RANT: Our Personal Finance “soft-lies”

The folks over at Our Next Life recently posted an article entitled "The Retirement Lie."  As with most of their articles, I found that it paralleled a lot of my own ways of thinking about life - BUT, it was not the article I thought I would be reading! When I read the title of the article, The Retirement Lie, I thought about what I would call the [...]

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5 Reasons to Payoff Your Mortgage Early

Before I get into my reasoning for early mortgage payoff, let's talk a minute about the view from the other side.  This is an age-old argument - probably because there is no [...]

Investing – Where Your Extra Money Should Go

So, you've gotten out of debt (hurray!) and, in doing so, created a budget.  Now what do you do with all of this extra money that is no longer going to things like a car [...]

The Only Parenting Advice You ABSOLUTELY MUST Follow!

Every parent has their own litany of experiences and their own "lessons learned."  Some of these will be the result of a single "aha!" moment... most will be the result of [...]

Mowing the Lawn Without Breaking a Sweat (or the Bank!)

I'm not sure anything calls up the proverbial image of "dad" more than a man out mowing the lawn.  It's about the most dad-esque image that doesn't include a child (such as [...]

Middle Class on FIRE

The folks over at OurNextLife (a fantastic blog on the topic of Financial Independence / Retire Early ("FIRE") issued an interesting challenge recently that they're calling [...]

Why the Thought of Not Being Middle Class Scares Me to Death (and Should Scare You Too!)

I've shared before that some of my biggest financial mistakes of my 20s were not budgeting, becoming comfortable with debt and not saving.  It turns out, this is the new [...]

Good Health, Sports and Personal Finance

Okay, this may be one analogy too many, but stick with me here..... Good Health = Diet and Exercise My exercise of choice is running.  When you run enough, you begin to [...]

Selecting a Daycare

My wife and I both work.  As a result, daycare is a part of our lives (and a big part of life for my two-year-old). My eldest daughter is currently on her second daycare. [...]

Personal Finance Basics – Part 1: Reading Your Paystub

This is Part 1 in my Personal Finance Basics series. It doesn't get much more basic than understanding the numbers on your paystub.  It's amazing how much valuable [...]

Trial By Fire / On-the-Job Training – How We Learn Personal Finance

In the preceding post, I shared my thoughts around the Trial By Fire / On-the-Job Training that is how we learn parenting.  Despite how monumentally important it is for us [...]