The 7 Personal Finance Articles We Loved This Week
With an upcoming vacation, an upcoming move, my mom visiting for Mother’s Day weekend, and another obligation with my boyfriend’s family, every single weekend of my month is booked up. I couldn’t be happier to be starting this new chapter with Peter and kicking it off with this big, fun trip, but I’m already feeling the weight of so many things happening at once on my wallet. (It’s why I’m pushing myself so hard to stick to my budget on our trip, but the reality of that remains to be seen.)
And honestly, that makes it a great time to be working for a personal finance website, where I couldn’t avoid budgeting content if I tried. I really loved J. Money‘s second pick this week, from the site The Holistic Wallet. Writer Michelle outlines a savings strategy that I think sounds pretty great, especially for these stressful times where a lot is happening at once: put money into your personal escrow. The idea is similar to saving up an emergency fund, in that you save up a specific amount to be able to cover expenses for a certain amount of time. Except instead of an emergency fund, this money you know you’re going to spend because you want to, and it will need to keep being replenished. That’s the biggest takeaway:
Even if you have a whole year’s worth of random expenses in your personal escrow, keep transferring your budgeted monthly contribution into this account. Ideally, automate this so you’re not given the option to put it off until the next month. The transfer into your ‘personal escrow’ is its own general budgeting category.
Be sure to check it out, plus the rest of this week’s great picks!
1. The $5,000 Question – Wall Street Playboys
“Would you rather work all day today and make $5,000, or would you rather work all day and generate $1 per day forever?”
2. Your Personal Escrow: The Ultimate Budgeting Hack – The Holistic Wallet
“The point is that your personal budget absorbs the shock of a non-monthly expense seamlessly. No lost causes. No planning fails. No hopelessness.”
3. The Dog Years of Investing – Ten Factorial Rocks
“Crossing the first 10-15 years of investing is the biggest challenge most investors face before they become true believers of this principle. If you manage to survive this period, better results are ahead.”
4. How To Start Your Own Self-Insurance Company – The Micawber Principle
“If you are paying insurance companies to protect you from life’s small emergencies, you should stop immediately and start paying this ‘regret premium’ to yourself.”
5. Money Is Money Can’t Buy Me Love (But It Can Buy Me Time) – The First Habit
“Each time you see a dollar, imagine that it’s a charged battery. You spent your time to produce something of value, and now that value is stored in the dollar ready to be converted back to life energy (time).”
6. The Awareness Ladder — Four Pillar Freedom
“I like to imagine there exists an awareness ladder with hundreds of different rungs that people live on…The farther away someone is from you on the awareness ladder, the more absurd their lifestyle seems.”
7. It’s the Small Changes That Make You Rich – Chris Reining
“What I’m really trying to get them to see is if they saved $5 a day they wouldn’t have to live paycheck to paycheck and never have any options with their life. I mean, what’s $5 when people waste money on all sorts of stuff.”
Image via Unsplash
