Pocketmint

Tag: savings

1. Women and money: four destructive myths

   8 March 2013

   Among financial bloggers, this has been designated Women’s Money Week. I don’t usually think about finances and economics in a gender-specific ways, but coincidentally, last week I happened to be reading a book called Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry. The author, Helaine Olen, devotes a chapter to the way […]

2. Reader case study: short sales and debt

   9 April 2012

   After I posted What to do — and not do — with your former mortgage dollars, I received a request for advice on a strategic default from a woman I’ll call Tricia. I agreed to give her some (friendly, I-am-not-a-lawyer) suggestions based on my own research, and she gave me permission to share our exchange […]

3. Quick, save now! Easy Roth IRA options

   1 April 2012

   If you live in the United States, you have just seventeen more days to do something very important. No, I’m not talking about filing taxes, although you certainly don’t want to forget that. April 17th is also the deadline for maxing out your tax-advantaged retirement contributions for 2011. The government actually gives you three and […]

4. What to do — and not do — with your former mortgage dollars

   21 March 2012

   With the decision to stop paying our mortgage, our immediate expenses dropped by nearly $3000 per month. That saved us over $32k in 2011 alone. So what did we do with all that ‘extra’ money? Well, first of all, about $6000 went to pay additional income tax, now that we no longer qualified for the […]

5. The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Your Turn

   8 February 2012

   In creating the Conflict-Free Family Budget, I was striving to accomplish two separate but interlinked goals: reduce spending and reduce conflicts. I think these work best in tandem, but that’s not to say that you wouldn’t derive some benefit by implementing just one or the other. I’ll try to tease them apart here for that […]

6. The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Our Results

   27 January 2012

   Our new budget system accomplished everything I hoped for, and then some. Still, I’ve been surprised by a thing or two about my own reactions, and even more so by Jak’s. (This is Part Two in a series. See the Introduction and Part One if you missed them.) I fully expected that for at least […]

7. The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Our Plan

   19 January 2012

   Here’s the complete rundown of the new budget agreement I worked out and proposed to Jak last June. This post is part of a series. See the Introduction if you missed it. First, I started with by calculating our net income from a single day job. (At the time it was me working and Jak […]

8. Move your money and bump your interest rate too

   1 November 2011

   A lot of people are moving their money this week, either because of outrage at the imposition of yet another fee, or due to a general realization that customers tend to get better treatment from small not-for-profit credit unions than from gigantic banking corporations. In tangentially related news, interest rates seem to be exploring Zeno’s […]

9. Risk-free high-yield savings option

   17 June 2009

   When is a CD not a CD? When it’s a savings account in disguise. Traditionally, certificates of deposit have offered a trade-off: in return for the bank’s guarantee of a fixed interest rate, you promise to leave your money with the bank for a specific term. If you renege and withdraw your funds early, you […]

10. Less income, more savings

    6 June 2009

    Yesterday I promised to give an update on our personal financial situation and how it’s changed over the last half-year. In November I wrote that we were down to a quarter of our prior income, as Jak’s employer had cut his hours by half just as I’d been summarily dismissed from my full-time job. I […]

11. I believe this qualifies as an emergency

    14 November 2008

    I’ve been quiet for a while, going through a number of struggles that have left me without the — in the vernacular of my childhood, the ‘gumption’ — to keep writing frequently.  I’m trying really hard to get the spark back now, because I know in the long run the Pocketmint project is important to […]

12. Should we worry about WaMu? and other disasters

    16 September 2008

    Sorry for the recent silence; I’ve been having a rough couple of weeks on the Life front. No financial crises, though, at least not yet! Thanks for all the recent comments — it cheers me up to see so many people reading. This week got off to an interesting start for us with the early-buzzard […]

13. Customer goodwill worth more than high interest rates

    7 August 2008

    J.D. at Get Rich Slowly recently opened up a discussion about chasing interest rates on savings accounts. The range of comments are pretty interesting, but the one recurring theme is that most people are willing to stay with a slightly lower rate as long as they’re happy with the service and convenience. I guess I […]

14. Orthodontic sticker shock

    29 June 2008

    No posts for the last couple of days — instead I’ve been spending a lot of time in orthodontist’s offices with the kids. Up until this year, both girls had dental coverage through their mother’s insurance, but it was an HMO situation and the care was pretty poor. Fortunately, the job that Jak got earlier […]