Like a lot of people, I found paying off debt really exciting — I couldn’t wait for payday every month so that I could sling thousands of dollars at my student loans. But when I paid off my debt and switched my attention to savings, my motivation lagged. It was too easy to come up […]
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Saving money as a grad student can be tricky. Most grad students have a limited income, whether through graduate assistant-ships or student loans, and especially if you worked a regular job between college and grad school, cutting back to the minimum level is difficult. Making the most of what you have requires a certain amount […]
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OK. You know you need to save. But it’s just so hard to actually transfer big amounts of money into savings when you want to pay bills or travel or buy new shoes or whatever. Stop beating yourself up about this. It’s a real psychological problem: humans have a hard time setting aside for the […]
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For Americans, Individual Retirement Accounts or IRAs are one of the best ways to save for retirement. When I finally started to turn my financial life around at age 35, the very first thing I did was to open an IRA. And two years later, it’s a choice I haven’t once regretted. IRAs have a […]
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AirBnB is one of the fixtures of the “sharing economy” that has emerged in the last few years. Like Uber, the other company that’s often mentioned, it’s a platform that allows people to rent their possessions (in this case, a sofa, room, apartment, or whole house) to others directly. Instead of staying at a hotel […]
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Friends, as a converted and frankly evangelical budgeter, I am here to tell you the deep dark magical mystical secret of budgeting. The ONE CRAZY TRICK that will allow you — yes, you with the entry-level job and the student loan payments — to start a successful budget when you’ve never been able to do […]
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Lately I’ve been writing a lot about the importance of your credit score. All kinds of things impact your credit score, such as the way you use credit cards and the amount of debt you have. But you can’t work on building your credit score unless you know what’s on your credit report. Credit reports […]
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Oh boy, do I have a lot to say on this topic. And pretty much all of it boils down to “don’t do what I did when I was a recent grad.” I’m pretty old for someone writing on “Young Adult Money” (37!!!!) and I really wish sites like this had been around back when […]
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A few weeks ago I wrote about common budgeting mistakes and one thing that came up a lot in the comments was the importance of tracking your expenses. I could not agree with this more. Tracking what I spend every day, week, and month shows me what I actually spend and not what I wish […]
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