Here are my favorites in this weekend's New York Times:
Here are my favorites from this weekend's New York Times:
Here are my favorites in this weekend's New York Times:
My November net worth jumped back up thanks to the stock market. It's amazing how steep the ups and downs are, isn't it?
Here are my favorites in this weekend's New York Times:
Here's what I'm reading in this weekend's New York Times:Annie Spencer, who lives in New York City, was also the first in her family to go to college — a small state school, then private graduate school.
"I can't lie, I often fantasize about just fleeing the country and being a debt fugitive in Canada or Europe or somewhere," Spencer says.
She saw higher education as a way out of the precarious paycheck-to-paycheck existence she'd grown up in. So, despite merit scholarships and working 30 hours a week, Spencer racked up $85,000 in student-loan debt.
"From the minute I graduated from my master's degree," she says, "my job prospects were completely limited to the jobs that would help me pay back my loans."
She gave up on social justice work and landed a decent paying government job. But in New York City, with high rent, plus $600 a month in loan payments, it was tough.
Here are my favorites from this weekend's New York Times:
Here are my favorites from this weekend's New York Times:
The Wall Street Journal has a new renovation chronicle series about a family re-doing their 1,300 square foot co-op in Queens. But why did I — and it was my fault — ignore all common sense and personal experience and buy a place needing a total overhaul? Right now, it’s 1,300 square feet of soiled floors, peeling paint and ancient plumbing and electric. The kitchen must be entirely replaced. When the co-op board interviewed us, the first thing they asked was whether we were going to renovate.There have been two installments so far:
Throughout the apartment are bizarre sayings — “Freedom of Love” is one; some sort of ode to beer is another — that were scrawled across the windows and walls when we arrived. Yeah, not our decorating style.
My wife won’t step into the place until it’s renovated.
But the apartment is in a leafy neighborhood with good schools (we know Forest Hills well, having been renting there for three years). For the city, it’s got a large living room and two nice-sized bedrooms. The many windows let in lots of light. And the old, brick building is handsome, with an Art Deco style, wood-lined lobby and lots of period details. Also crucial: a price, reflecting the need for a gut renovation, that we could afford.
As we ready for the work, I find my emotions alternating between anticipation and dread. There’s a stain in the second bedroom’s closet; but the super says it was from a leak fixed long, long ago. Our architects have some great ideas for modernizing the space; but will we able to afford these grand plans? Potential contractors have done impressive jobs elsewhere; but how do we guard against seeming inevitabilities like cost over-runs and delays?
Urgency is starting to set in. It’s not, er, ideal to pay both a mortgage and rent. I’m looking forward to taking the first step: demolition. And soon.
Here are my favorites from this weekend's New York Times:
My October net worth took a big hit. Like last month, my retirement savings are way down thanks to a horrendous stock market. DH and I are also still grappling with some credit debt and legal bills, so my extra payments to our mortgage principal are on hold for a while.
Here are my favorites in this weekend's New York Times:
Here are my favorites in this weekend's New York Times:
Here are my favorites from this weekend's New York Times:Are you convinced the reason you can't save is that you don't make enough money? You're probably deluding yourself.
Income differences don't explain why some households accumulate wealth and some don't. Ivy League researchers Steven F. Venti and David A. Wise found that some high-income people wind up with little wealth and that some low-income people accumulate a lot.
A study of 3,992 households whose heads were near retirement age found income differences explained just 5% of the variations in wealth. Life events such as inheritances, big medical bills, divorce and the number of children accounted for just 4%. Investment choices accounted for 8%.
So what made the most difference? How much the households chose to save. Even some of the lowest-income households managed to accumulate significant wealth.
The takeaway. Making savings a priority, and paying yourself first from every check you get, turns out to be the No. 1 way to build wealth. So get started. For more, read Trent Hamm's wonderful post "12 excuses for being broke."
Here are my favorites in this weekend's New York Times:
I'm ready to face our August numbers, I think. DH and I both maxed out our 403(b) plans at work (DH contributed $1,375 and I contributed about $1,400), and my employer threw in another $750. I also contributed $600 to my 457 retirement plan (also serving as an emergency fund). Now for the not-so-bright side of things:
August Income:
August Expenses:
Total Income: $7,101.96
Total Expenses: $12,230.20
Over by $5,128.24. My checkbook is about $1,000 in the negative at the moment until I get paid next week and pay off my rewards card, and DH's credit card balanced increased to $7,001. Gulp.
