Weekly roundup of recommended personal finance articles from around the web. Stop asking whether money buys happiness (The Atlantic). Does more money bring more happiness? It’s complicated. How to know if a rental property is a good investment (The Long Game). A good starting point for an objective evaluation. Do I need to re-visit my […]
Archive | Investing
Getting Started With Investing
For help determining how much you may need for your retirement, figuring out your optimal asset allocation, adopting the best process for choosing investments, and choosing among your IRA and 401(K) options, read The Essentials of Investing. For college funding, read How to Help Your Kids Pay for College.
Teaching Kids About Money By Keeping It Real
Wise money management is one of the most important subjects typically not taught in school. And unfortunately, where it is being taught, such efforts have generated mixed results at best. The issue seems to be that classroom teaching is too abstract. There’s too much lecturing and too little letting kids do real things with real […]
Profitable Ideas: How Money Breaks Marriages, One Good Reason to Buy a House, and More
Weekly roundup of recommended personal finance articles from around the web. Money can break a marriage, even getting more of it (Wall Street Journal). Money and marriage — it can get messy. No easy answers here, but it helps to talk openly about money and maintain complete financial transparency. So much to like (Humble Dollar). […]
Profitable Ideas: Determining Whether Your Money is Safe, Bend it Like Buffett, and More
Weekly roundup of recommended personal finance articles from around the web. How to tell whether your money is safe in the bank (Lifehacker). I especially like the idea of setting up a news alert to track any articles about your bank. For example, see also, 20 banks that are sitting on huge potential securities losses […]
Profitable Ideas: Logging Off, Making Your Last Smart Money Move Now, and More
Weekly roundup of recommended personal finance articles from around the web. How to log off (MIT Technology Review). To a great degree, social media is a distraction and discouragement—for us and our kids. See also, How to stop mindless scrolling (Business Insider). Too many employees cash out their 401(k)s when leaving a job (Harvard Business […]
Four “Blind Spots” To Watch Out For When Investing
Ignorance definitely isn’t bliss when it comes to your investments, and yet we all seem to be hard-wired with blind spots, or as psychologists call them, behavioral biases. Here are some of the more common ways we tend to make irrational and unprofitable investment decisions. 1. Assigning too much value to the most recent news Try […]
Investor Live Fire Testing
I remember reading an article by a long-haul cargo plane pilot who described his job as hour upon hour of boredom interspersed with moments of sheer terror. That’s a pretty good description of the stock market. There are long periods when not much happens. And then there are times like these. A rough year last […]
Profitable Ideas: Be Like Buffett, Money Lies, and More
Weekly roundup of recommended personal finance articles from around the web. Would you trade places with Warren Buffet? (Owen Stoneking). A good piece about the value of time and experiences. Forget milk and eggs: supermarkets are having a fire sale on data about you (The Markup). Those frequent shopper cards don’t just save you some […]
To Invest Well, Ask The Right Question
Have you ever invested in a stock or mutual fund because it was recommended by a friend or relative? Or maybe you read about it on a financial web site or blog. Think about the investment choices you’ve made in your workplace plan. Why did you make those choices? One recent study found that when […]
Two Steps Toward a Biblical Approach to Investing
As with most financial topics, there are biblical principles that should guide our investing, but many of the specifics are left to us to figure out, hopefully motivated by a heart to consider how a good steward would invest. Last week, we looked at some reasons to invest. This week, we’ll start to build a […]