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Did you know that your great grandfather could’ve turned $3,000 into a $41 million family estate if he just stayed invested in either the Dow Jones Industrial Average or S&P 500 since 1920? I read a fascinating piece recently from Barron’s as part of their celebration of the publication turning 100 years old. They dug into past history and found that both market indices returned about 10% a year in the past decade. If one were to be invested in the US market this whole time, a very respectable $3,000 at the time would turn into a very admirable sum of $41 million by the end of 2020.
And you didn’t have to lift a finger to build the wealth either. You didn’t need to work. You didn’t need to build a business. You didn’t need to pick the right stocks, nor did you even need to foresee and invest in disrupting companies in advance. Just good old buy and hold.
If only… right? Hindsight is obviously 20/20. As they say in the world of investing, “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Still, the good news is that you can learn quite a bit from looking at what’s happened in the past. Here are a few golden nuggets that stick out. [ continue reading… ]
There’s no denying that men and women often view financial planning from different perspectives. The reasons are varied – everything from cultural expectations to practical considerations. And while most financial advice isn’t gender-specific, it’s clear that ignoring the differences between how men and women plan for their financial futures can put women at a disadvantage. After all, most financial advice being circulated are written by men and therefore often reflect their perspective of how to best tackle the issue.
Here are three money issues that often affect women, and how you can work around them:
1. Women live longer and tend to make less money
The pay gap between men and women has been news for what seems like forever. It’s disheartening, to say the least, that women still earn about 20% less than men do for the same job. This means women are already at a financial disadvantage in planning for retirement, as they have less money to put aside. [ continue reading… ]
January can sometimes be a very gloomy month. Aside from frigid temperatures and unpredictable weather, another reason this month might not be going so great for you is because of all the spending you did last month.
Overspending during the holidays can really make it difficult on the budget, especially as you try to forge ahead into the new year. The holidays are stressful enough financially and it can be even more challenging if they didn’t go as planned. While you can’t change anything now, you can create a plan to help you bounce back and recover from a blown holiday budget.
Understand How Much You Spent
First, you need to understand how much damage was done. Look at your holiday spending in totality: how much did you spend and on what? How much of it did you pay in full already? How much did you charge on credit cards? Can you pay off your upcoming credit card bill in full? You want to know exactly how much was spent and in what categories. This will help you devise a plan to tackle whatever debt is left over and also help you plan for next year. [ continue reading… ]
That’s what I thought when my kids opened the gift they got this past Christmas.
You see, my friend gave us two puzzles as presents. A 1,000 piece monster for my 11-year-old, and a 500 piece head-scratcher for my 8-year-old. My kids opened the boxes right away, spreading all 1,500 pieces all over the house. Meanwhile, I was at the back looking like Albert Einstein because my hair started graying out immediately from the thought of having to finish the two massive dilemmas that have invaded my living room and also from me starting to pull all my hair out.
Luckily, my kids couldn’t care less about what I looked or felt like. They started plugging away, fitting each piece in willy-nilly. The approach they took was far from the most efficient, but they were making progress. It certainly beats good old dad at the back with the paralyze-in-fear approach.
Without doing anything special, my kids were reminding me about the power of getting started. It reminded me of my own journey to financial freedom. It reminded me about this very site, MoneyNing.com. When I first started on the road to be financially independent, I was far from an expert in personal finance. All I knew was that I wanted to build wealth. All I knew was that I needed to save and make more money. I didn’t know about index funds, tax-loss harvesting, or Roth conversions. It didn’t matter that nothing I was doing was efficient because I was spending less than I make. I was saving. I was making progress. [ continue reading… ]
Many of us couldn’t wait for the past year to be over. And now that a new year is finally underway, it’s time to figure out how to make it great.
One of the best ways to improve your life and your finances is to invest. And you aren’t limited to investing in order to further your finances either. You can invest your money, but you can also invest in yourself. Here are some of the best ways to invest in the new year:
1. Boost Your Retirement Account Contribution
One of the best ways to invest is to boost your retirement contribution. That’s money that will grow for you over time. It’s even better if you work for a company that offers an employer match. In those cases, you get free money to invest.
If you have room to increase your retirement account contribution, do so. This is true even if it’s just by a few dollars every paycheck because getting into the habit of improvement will help you be able to increase the contributions even more down the road.
I know of some people who are already putting in as much as they could in a Roth IRA this year because they want their money to grow tax-free for as long as it’s possibly allowed to grow. How about you? How long do you plan to wait and miss out on tax-free growth for life? [ continue reading… ]
It’s 2021 and the new year is staring at you right in the face. You probably have a few unfulfilled new year resolutions from the past year but no matter, 2020 has been crazy, long gone, and there is no better time to get things done than right now.
I was just going through the motions of working the 9 to 5 a few years ago. Though my work seemed to have exceeded all peer expectations, my career was unfulfilling. Merely showing up provided me a challenge but it really provided me with little more than the biweekly paycheck. As one of my coworkers told me at the time – “You are just wasting your time”. Coming out of graduate school, I didn’t quite know what it meant, but I knew I wanted to change.
When I first started MoneyNing, I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was going to write about, let alone the fact that it could turn into a business. It didn’t matter though, because learning about building a website and connecting with readers was exciting, challenging, and most of all, fun. By then, I was in sales and traveling across the country every week, but the lack of time (or sleep) didn’t seem to hurt my productivity. Because I was motivated to get things done, I could work anywhere, at all hours of the day. [ continue reading… ]
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