Owner: Adfecto Abundantia - Aspire 2 Wealth URL:http://blog.aspire2wealth.net Join Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 23:43:29 -0600 Rating:0 Site Description: A realistic chronicle of a young guy's path to wealth. Site statistics:Click here
New Way to Bank Extra Cash 2008-03-04 09:41:00 Today I am taking off for a quick three day / two night business trip. I don't travel that often, but every couple of months I need to attend an out town meeting or drop in with a supplier. As a part of my quest to squeeze a little more money out of my budget I am going to try and use these business trips as a way to increase my income. How can I turn my travel into extra money? First, I signed up for all of the frequent traveler accounts that I may use while on the road. My employer lets its employees keep the rewards they rack up for personal use. For the first couple of trips I wastefully failed to claim these benefits. I now have accounts with each of the major airlines that service my local airport and a selection of hotel chains that I will use Read more:Extra
Oops. Net Worth "Fix" 2008-03-03 12:49:00 I jumped the gun last week to update my net worth. It was the last day of the month and I went ahead and posted. Well... those who follow the markets day-to-day may have noticed that Leap Day did not turn out so well for stocks. I lost 2.14% off my 401(k) and Roth IRA portfolios and had to revise my February results downward a tad. As a result my investments were nearly flat for the month and I have have now adjusted my net worth downward by about $350. Oops. Now, what is important is that this little hiccup doesn't really bother me. Other than for record keeping purposes I try not to even follow the day-to-day movements of the market. I turn 25 later this month so my retirement is still decades away. That long time horizon means that this 2% d Read more:Worth
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Net Worth Update: March 2008-02-29 11:57:00 The monthly Net WorthUpdate
has arrived. Check out how I did over the month of February: Assets $ Diff % Diff Cash $3,808 ($69) -1.78% Stocks $0 $0 - Bonds $0 $0 - Annuities $0 $0 - Retirement $16,488 $1,297 8.54% Home $191,900 $0 - Other Real Estate $0 $0 - Cars $16,123 $0 - Personal Property $0 $0 - Other $0 ($151) - Total Assets Read more:Net Worth
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Break the Spending Cycle 2008-02-28 12:03:00 Just like being on a diet, being frugal seems to go in cycles. One month we may get our ship going in the right direction, and BAM, the next month we totally drift off course. In the months leading up to buying our house we saved hard, almost 50% of our income. For three weeks after we closed, we went into a buying spree that left us with $4,000 of debt. Some of these purchases were legitimate needs, but much of it was not. We spent money to celebrate our milestone ($400 for a self thrown house warming party anyone?) and rebel against our months of restricted spending (how about a flat screen TV?). We went from spending 50% of our income to spending 200% of our income in an instant. By starting this blog I took the first steps in reigning back in the exc Read more:Break
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What is an Emergency? 2008-02-26 10:12:00 Save an emergency fund! This is one of the most important first steps to getting control of your finances and stopping the cycle of reaching for the credit card when things get tough. I even made saving an emergency fund Millionaire Rule #5. I've scraped together almost $2 grand for my emergency fund over the last year, and that is great progress. Right? My problem today is that my car needs work, but I don't want to raid my emergency fund. The $400 repair bill seems small enough for me to pay out of my regular living money, but history has shown that I won't tighten the belt enough. I know that if I pay this bill out of normal income I will run out of money by the end of the month. When the money runs out the immediate response will Read more:Emergency
The 123 Book Meme 2008-02-25 20:52:00 Over the weekend I was "tagged" to make my contribution to The 123 Book Meme. Here is the low down:"Grab the nearest book that has at least 123 pages, open it to page 123, and count down 5 sentences. Then, type the next three sentences here. Then 'tag' 5 other people/blogs."Credit Withdrawl was kind enough to tag me so here goes. My closest book is The Only Three Questions That Count by Ken Fisher."The PSR [Price to Sales Ratio] tells you, in the event the name didn't give it away, a stock's price relative to its per share sales. It's just like a P/E but uses annual revenue or sales where the P/E uses earnings. A stock selling for $25 with $25 in sales per share has a PSR of 1."There you have it. You have now learned a new metric by which to value stocks! Now I'll tag five new blogs (
