Don't Quit Your Day Job…

Unlike the swine flu, the personal finance bug is a relatively hard bug to get. Unfortunately (for them), far too many people avoid putting any thought into their future until that ‘future’ is right around the corner. Investing is a topic that comes up a lot when I talk with people. How you field open ended questions like “How do I invest in stocks?” is a make or break question in which you need to figure out before your trust is deserved. I’ve come up with a step by step method which I use to narrow my confidant’s thoughts and distill their true intentions. Read on, then leave me comments on your style.

I feel it necessary to shill for Mint for a bit… and no, this is not a paid post…

Mint.com is a financial website in the vein of Quicken Online or Yodlee which allows you to aggregate the information from the vast majority of your financial accounts in one place. I’ve been using Mint for 13 months now, and have seen a number of the improvements to the service in that time. As an aggregator, Mint is very good at what it does. Going beyond a financial snapshot, Mint even has some analytical features that I find useful. I’ll take a look at some of the good features and caveats in this article.

It’s a quickly moving target, but as of August 04, 2009, the national debt is $11,653,350,207,790.34. With 307,212,123 people in the country (July Estimate), that works out to $37,932.59 per person. President Obama promised on the campaign trail to not raise taxes on people making under $250,000 annually. Is that promise now on shaky ground?

Thank you Bernie Madoff! Bernie Madoff set the news on fire with a $50 billion Ponzi scheme for which he recently went to prison. Since then, a number of other financial schemes have come to light: Allen Sanford, Joseph Forte, even the Yacht scheme. But what are Ponzi schemes? How are they different from Pyramid schemes (and Matrix Schemes)? And, most importantly, what are the signs of each?

Behavioral finance and economics have recently exploded onto the national scene. These two behavioral topics deal with the idea of ‘rationality’; they are concerned with the rationality of the decisions of members of a population and the limits to an individual’s rationality. Studies show that humans have many irrational tendencies which can be shown experimentally.

Reverse mortgages are a relatively new financial product. Generally, if you are close to (or in… the minimum age is 62) retirement, you can take out a reverse mortgage on the equity in your home. Just like the product’s name, you would then get a payment from the bank which holds the reverse mortgage. Sound good? In some cases, a reverse mortgage can be a lifesaver. In other, it’s best to stay out of reverse…

I’ve written plenty about gasoline lately, but only about gas taxes. Let’s shift gears a bit… Do you think gas prices will increase? If gas prices increase, is there a way for you to hedge against that increase so it doesn’t affect you? Of course!

One of Milton Friedman’s most influential and revolutionary theories was his challenge to the traditional Keynesian consumption function, which includes simple after-tax income as a variable in the consumption. Friedman countered, however, that those who consume today take future taxes, price increases, salary increases, and other factors into account. This is summarized in his Permanent Income Hypothesis. More specifically, this counters that people consume based off of their overall estimation of future income as well as opposed to only the current after-tax income.

If you saw $1,377.71 lying on the ground, would you pick it up?

I hope you would. That’s the sort of savings you could find from opening a Roth IRA. Any increase in your future tax rates means you made money simply from choosing the right account to invest in. Sound good? Read the article.

A commonly heard refrain in the personal finance world is ‘Keep 3 months of living expenses in an emergency fund!’ If fact, this is heard so much it’s almost become a mantra for people taking control of their finances for the first time. Where does this ‘3′ come from? Why do you keep it? All this and more will be answered, read on…