You have big dreams for the future. Maybe it’s buying a home with a drool-worthy, airy kitchen. Maybe it’s an early retirement so you can jet off with your S.O. and see the world. Regardless of the future you imagine for yourself, you probably know that you should be saving but might be wondering if …
The coronavirus, AKA COVID-19, might be more life-threatening to the those who least suspect and the old but the life implications might just kill the financial lives of a wide swath of people. Year-after-year the warnings come out about how much people save for an emergency. The results are never good. Bankrate reported in 2019 …
I once heard someone say there is never a great day to have a flat tire. So very true. But you can add this to the list, there is never a good day to have you eleven-year-old refrigerator crap the bed. Yes, our refrigerator greeted Tuesday by deciding that’s the day it would expire. It …
The researchers at Prudential released a very interesting study on how the shutdown affected the household finances of federal workers. As you can imagine, the impact was pretty dramatic with nearly a month of missing paychecks. Eighty-three percent of survey respondents reported an uptick in their overall stress levels as a result of the shutdown, …
“Dear Steve, I am not sure if you are the same Steve Rhode I wrote to about 7 years ago. I heard about you on the TV show Starting Over, with Rhonda Britten. I wrote to you asking advice on how to get out of the large debt we had from attempting to start our …
“Dear Steve, We are $23,000 in debt not including our house. We are able to make all payments but nothing is left over to save. $11,000 of this debt is an old school loan that we pay $114/mo on. $5000 is an auto loan. The rest is old credit debt. We have paid down about …
In a paper by M. Keith Chen of Yale University School of Management and Cowles Foundation, a conclusion was drawn that the language you speak has an impact on your ability to save for the future. Languages differ widely in the ways they partition time. In this paper I test the hypothesis that languages which …
“Dear Andy, I am 31 years old and I own my own house. I have never missed a payment, yet can’t get refinanced due to my lowered house value. (Currently I owe about 149,000 and I just had it appraised at 140,000). My mortgage rate is 6.2%. That is part of the story…the other part …
This week I answer Brandon’s question about saving money even if you are barely able to make ends meet. When you are just making it from month-to-month and paying the minimum payments alone it seems like a strange time to need to think about saving money. Most people don’t and then guess what happens when …
“Dear Steve, I just realized how far in debt I am and it is all credit card debt…..$21000.00. I do not have a home mortgage. I feel like I am just spinning my wheels. I have been able to make my payments, but if I have any type of emergency, I am going to find …