Frugality Making a Come Back? 2008-02-25 11:17:00 While reading through my long list of online news sources I found an interesting article that I felt merited some further analysis and discussion. The article Why America Has Too Many Stores from Slate.com talks about overbuilding and dropping consumer spending in the retail sector. In real dollars, after adjusting for inflation, sales were down over 2007 for the first time in years. At the same time, strip malls and shopping plazas have sprouted up all over the cityscape (and Main Street USA too). I can certainly see this trend in our neck of the woods. My wife started working a part time retail job at a brand new upscale development when it opened back in December. This complex has about 60 high end stores like Lucky Jeans, J.Crew, and Anthropologie. W Read more:Frugality
$940 in Found Money! 2008-02-22 12:34:00 At the start of the year I wrote down my goals for 2008. One of these goals was to create found money, which is money created outside of my normal income. For now I have embarked on this goal primarily by selling unused stuff on eBay for extra cash. Most of what I have sold is old inventory from my failed multi-level marketing business. I bought this stuff for about $2,000 and the debt is still hanging around on my credit cards. I have finally completed all of my auctions and tallied up the results. I had a lot of sales, when you look at the gross amount, but unfortunately I found that the fees and shipping expenses greatly cut into my returns. The gross amount taken in from all of the auctions was $940! Next, we subtract the PayPal fees that avera Read more:Money
Millioniare Rule #9 2008-02-21 22:30:00 Buy a House and Cars You Can AffordAs a part of the Millionaire Rules series it is important to address the two largest purchases most people make in their lives. The choices you make about where you live and what you drive can drastically effect your long term ability to create wealth. If you allocate too much money to these budget items it is almost guaranteed that you will find it difficult to save and invest for the long term. A lifetime of fugal living, epitomized by the "latte factor" is quickly dwarfed by these two massive financial commitments.I am not sure if these terms are universally used, but where I'm from it was common to hear someone called car-poor or house-poor. Contrary to what you might expect, it is NOT someone who lives in an ugly house or drives an ugly car. In
Welcome to Aspire 2 Wealth 2008-02-21 09:12:00 Today Aspire 2 Wealth
has been featured on Consumerism Commentary with a guest post: The Case Against Mortgage Pre-Payment. If you haven't already, please take a moment to read the post and share your comments. The Peer-to-Peer Lending Carnival also went live this morning and features another post from Aspire 2 Wealth called Neat Idea, Bad Investment. Welcome
to those who are new to the site. This blog was started to chronicle my path to wealth and keep me moving forward toward my goals. I share my detailed personal finance history and articles on the topic of personal finance. Be sure to check out my Millionaire Rules Series, Archives, and subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for stopping by.
Tax the Unhealthy? 2008-02-19 16:44:00 Lazy Man and Money was kind enough to ask me to contribute a guest post. I was happy to oblige and today the post went live. Please check out Tax the Unhealthy? (Part 1). Be sure to read the post and check out the debate in the comments. Check back tomorrow to see Part 2 and again later in the week for a possible rebuttal on the other side of the debate. Welcome to those who are new to Aspire 2 Wealth. This blog was started to chronicle my path to wealth and keep me moving forward toward my goals. I share my detailed personal finance history and articles on the topic of personal finance. Be sure to check out my Millionaire Rules Series, Archives, and subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for stopping by.
Class In America 2008-02-19 10:11:00 I stumbled onto a special feature from the New York Times about Class in America
. It seemed like a good follow up to my post last week about Wealth Porn. I learned some interesting things by reading the articles and running some numbers in their tools. First, based on the How Class Works calculator I rank in the 74th percentile of Americans. My education and salary both push me high up the scale while my net worth brings me down a good bit. If I put my parents on the same scale, they both have masters degrees and make upper middle class salaries; they are at the 90th percentile. I think with enough time I will catch up to them, but I think it is unlikely for me to surpass the level of my parents. I started near the top and I have followed in my parents foot steps.Another graphic sho
Open Wallet: 2007 Taxes 2008-02-18 10:27:00 I got down to business with our taxes yesterday afternoon. I have written before about how I was excited to do our taxes this year, especially because this will be the first year for us to itemize. I guess it really takes a personal finance geek to get excited about itemizing. I used the online program from Turbo Tax to make the process as painless as possible.
