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For the self-employed, it can be tempting to forget some of the basics associated with long-term financial planning.
When you’re trying to get your business off the ground, you’re more interested in the day-to-day of survival. You do, however, still need to remember to prepare for the future with retirement planning.
After all, even as a self-employed business owner, chances are you’ll want to retire at some point — or at least cut back on your heavy involvement with the business.
Here are three retirement-saving tips for the self-employed:
Get Started Now
The #1 rule of retirement planning (or any investing, for that matter) is to get started now. Even if you don’t feel like you have “enough” money to get started, you should begin investing in a retirement account. [ continue reading… ]
Pricing yard sale items can be hard. You want to get rid of your junk — but at the same time, you want to turn a profit. After all, who wants to give up their entire weekend to make a grand total of 30 bucks? Not me.
If you’re successful at decluttering your home and have enough items to make your sale worth it, you should be able to come out with at least a few hundred dollars.
The key is to price your items to sell. Here are three strategies that have worked for me: [ continue reading… ]
My very first job was working at a little mom-and-pop bagel shop in suburban Baltimore. I was 15, and I was thrilled to be earning a dollar more than the then-minimum wage of $4.25. Over that summer of 1994, I worked just over 30 hours a week making bagel sandwiches, wiping down tables, and running a cash register.
Something I learned early on, however, was that the mom and pop who owned the bagel shop were not sweet and cuddly. They paid the teenagers who worked there a decent wage, and generally treated them well. But the adult employees — the ones I thought of as lifers, because they depended on their paychecks to live — faced Pop’s consistently bad temper and worked for just about the same amount of money as the kids did.
This was an important early economics lesson for me: when you have a captive workforce, it’s easier to get away with treating them poorly. [ continue reading… ]
Wedding registries are the modern way to give newlyweds exactly what they want. Couples scan their homemaking wishlists into a virtual catalog, from which guests can purchase specific items as a token of congratulations.
Though this process is a staple of the modern American wedding, a promising new trend is gaining popularity: financial gift registries.
The Rise in Financial Gift Registries
I’m not merely talking about a gift of money slipped into a card, intended for use on some household purchase or honeymoon expense. These types of registries are designed to appropriate donations towards the couple’s financial planning goals, instead of current needs or wants. [ continue reading… ]
Last weekend, my wife and I stopped by the local Costco to renew our membership, which expired at the end of March. As expected, they asked us if we wanted the Goldstar Membership for $55, or the Elite Membership for $110, with which members get 2% cash back on purchases.
The customer service representative sensed our hesitation, and reminded us that if we didn’t earn the $55 price difference in cash back rewards, Costco would make up the difference themselves. That’s what happened last year, as we only earned $23 in rewards.
With this guarantee in place, as long as you follow through on getting a refund, there’s no way you could lose money on the upgraded membership.
We signed up for the Elite membership, and are determined to make it work in our favor this time. In order to just break even and earn $55 in rewards, we’d have to spend $2,750 at Costco in the next year. That works out to $230 per month, or about one third of our overall budget for groceries and household items.
The key is to buy things at Costco we’ve been buying elsewhere — not to increase our overall spending. [ continue reading… ]
My least favorite part of shopping is going to the cash register. I hate the sinking feeling in my gut that I get when my items are totaled and tax is applied.
Did I really spend that much? Yes, the numbers don’t lie.
As I’m shopping, I have a rough idea of what I’m spending, but somehow it always becomes much more when it’s accurately totaled. This is partially the fault of my falling for retail pricing tactics. [ continue reading… ]
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