Let’s review my five retirement planning steps in case you missed any…click on the Steps to go to the appropriate Step. Step 1 – Total all retirement accounts. Step 2 – Estimate how much social security might provide. Step 3 – Estimate what the IRS standard deduction might be during my retirement years. Step 4 – Estimate…
Category: Personal Management
Economic Prosperity By State
In a recent post, I suggested that if anyone is not happy with their current personal finance situation they should consider moving to a new city, state or country. I decided to dig a little deeper into this topic and came up with some interesting facts. GPD by State The first thing I did was…
Are Annuities Good or Bad? It Depends!
A friend of mine recently asked me if I thought annuities were a good investment idea. For context, her key concern was market volatility which is why she was looking at annuities. I’m not a big fan of annuities but I decided to ask an artificial intelligence to tell me what the pros and cons…
Not Getting Paid Enough? Consider A Career Change!
It seems everyone I speak to these days is struggling in some way and often it is with either money or health. To address the money issue, I’ve been doing some research on behalf of some young struggling individuals. My first stop was the Bureau of Labor Statistics that offers projections for what future job…
Want Personalized Financial Advice? Learn!
There isn’t a week that goes by that someone asks for personal financial advice. The problem with giving personal financial advice is that in order to give truly useful advice you need to know a whole lot about the person. This week someone asked me how I became so wealthy and what they could do…
Why You Should Always Cash Out Company Stock Grants
I’m going to share the hardest money lesson and regret that I had in my career but as bad as it was, some had it far worse. The Great Financial Crisis 2008 The year was 2007 and I was hired by a company that offered me $100k worth of company stock every year as part…
Why I Pay For Ad-Free Streaming Services
I’ve been trying to decide which streaming services I want to keep since most continue to raise prices and with the recent writers and actors strike, have few shows that I actually want to watch so I’ve decided to cut down, for now, on some of these services. At the moment, I have Netflix, Disney+,…
My Financial Asset Inventory
Yesterday I told you about my personal finance operating manual and one of the things in that manual is an annual review of our assets so to that end, I’m sharing a high level overview of my financial asset inventory. You will eventually need to compile a list like this for insurance and will &…
Know The True & Total Cost of Home Ownership
In preparation for a potential recession, I have been planning and preparing for the worst but hoping for the best. I decided to take a look at all of our home ownership expenses and take a look to see if there were anywhere to cut any expenses. Here’s an overview of my expense matrix diagram….
Financial Life Lessons From AI & Why Google Sucks Now!
I continue to be blown away by AI’s ability to answer almost any question I ask it so I decided to start asking some personal finance questions and one of the ones I asked was what are the best financial advice tips for people and below is the response (everything in italics). Live Within Your…