Right off the bat I got a bad surprise. Despite completing DW's W-4 to claim no exemptions, her employer still withheld no where near enough taxes. I had a feeling this was happening as I would look at the pay stubs, but I wasn't exactly motivated to decrease her take home pay. The Turbo Tax software I used keep a running tally of your results. I input my W-2 first and was greeted with a refund of several hundred dollars. Read more:Taxes
Wedding Season Has Arrived 2008-02-16 20:26:00 Today I got my fourth wedding invitation in the mail today. Three of my friends and one of my wife's are getting married this Spring and early Summer. I have responsibility to be an usher at one, but so far I don't have any mandatory tux rentals. Still, the travel is certainly going to add up and we aren't going to have very many free weekends once this starts. I think it might be a bit much.Going back to my post a few days ago, Gift Spending: Am I Cheap?, there will also be lots of gifts to buy. Some of these friends have been out on their own for several years now, so they don't necessarily need the basics like pots, pans, and kitchen appliances. I don't like to buy gifts that never get used either. I think this may be an occasion where a $30 gift card for each lucky couple is use Read more:Season
Round-up: Cupid Edition 2008-02-16 11:02:00 Last night my wife and I had our special evening together for Valentine's Day. I cooked a red wine fondue. It involved a lot of chopping veggies and cutting meat into cubes that were put onto skewers and cooked in a boiling mixture of wine and beef stock. Very yummy.I also gave her two sets of coupons as a gift. The first set of 13 tickets are redeemable for "Blog Free Nights." My wife supports my blogging, but there are times that she needs me to pull myself away from the computer. Blueprint for Financial Prosperity posted recently about the Five Languages of Love. I know my wife needs attention to know she feels loved and that isn't always my strong point so this way she can remind me when she is feeling short changed on my affection.The other coupon book I found online, I've lost Read more:Cupid
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House Lust 2008-03-10 23:58:00 This weekend we had some great weather, and so we spent a few hours yesterday afternoon gawking at the pretty houses. I nearly went into architecture, and even though I did not choose it as my career, I still draw floor plans and elevations as a hobby. There are dozens of open houses all over the area and if something really gets our attention we will stop and take a look.Yesterday we drove through several neighborhoods where prices ranged from $280-500k. Of course in those price ranges we found a lot to like about the houses. One in particular really stood out and I immediately started running the numbers in my head. Could I ever afford it?In our area basic housing will run around $80 per square foot. That will get you a house that is a little older (built in the 50's and 60's) and Read more:House
Millionaire Rule #10 2008-03-08 18:00:00 Generate Multiple Income StreamsThere are two components to having more money left over in the bank at the end of the month. The first is to reduce expenses and spend less money. The second is to increase your income. While it may sometimes seem impossible to make more money on will power and elbow grease alone, creating multiple income streams is a sure-fire way to bring in extra cash. Branching out from your traditional day job to seek new ways to create income is an integral part to becoming wealthy if you, like most of us, don't pull down the big bucks. This installment of the Millionaire
Rules series will explain the importance of having diversified sources of income and some suggestions for how to get started increasing your cash flow.First off, if we want to become wealthy we mu
Dress to Impress 2008-03-13 22:51:00 Over the last year and a half I have started traveling for business every couple of months. Usually on these trips I am visiting a contractor which does business for my company. Ultimately my role is to perform an audit or provide oversight into how well they are executing their contractual duties. I have also starting giving briefings to high level managers and decision makers. In other words, at times my job requires me to put forth a professional, credible persona.A large part of that professionalism is dressing the part. In my normal work environment we don't have a dress code. As an unspoken rule, shorts and sandals are a bit too casual except on special occasions, but day-to-day a tee shirt and blue jeans is perfectly acceptable. I am sometime teased by friends and family beca Read more:Impress
