Evolving Personal Finance » Entries tagged with "debt"
Do You Practice What You Preach?
It’s so true that trying to teach a subject forces you to truly learn it. I’ve been working hard on preparing my presentation on personal finance for grad students (it’s tomorrow!) and it’s really helped me fill in some of the remaining gaps of my knowledge, particularly regarding debt acquisition and repayment. I haven’t had a lot of interaction with debt in my life, and the interactions that I have had didn’t make a big … Read entire article »
A Peek at Graduate Student Loan Debt
An article popped up on my personal Facebook feed last week that was accompanied by a spirited discussion in the comments about PhD student stipend levels and the necessity of taking out student loans even for students who are “fully funded.” Of course I clicked over and eventually found my way to this spreadsheet of student loan balances created by Karen Kelsky of The Professor Is In to demonstrate her point that even funded humanities PhDs can result … Read entire article »
Filed under: debt, grad school
The Thinking Person’s Guide to Dave Ramsey: Swapping Baby Step Order
This is the fourth installment of this series on reasonable way to adapt Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps program to fit your financial goals. You may want to reference last week’s post on intra-Baby Step modifications to familiarize yourself with the steps before we dive into this week’s discussion of inter-Baby Step modifications. The big difference between Dave Ramsey’s approach to managing debt and investments and other financial professionals’ is that Dave Ramsey does not care about … Read entire article »
Don’t Buy into the Pro- or Anti-Credit Card Hype
Last week’s FPU lesson was “Dumping Debt,” which was rather different from what I expected. Dave spent a lot of time talking about the disadvantages of various kinds of debt and not as much as I thought he would on the mechanics of the debt snowball. Of course, credit cards were pointed out as a particular evil, not just in the video but also reinforced by the class exercises. One exercise was to stand up … Read entire article »
Filed under: credit cards, debt
On Debt and Feeling Like a Slave
I’m honestly not sure how it happened, but I sort of forgot that the Bible compares being in debt to slavery. I hear Dave Ramsey say “the borrower is slave to the lender” on his podcast all the time – maybe that imprinted it on my brain as a Dave Ramsey-ism instead of recognizing it as Proverbs 22:7. And I haven’t made any decisions about debt recently so I guess I let it float out … Read entire article »
Filed under: debt
Attend Weddings But Don’t Go into Debt
Wedding season is upon us! I love marriage and I love attending weddings to spend time with and support our friends and family. That’s why I initially felt sympathy for Christopher Sledzik, the face that CNN put on its recent article on the rising cost of wedding attendance and the pressure friends and family feel to attend. Like Sledzik, we are also 27 and in the last three years have devoted all our vacation time … Read entire article »
Filed under: choices, credit cards, debt, marriage, savings, targeted savings, travel
Our Experiences with Paying Off Debt
This post is a personal story about how debt has intersected our lives and not intended to be any big lessons. You’ll see that how we paid off our debt doesn’t necessarily apply to others as I’ve been rescued a couple times! We also still go back and forth over whether or not we are officially debt-free. Between me and Kyle, I have more experience with debt so I’ll start with mine. Student Loans I took out some … Read entire article »
Filed under: cars, credit cards, debt
When Did We Acquire All This Cash?
When Kyle and I arrived home from our honeymoon in June 2010, our non-property net worth consisted of: our Roth IRAs around $16,500 in savings accounts/CDs a bit in checking the money we received as wedding gifts $16,000 in student loans We had just spent between $10,000 and $20,000 on our rings, our honeymoon, and our portion of the wedding expenses. We felt like we were starting from zero, in cash anyway. That summer we put in CDs the amount of … Read entire article »
Filed under: personal, targeted savings
Are You Sure You Want to Spend $27000 on Your Wedding?
Today we are featuring a guest post from Edward Antrobus as part of this month’s Yakezie Blog Swap – click over to his blog to check out my participating post. Edward is a blogger, home cook, and construction worker. Enjoy! The cost of the average wedding is over $25,000. That number doesn’t even include the cost of the dress! (I’ve never understood that. Isn’t the wedding dress a wedding-related cost? Why wouldn’t you include it in the … Read entire article »
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Will You Ever Reduce Your Retirement Contribution Rate?
November 4th, 2013 | 23 Comments
When I think about the retirement savings trajectory of a typical American, I imagine that his rate of saving for retirement increases basically monotonically throughout his life. In his 20s and 30s he doesn’t save anything; in his 40s he wises up and starts putting money away; in his 50s he panics and saves as much as he can given the lifestyle he’s become accustomed to; by the time he’s about to retire he’s putting … Read entire article »
Filed under: choices, retirement, savings