Living for today - Planning for Tomorrow
Babysitting can easily be one of the biggest expenses of any parent’s budget. In fact, when I read other people’s budget reports I often see babysitting costing more than mortgage or rent. That’s an insane amount of money! While I would personally NEVER put a price on the well-being of my child I’ve managed to keep my babysitting costs reasonably low and couldn’t have asked
I first started using ING Direct (now Capital One 360) years ago and was smitten with the fact that I had the ability to easily create and name multiple savings account. Five years later I’m still dividing up my savings account to help me stay on track with my financial goals. If you’re new to the idea of using multiple savings account here are the
Has anyone else caught the Spring cleaning bug yet? While I’ve been walking around whipping my house into shape, one place I haven’t wanted to touch is the enormous stacks of papers lying in my office drawers. But, if I don’t get it dealt with now I can only imagine what I’m going to have to deal with in just a few months’ time. In
We talk about frugal living often on ELYM. But frugal living without a purpose is pretty pointless. So today I wanted to go over three benefits of frugal living and the ways it’s helped to improve my life (plus two drawbacks). You’ll Have Less Stress When you make the conscious choice to live frugally and spend less than you earn you’ll naturally have less stress.
If you’re at the point in your life where you’re living paycheck to paycheck or just want to save and invest at a faster speed there are certain expenses you can lower or eliminate that will have a huge impact. Sure, skipping your morning coffee will save you a few bucks but if you really want to improve your financial health fast here are the
I am a firm believer that there is no one right way to manage money. We’re all in different stages of our life and we all have different personal preferences. What works for me might not work for you and vice-versa. That’s the way it should be. You should experiment with your money management systems until you find what you like and find something that
As I think back over my last couple of years it’s pretty incredible how far I’ve come. I remember in my early twenties working a low paying office job and thinking that I’d never earn more than $2,000 a month. Where I live there really are no high paying jobs. As far as flexibility and pay, I was doing okay compared to others in my
I’m a believer that when it comes to personal finance you need to look at both sides of the equation: income and expenses. But before you focus too much of your time on income you first need to make sure that you have your spending in line. After all, if you spend every penny you earn then you’re never going to be able to save
After calculating my new two person budget I realized that combined we would be socking away 47% of our income on a bad month and even more on the months where we earn more than average. The good news was that we will able to do this at a quite comfortable spending level. (Note that I’m not talking about spending ungodly amounts of money on
Just in case you didn’t know I got married a couple weeks ago! It was something I had been thinking about for a while but wanted to feel one hundred percent confident about when I did. So I did it on a whim when I felt ready. Jamie and I went and bought a marriage certificate and had my old boss make it official for