Life Insurance: How Much? 2008-03-12 20:44:00 I know I need more life insurance. I've been planning to get more ever since we bought a house last May. I have a few reasons that I've put it off, but I know I should stop making excuses and do it!We aren't completely without life insurance at the moment. I have a little more than twice my salary from work. My pension also provides a death benefit that would be about $1,500 a month to my wife. Finally, there would be a small amount of social security that my wife would collect as well. If you add that all up it is in the ball park of $200,000 plus $1,500 a month. That is enough to pay off all of our debt (including the mortgage) and leave my wife a little money each month to get by.Based on what I have already, I know we are currently ahead of many people out there. However it cer
I Am a Perma-Bull 2008-03-16 23:45:00 In case you have missed the latest development in business news, Bear Stearns Companies Inc has brokered a deal with JP Morgan Chase to be purchased for $2 per share. At the start of 2008 the stock was trading at $88 per share. This deal is expected to rock the global financial markets and completely crush the stock price of the financial firms. It is likely to be very ugly.On the flips side of this pain there are two great ways to find profit. First and the method I plan to take advantage of is to continue to invest into the broad market indexes and dollar cost average more money into the market. This route will profit when the market recovers.The other way to profit from this situation is to delve into more complex investment concepts like options or short sales. I personally tried
10 Simple Steps to be a Millionaire 2008-03-14 18:35:00 Believe it or not anyone can become a millionaire. Becoming a member of the millionaire club can even be achieved on a very modest income. The trick is to realize that what determines wealth is not how much you make, but instead how much you save and invest. Here is the proof, a New Jersey man while never earning more than $11 an hour became a multimillionaire. There are literally thousands of examples of people who started with nothing and were able to achieve their millionaire dreams.When I started Aspire 2 Wealth I quickly decided that I would need a plan if I was going to reach my goals. As a part of that plan I wrote down a list of rules or steps that would guide me on my path to wealth. These are ideas that are embodied by millionaires all around us that built their wealth grad Read more:Millionaire
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Overcoming the Fear of Failure 2008-03-18 23:35:00 I want to start my own business. In order to diversify my income streams and increase my income I feel that entrepreneurship is by far the best route. The problem I now face is that I am hesitant to risk my savings on an unproven venture. I am afraid to fail. I think that recognizing both my desire to enter the business world and my reservations is a good start, but as someone wise once said, "You can't win if you never play the game."I spent some time this evening scouring the net looking for advice. Here is some of what I've found:Biz Thoughts: Don't Be Afraid to FailNational Federation of Small BusinessPractical Commerce: Four Things You Should KnowBecause I went out looking for motivational and inspirational resources that is mostly what I've found. One common theme I have found
I Missed Out on a 517% Single Day Return 2008-03-17 09:50:00 Yesterday I wrote about the Bear Stearns buyout announcement. Had I been able to put in my options trade for BSC last night it would have worked out to a fat 517% return in mere seconds at the opening bell this morning. As predicted the stock fell from $30 a share to $3.20 per share. The March 19th puts with a $25 strike price went from $4.10 up to $21.20 in a matter of seconds at the open. If I put in my order overnight I may not have gotten my trade done at the perfect price but I almost certainly would have still tripled my money. My investment of $4,100 could now be worth $21,200. I missed this boat this time, but it is still nice to know I made the correct call and would have made out like a bandit if I'd had the foresight to get my brokerage ac Read more:Return
March Money Madness 2008-03-21 16:53:00 The pinnacle of the college basketball season is upon us, and like many people I have found myself checking stats and picking brackets. In years past I have put some cash into various betting pools and wagers. This year I have decided to enter only for fun but I now regret that decision. Why? Paying with nothing on the line isn't very much fun at all. It is my theory, and I'm not psychologist, that the small bets I've made in the past give me a personal stake in the outcome of the games. If I don't care who wins I don't enjoy watching as much. Who cares if Butler or South Alabama win in the first round? I do because I've got $5 on Butler. Why did I bet on them? Because I have a cousin that went there. Does Read more:March
