When I originally set my $100,000 by age 30 goal I needed to sort of cheat and I made the goal to have $100,000 in principal (money I contributed) in my retirement accounts by Dec 31 of the year in which I turn 30. My birthday is in August and well according to my original calculations I would need at least those extra 4 months to reach my goal.
I’m always looking for side jobs or easy ways to make some extra money on the side. Turns out that you might be able to make a decent amount of money by suing companies who violate the do not call list legislation, and what could be more fun than suing a telemarketing company. Generally I have a personal aversion to lawsuits and think that it’s gotten entirely out of control in recent history, but in this case I’m all for it.
Well I just talked about the true cost of owning a home and well if I want to stay happily married I’m going to have to spend some money on landscaping this summer. So obviously I want to figure out the most cost effective way to do my landscaping and still end up with a product that my wife would be happy with. I already start the process of frugal lawn care last summer after the Chemlawn guy stopped by an challenged my green thumb manhood and to be honest my lawn ended up looking great. So while I know next to nothing as I write this article about landscaping I do know that if you aren’t careful landscaping can cost a fortune (we just had some professionals stop by last night with some plans and a quote – thus somewhat like the Chemlawn incident I feel personally challenged to show them I can do a much better job for a fraction of the cost)
Not wanting to be left out I too have switched to full-text feeds. To be honest I’m not sure why I even had partial feeds to start with as I hate reading feeds that only give me a teaser and make me go out to the site to get more. So it was pretty stupid for me to be offering partial feeds on my own site. Anyway hopefully this will be a welcome change. Unfortunately I haven’t found a way to make it entirely retroactive so my older feed items are still partial, but going forward you will be able to read my articles in their entirety with your favorite RSS reader. Sorry it took so long.
My wife and I were discussing whether her soon-to-be-married brother and his future wife should really be looking to purchase a home right away. Knowing what I know about the couple and my personal opinion about buy vs. rent I took the side of the argument that the couple definitely should not be looking to buy a house right now. The two of them are fresh out of college and from what I know don’t have a whole lot of money saved up. In fact I think they have some debt and are going even further in debt to pay for the wedding and honeymoon. Now at their age there is certainly nothing wrong with being in debt, especially if the reason for the debt is college education and well as much as I promote being frugal in all aspects of your life, you probably should enjoy your wedding/honeymoon as hopefully it’s an only once in a lifetime experience.
The check engine light came on in one of our cars sometime last week. Now before someone starts saying “I told you so that’s what you get for driving a POS”, it’s not on my Ford Escort – that one burned out a long time ago 😛 The light came on in my wife’s 1999 Honda Accord which well it’s worth at least 7 Escorts so I actually go to worry about the car getting wrecked which means I’m going to have to do something about the light.
If you’ve been following my blog lately you’ve been noticing that I’ve been questioning why one would ever have any money in bonds in the long-term due to their sub-par performance vs. stocks. I’ve had tons of great comments and I thought I even summarized things pretty good, but in the end I don’t know that I really had it nailed down. I was still able to shoot my mouth off somewhat about how in the long-term stocks are still the best investment and I really kind of wanted someone to stick my foot in my mouth, well maybe not that harsh but there are two great posts about why bonds are a vital part of an investment portfolio.