Debt is often treated as something that simply shows up without an announcement, attacking us when we least expect it. However, debt is completely and totally avoidable, if you are willing to take the proper precautions and make the correct decisions during the early stages of building your personal financial portfolio. While there are a variety of methods that a ...

To a certain degrees, people understand that it is very vital to think about proper protection. When it comes to managing personal finance family budget, of course the most familiar area of protection is insurance. Finance protection includes insurance, but it also includes expenditure Adult care, child care and other obligations, such as alimony, maintenance and child payments. Our behavior ...

Last week we learned about cognitive biases–patterns of flawed judgment or irrational thinking that trick us into making poor decisions, or acting against our best interests. Often, these cognitive biases compel us to spend money foolishly; but we can also use them to trick ourselves into spending less, and saving more. The denomination effect, for example, refers to the tendency ...

The human brain is a remarkably complex organ, composed of roughly 100 billion neurons firing at a rate of about 200 times per second, resulting in an operating speed of about 20 trillion calculations per second. The brain is so complex, in fact, that it took researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Technology Graduate University in Japan and Forschungszentrum Jülich ...

According to most business and technology news sources, Apple is expected to announce the release of a new line of consumer products—including the latest iteration of the iPhone—in less than two weeks, at a media event on September 9th. The rumors and speculation leading up to this event have all followed a pattern that has become as predictable as the ...

How often do you allow your immediate wants or needs derail your future financial goals? Whether you’re putting money away for retirement or saving for a planned expense, all of your hard work and progress can be doomed by a single moment of weakness. In October, 1970, a Stanford University psychology professor named Walter Mischel devised an experiment to measure ...

Suppose you want to walk from the Empire State Building in New York City to the corner of Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles—a distance of about 2775 miles; and, on the first day, your journey, you walk 2% of the total distance to your destination, 55.5 miles. Continuing your journey at a constant rate of 55.5 miles/day would result ...

In a previous article for this site, you learned a few methods for calculating your retirement number, the amount of savings you will have to accrue to maintain your standard of living after retiring at 65 years old. For many Americans, that number may be intimidating. Even the most conservative estimated retirement savings goal for a worker earning $100,000 in ...

Benjamin Franklin wrote, “A penny saved is a penny earned”; but when it comes to saving for retirement, it might be best to remember that a penny not saved, is a penny lost. Simple math Personal financial advisors have come up with several methods with which you can calculate your “retirement number”–the amount of savings you will need in order ...

It’s easy to think that the financial challenges facing Americans today are new, but one needn’t look too far in the past to see many of the same destructive patterns of behavior and habits of consumption bedeviling humanity since the beginning of modern economic theory. In 1899, economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen introduced the concept of conspicuous consumption to describe ...