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Hump Day Round Up 2008-03-19 23:30:00 I've continued to look into the inflation problem I raised in my post How High is Inflation Really? I found two good links that dig deeper into rising food costs and rising fuel costs. In general it seems like there have been a whole series of failed policies and broad economic mistakes that have all built up to give us a perfect storm for rampant inflation. It may not be too late to fix some of the problems but there is the potential for very bad things.On another note, Aspire 2 Wealth has been included in a whole slew of carnivals over the past week. I have gotten behind with sharing them, but today I sat down and read through many of the posts and came across a lot of great information. Here they are:Money Hacks Carnival #2 hosted by beingfrugal.netMoney Hacks Carnival #4 hosted by Read more:Hump Day
How High is Inflation Really? 2008-03-19 15:12:00 If we stop at the gas station to fill up the tank it is obvious that prices have done nothing but go up, up, up these days. What is even more worrying is that it isn't only fuel costs that have skyrocketed. Two years ago it would cost about $100 for a trip to the grocery store. This would provide all of the staples for two weeks. In a month, the total bill would be about $250. Lately I am budgeting $300 a month and finding that I consistently go over budget. It isn't a scientific measure by any means but it feels to me like my buying power has dropped by as much as 25% in two years. How is that possible? The official figures for the Producer Price Index, which measures the cost of goods at the wholesale level, rose 0.3% in February an Read more:Inflation
Anecdotes from the Downturn 2008-03-25 11:59:00 CNN Money is running a series a short stories from those who are struggling financially. In total there are 26 articles that cover a diverse mix of Americans. The common theme is that broad swaths of our population have been hit by hard economic times. However, all of these stories remind me how important it is to recognize the difference between a collection of anecdotes about individuals economic hardship and statistically important analysis of the whole economy.After reading through all of the anecdotes, the most common hardships are job loss, health problems, and single parent households. What struck me is that even in good economic times these problems are very real and likely to hurt the prosperity of ANY household. As it turns out, unemployment is
Your Brain Makes Building Wealth Hard 2008-03-24 22:55:00 One of the first steps to overcoming a challenge is to recognize there is a problem. If you do not know where your stumbling blocks lie it is often impossible to achieve the results you desire. In the wealth building process there are multiple challenges, but one that many people don't recognize is your own brain. Our brains developed to do a great job helping us hunt, gather, and reproduce. Unfortunately our brains are not particularly suited to the challenges of creating wealth.There is [relatively speaking] a new field of study called Behavioral Finance. The basic idea is that investing decisions are made by people, and people are influenced by psychology in addition to the pure numbers of the markets. In fact, investors (being human) are subject to quarks of neurology, biochemist Read more:Brain
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What Are We Proud Of? 2008-03-28 16:41:00 I heard someone on the radio today talking about Americans and what makes them proud. That is a funny little word that has a tendency to have deep emotional and moral connections. Another way to look at pride is one of its opposites, shame. Both pride and shame have important applications to personal finance that I'd like to consider. First, what about your money situation are you ashamed of? Debt is something that makes many people ashamed. But, not all debt! The debt that you are ashamed of comes from those purchases that you know deep down you never should have made, or the times you splurged when there really wasn't any money to splurge. I know that right now I am ashamed that I have about $10,000 in credit card debt. How do I kno Read more:Proud
More Ways Your Brain Tricks You 2008-04-01 14:32:00 Today I came across a great article about more ways your brain tricks you into making bad financial decisions. The article, Why You're a Big Sucker, explains how a few blind spots in cause us to make bad consumer decisions and cost us money. Two examples resonated with me personally. The first is how the word FREE tricks us into doing some very stupid things. In short, when a marketer or sales person is giving you something for free there is always a catch. In my case, I called a toll free number advertised on the radio to collect my "free" trip to Las Vegas. Of course, I found out when the marketing materials arrived there was indeed a free trip, except for the $29.99 handling fee, the $79.99 conditional cancellation fee, and the mandatory 2 hou Read more:Brain
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