I'm off for a road trip the next couple of weeks and won't be posting the usual weekend articles. Here's one from the New York Times to tide you over until I'm back: Maybe It's Time for Plan C
RONA ECONOMOU was a lawyer at a large Manhattan law firm, making a comfortable salary and enjoying nights on the town when she was laid off in 2009, another victim of the recession. At first, she cried. “Then it hit me,” said Ms. Economou, now 33. “This is my one chance” to pursue a dream.
Six months later, feeling hopeful, she opened Boubouki, a tiny Greek food stall at the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side, where she bakes spinach pies and baklava every morning. This was supposed to be her Plan B: her chance to indulge a passion, lead a healthier life and downshift professionally — at least by a gear. Instead, Ms. Economou finds herself in overdrive.
Six days a week, she wakes up at 5:30 a.m. (“before most lawyers”) to start baking. Instead of pushing paper, she hoists 20-pound bags of flour, gets burned and occasionally slices open a finger. On Mondays, when the shop is closed, she does bookkeeping and other administrative tasks.
So much for a healthier life. “The second I feel a cold coming on, I’m taking Cold-Eeze, eating raw garlic,” she said. “I can’t afford to shut the shop down.”
Here are my favorites from this weekend's New York Times:
Ruth Hayden's latest interview on Minnesota Public Radio focuses on emergency savings: How to create a cash cushionA recent survey indicated that nearly half of American households couldn't come up with $2000 in cash within thirty days. In this recession that just won't quit, what are you doing to build an emergency cash cushion?
July Income:
July Expenses:
Total Income: $8,496.76
Total Expenses: $10,199.77
Over by $1,703. My checkbook is about $300 in the negative at the moment until I get paid next week and pay off my rewards card, but I'm not sure what DH's situation is or how this ginormous deficit is manifesting itself with him. Perhaps it's part of his credit card debt?
My August net worth increased slightly. My cash savings are down because of some spending for an upcoming trip and my retirement savings didn't do so hot this month given the economy. But I did make an extra principal payment to our investment property mortgage and my student loans are down to (drumroll, please) four figures! Paying off just over nine thousand in student loan debt seems so much more doable than the initial fifty thousand dollar balance.
Here's what I'm reading in this weekend's New York Times:When I wrote the book "Money and Happiness" in 2005, just before I joined Yahoo! Finance, my thesis was that if you could clearly identify what you value most in life, set goals around those things, and use money as a tool to help you achieve them, you would find happiness. Not the immediate gratification, smiley-face kind of happy, but long-term contentment. Because everyone knows that pursuing your values is not the easy road and can mean short-term sacrifice — like taking calculus again when you're in your 40s, or coaching a squirrelly bunch of 9-year-olds in soccer when you could be laying in a hammock reading the Sunday paper.
I still believe that theory about money and happiness. But what I've learned over the last six years of writing this column is that money is something you should kind of watch from the corner of your eye while you live your real life. You obviously can't take it with you, and when someone writes the homily of your life, they're more apt to remember your attitude, character, creativity and spirit of generosity, than what you did or didn't do with your money or how much of it you had. So it makes sense to me to earn it doing something you value, something that gifts other people and the world rather than diminishing them. Save, invest and spend it the same way, reflecting your values, in a spirit of generosity and joy. And remember it's important, but it's not everything.
This is my last column for Yahoo! Finance. Thanks to readers who cared enough to comment, correct, argue and email me to share their financial wisdom. Those of you who emailed me with financial questions, I hope I helped. If you'd like to continue the conversation, you can find me on The Huffington Post, where I'll be writing about retirement (and occasionally money and happiness), or email me at laura@laurarowley.com. I wish you wealth and happiness in abundance.
Here's what I'm reading in this weekend's New York Times:
Here's an amusing story in the New York Post: Married couple lives in divided apartmentThis quirky couple has a secret to a happy marriage — try not to live together!
Allen Sheinman, 58, says he and his wife, Collette Stallone, 56, kept separate homes for the first four years of their marriage, but when hard times hit in 2009 they did the unthinkable and moved into the same apartment.
Battle lines were drawn and plastic walls went up, as the kooky pair divvied up her tiny, 576-square-foot West Village apartment as though it were postwar Berlin.
“I told her I could handle getting married and living together, just not both,” Sheinman old The Post.
There was no crossing into each other’s domain without permission: She took the bedroom, he walled off the sofa-bed in the living room. The kitchen and bathroom were kind of a demilitarized zone.
Almost nothing is communal: They each have their own newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and when they watch the same TV show, they do it from separate rooms.
By keeping apart, they’ve made their marriage a blissful one, Stallone insists.
“I don’t need to see Allen brushing his teeth,” she explained.
Apparently the rent on his bachelor pad was going up to $1,800/month, so they decided to live together in her rent stabilized apartment for $800. Good luck with that!
Here are my favorites in this weekend's New York Times:
