Photo credit Mighty Oaks from Little Acorns Grow: Chickens, Spare Change, and Micro Investing. My grandmother had a chipped gravy boat in her kitchen cupboard. My grandparents operated a small farm in South Dakota. My grandfather looked after the cattle, hogs and crops. My grandmother oversaw the chickens, did the books and a million other tasks. She had hundreds of laying hens and once a week the egg truck would come and take most of the eggs. But she held some back to barter with and sell on the side. For years she paid her hairdresser with eggs! Her side egg money and spare change went into the chipped gravy boat. Every time we visited, my sister and I would get the …
Teenager Got a Job? Now they need a ROTH!
Did your teen get a summer job? Mine did - in the dining room of a local assisted living facility. Prerequisite: Ability to speak loudly and slowly. One conversation reportedly went like this: "Tonight's special is spaghetti with marinara sauce." "MARIJUANA sauce?!" "No, marinARA sauce!" After more banter to establish the lack of psychoactive substances in the sauce the resident went with grilled cheese. Good choice. Teens earning money is a beautiful thing! Now's the time to salt away some of those earnings to a ROTH IRA and they won't have to share with Uncle Sam. No tax now, no tax later. It doesn't get much more beautiful than that. TEN things to know about …
Working during Retirement for Fun and Profit!
When I work with clients on retirement planning I have a lot of questions about numbers. How much have you saved so far? How much more will you save? How much do you spend now, how might that change in retirement? How much will your social security benefit be? How much will your health insurance cost? On and on and on, numbers galore! But what about the non-numerical questions? They are also important. How will you fill your time for the first 6-12 months after you retire? How about after that? How will you keep your mind sharp? What's going to get you out of bed in the morning? (Besides the cat) For some people, the answer to these questions is a job, even …
Capture those Dollars – Avoid the Vortex of Spending!
In recent months several of my clients have happily experienced an increase in cash flow. The reasons include: Paying off a student loan Paying off a mortgage Decreased daycare costs due to a child starting school Stopping monthly allowance to an adult child who graduated and got a job (yay!) In each of these cases cash flow went up because of a decrease in a regular expense. Cash flow can also go up from an increase in income such as a raise or a bonus. Clients who have been with me a while know my standard response to an increase in cash flow: "Capture those dollars!" What do I mean by that? If you do not intentionally capture increased cash flow dollars, …
Cash and the Single Woman – What does the Survey Say?
I specialize in helping single women make sense of their money and their taxes. So I was very interested when Fidelity* recently came out with a study exploring the financial planning and investing habits of single women - they surveyed 1,503 women who never married, are divorced or widowed as well as single men and married men and women. Kathleen Murphy, president of personal investing at Fidelity said of the study ".....it's critical that women be actively involved and invested in the financial choices that can enable them to live the lives they deserve." There are a lot of interesting things in this study. I could write a bunch of newsletters about it. In fact, maybe I …
