Category: Millennial Personal Finance

I was waiting in Charlotte airport for my flight back to America early Thursday morning, and I overheard a really interesting conversation between a bunch of flight attendants sitting next to me. There is a “Workerbee” mentality in America that keeps the average family average in terms of their net worth and income. I’ve demonstrated before that anyone who starts investing in their 20s can retire a millionaire, and the chat I heard that day reminded me why more people don’t end up that way. The headlines in each section below are some of the things they said. Continue reading “These Flight Attendants Show Why Most People Are Poor”

One night in my sophomore year of college, I was coming home for Christmas break in bad weather. I hit a big puddle on the interstate and lost control of the vehicle. Once I was off the road it all happened so fast. I just went diagonally right into a big pine tree. I’m very grateful my friend and I both escaped the accident without serious injury or worse. Now that it’s been almost five years and I’m able to talk about it more openly, I was horribly taken advantage of by our nation’s healthcare system that night when the hospital charged me more than the price of new car. If I hadn’t had insurance, I would have been ruined financially. Let’s look at how this crash shows how broken our health care system is in America, even post Obamacare, and how we need a major societal change to bring down sky high costs.   Continue reading “The Night A Hospital Charged Me and My Friend $60,000”

A reader asked me to do a post on the attractiveness of the rental market vs the stock market right now, and I’m happy to oblige. After all, I want to write what you want to read so if you have suggestions send them my way at [email protected].   Continue reading “Should I Buy a Rental House or Invest in the Stock Market?”

Everywhere you turn, state and local politicians are talking about pension reform. If they’re not talking about it, they are having to deal with the consequences of years and years of underfunded pensions. Whether proposed reforms include more employee contributions, a higher retirement age, benefit cuts, or elimination of cost of living adjustments, the story is the same: pensions aren’t as good for teachers as they used to be. Teachers, if you were born after 1985, reconsider relying on your pension as your primary source of retirement security, especially if you work in one of the states with a severely underfunded pension. In place of a pension, I am going to show you alternatives you can use to fill the gap on your own with workplace retirement plans like 403b’s and Roth IRAs. Continue reading “Why Teachers Under 30 Should Consider Opting Out of Their Pension Plan”

I went to the People’s Museum of Manchester, England the other day and accidentally walked into a gold mine of financial comedy thanks to English kids. The Museum has a section dedicated to the history of finance. It talks about financial bubbles, crashes, how English and American banks financed the Industrial Revolution, and more.  To make the exhibit more kid friendly, they had a bunch of children write what they would do “if they had all the money in the world.” After scribbling down their answers, they stuck them on the wall. As you might expect, asking a bunch of 7-12 year olds what they would do if they were fabulously wealthy didn’t disappoint. After studying the notes and pretending to be an expert on child financial psychology, I found the kids seemed to fall into eight groups. I think most of these categories coincidentally reflect what adults would say too, just in a less direct way. After all, out of the mouths of babes comes truth. Let’s see what the different groups of kids said they would do with money if they had all they could ever want. Continue reading “What English Kids Said They’d Do With All the Money in the World”

After a wonderful day roaming around Manchester, England, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, I open up my computer to a series of really bizarre emails. A stream of emails from Apple start appearing thanking me for my purchase. Since I’ve had nothing to do with Apple since selling my iPad before going on this trip, I know something is up. It looks like the kind of thing that you get when someone steals your identity. I check the contents of the email since it appears to be a legitimate message from Apple, and it gives me the details. I’ve apparently made 11 transactions in varying amounts for a combination of store credit and access to this strange Chinese app. As I’m the curious type, I copy paste the Mandarin characters into Google and translate the page. “Meet your people now in social media exchange. Chat your connections” it says. Under the description of the app are photos that show profiles of women that look a lot like what you would see on OkCupid or eHarmony. Imagine if you were in this situation. What would you do? Are you panicking? Is your credit going to be ruined for the rest of your life? Is someone going to do a freedom of information act on your name and think you were searching for some strange scandalous website? The good news is, this is not even close to a financial emergency. I’ve actually faced something like this before when I traveled in Mexico so I knew what to do. Just in case this ever happens to you, here’s how I handled it. Continue reading “What To Do When A Guy Steals Your Identity to Spend $500 on a Chinese Dating Website”

Because I was lucky enough to receive a scholarship and go to a low cost in-state university, I never had to deal with the bane of our generation, student loans. A lot of news outlets will throw around a $30,000 average balance, but many people who go to medical school, law school, business school, or other graduate program have 5 to 10 times that amount.

For those saddled with huge debt loads, it can delay big life decisions like buying a house, a car, getting married, and having children. Friends have shown me loan balances as high as $300,000, and I’ve heard of figures as high as $500,000. What can you do when loans are eating you alive? Continue reading “How to Get Student Loans Forgiven Tax Free”

Please read this Elite Daily article called “If You Have Savings in Your 20s You Have Done Something Wrong.” It’s so bad, it makes me want to have mandatory financial education classes in high school. The blog that inspired me to retire early, MrMoneyMustache.com, wrote a powerful response to this celebration of hyper-consumerism in America, but I wanted to write another post on it to emphasize just how bad the author is at math and save others from this attitude about money. From a financial professional’s point of view, not saving in your 20s is similar to saying, “yeah keep smoking a pack a day while doing McDonald’s breakfast lunch and dinner while drinking each meal down with a liter of vodka. I’m also going to break down some of the crazy ideas Elite Daily uses to sell the dream of spending like there’s no tomorrow. Continue reading “The Extremely High Cost of Not Saving in Your 20s”

In one of the universe’s great ironies, people that marry for money usually get beat out financially by those that marry for love. Huh? Say what? People looking to marry a sugar momma or sugar daddy look like paupers compared to couples that walk down the aisle and stay married for the next 40-70 years. I’ve seen this not only in my own life through friends and family, but through statistics. If you read The Millionaire Next Door, one of the best personal finance books ever written, you’ll find that one of the most common traits among America’s millionaires is being married to the same person for decades. How is this possible? I’ll go through different scenarios to show you that the real sugar daddy or sugar momma for you could be right under your nose. Continue reading “How to Marry a Sugar Momma or Sugar Daddy”

 

People have been asking me for a while now to write about how to get a better phone plan. How much are you paying per month now for your plan from AT&T or Verizon? $40 a month? $80? Maybe $120 after taxes and fees? I am currently traveling the world and am able to call and text my friends and family with my 5 dollar a month phone plan. One of the best decisions I’ve ever made in the personal finance space has been to cancel my relationship with the blue blood phone companies and switch over to this cool little startup called Republic Wireless. Here’s how you could save 60% or more off your phone plan, even if you are still using Mom and Dad’s family discount. Continue reading “My 5 Dollar a Month Phone Plan and How You Can Get it Too”