And a lot of us are also strapped for cash. With so many responsibilities to manage, it can be hard to find time to make budget cuts and save money.
If you’re running low on time and money, you’ll definitely want to check out these tips that you can implement in five minutes or less.
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