When you and your partner are focusing on paying the bills and trimming debt, it’s easy to put fun on the back burner. After all, dining out is a sure-fire way to blow the budget. Expensive vacations? Entirely out of the question!
There is something about the dawn of a new year that brings out our willingness to kick old habits to the curb and start afresh. If you’re ready to create impactful and effective financial resolutions that best serve you and your goals, it’s time to lean in. With a few tweaks, a little planning and some disciplined effort, 2023 can be the year you start to make your money goals come to life.
One of the best things about a vacation is taking your mind off mundane, day-to-day concerns and responsibilities, and focusing on pleasure. Trips are the time to live it up! If you put a little effort into making your money stretch farther on your getaway, you can have just as much fun and save enough to take additional excursions each year.
When you think about it, planning is one of the best parts of taking an exciting vacation. Putting your dazzling itinerary together and daydreaming about all the amazing things you’ll see can really get the juices flowing. However, if you haven’t planned for the financial impact of your trip, money concerns in the months after your excursion can tarnish your happy memories.
s or become independent young adults. But a better way to help your children understand earning, saving, and investing is to teach them such skills while they are young. This will make finance more intuitive for them – rather like giving your child a tablet when very young so they become “digitally native.”
Finance like fashion can be “in” one day and “out” the next. New approaches emerge and everyone piles into them. Then they move on to the next big thing. But some tenets stand the course of time and never really lose their luster.
It is easy to think of wealth as something that happens overnight. The media often emphasizes rags to riches stories, that stock squeeze on Redit that made someone tens of millions of dollar. Or the big kitchen table idea that went on to become a billion dollar business in five years. News sites share stories of happy lottery winners, reports that also overlook the enormous odds ticket buyers face when they lay down their hard-earned money.
f you are nearing retirement, many decisions are coming your way, from where you will live, to how you will fill your suddenly idle hours. One of the most critical retirement decisions involves your finances. Without a steady paycheck, you will be responsible for creating an income that will sustain your lifestyle.
Many Millennials, who graduated during a time of job scarcity and enormous student debt, can be forgiven for being a little skittish about financial matters. After all, in addition to their own challenges, many saw their parents’ generation struggle with layoffs, stock market losses, and the housing crisis. Still, there’s a lot that today’s 20-30 somethings (in fact anyone in their early earning years) can do to build a brighter financial future.
An emergency savings fund will help you be self-reliant and take care of bills if you have an unexpected expense or your income is reduced or eliminated without relying on credit.
