The carnival of personal finance #85 is being hosted at FiveCentNickel this week. As usual there are many high quality posts at the carnival. I submitted my article on the odds of winning the lottery and it even made the editor’s choice section. Anyway go check out the carnival and thanks again to Nickel for hosting.
Well if there was one thing and one thing only that I could recommend to people really looking for ways to save money to get out of debt or save some extra money for retirement it would be don’t ever buy a new car. In fact I would go one step further and say spend as little money as possible on your cars.
Well today was a pretty good day for me. In the span of a few hours I found out that I’d be receiving about $4,000 total that I never expected to receive. The first windfall came when I went out to lunch with a local IT recruiter who I had worked with during my job hunt, but actually ended up turning down the job offers I got through her. What I did do though was email her the names of a couple guys I worked with who might be interested in the jobs I turned down. Well turns out that they both took jobs through her company. …
I don’t go to casinos, I don’t buy scratch offs, and I don’t play the powerball no matter how high the jackpot. That is until tonight, I was just informed that my wife threw in $10 with her family to buy lottery tickets. Now before I go off portraying my wife as a know nothing moron who plays the lottery I can see the occasional “fun” money being spent on what-if scenarios and by all other accounts I don’t think there are two many women in this world that can handle expenses as well as my wife. Me however I feel almost sick that some of our hard-earned money was voluntarily paid into the stupidity tax. I would rather have heard her say that she had just lit a $10 bill on fire to see what would happen.
I am curious to see what kind of vehicles my readers drive and why they drive the vehicles that they do. Purchasing a vehicle is usually a pretty major decision/expense and depending upon what kind vehicle you buy, how you pay for it (cash, credit), and how you maintain your vehicle can really affect your overall financial picture.
I have pretty good health insurance now that I switched jobs, but my previous employer’s health insurance benefits were degrading pretty rapidly and because they are such a small company I can see them continuing down that road. While talking to one of my buddies at the old company he showed me this site where you can go out and get quotes on various health insurance plans on your own. For those wondering the site is www.ehealthinsurance.com
I just thought of something that I think would be fun to track as it will make sure I don’t overestimate how big my retirement nest egg really is. I currently have a mix of Roth IRA, Roth 401k, and Traditional 401k retirement accounts that combined together give me that number at the top right corner of my blog. One thing that people often forget when saving for retirement is taxes (the other is inflation). You see any money that is stored in traditional 401k or traditional IRAs you need to pay taxes on when you withdraw it. This means that the government actually owns part of my retirement nestegg.