September 6, 2005
Wealth is Not About the Income!
A review of The Millionaire Next Door
Long after I started getting responsible with my finances, I thought that in order to achieve real wealth, I needed to earn an extraordinary amount of money.
At a certain level, that's true. You'll never become a billionaire by pinching pennies alone. And to become a millionaire, it certainly helps if you earn a healthy salary and are disciplined about saving it.
But when I read The Millionaire Next Door, it completely changed my assumptions about what it takes to become wealthy. Nothing corny like "it opened my eyes and changed my life". It just introduced me to a new idea -- that anyone can acquire wealth -- and provided research to back it up.
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Posted by Frank at 7:59 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
August 30, 2005
To Budget or Not to Budget
This post is part of the Budgeting Mini-Series.
While I believe budgeting is a great means to begin understanding your financial situation, there are some who think it's not worth the trouble. I'll be the first to admit I don't have all the answers, and what works for me might not work for you. So I thought I'd try to summarize the argument and let you make the decision for yourself.
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Posted by Frank at 9:23 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
August 29, 2005
Spreadsheet Budgeting
This post is part of the Budgeting Mini-Series.
Here's an Excel spreadsheet that I created and have used in the past to keep track of my budget (I'm experimenting with some other things, like paper, right now, but this works perfectly well).
The spreadsheet contains a worksheet for planning your budget in a similar way that we did with a sheet of paper on Friday.
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Posted by Frank at 10:22 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 26, 2005
Less is More in Budgeting
This post is part of the Budgeting Mini-Series.
There's something to be said for the "Less is More" approach to budgeting. Basically, the simpler the process of creating and following a budget is, the more likely you are to stick with it.
With that in mind, let's work out a simple budget on paper. This will get you going quickly and with a minimum of effort. If you want to put this in Excel or Quicken later, it should be pretty easy. But for now, let's turn down the technology and focus on keeping it simple.
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Posted by Frank at 10:43 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
August 25, 2005
Envelope Budgeting
This post is part of the Budgeting Mini-Series.
Envelope budgeting is a style of budget that guarantees you don't spend more money than you have allocated for a particular category.
How it works
The concept is pretty simple -- when you get paid, you divide all of your money into envelopes. Each envelope represents a different expense category.
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Posted by Frank at 8:18 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
