Money Reasons

Smart Reasons to Save, Use and Invest Money

Archive for September, 2010

Wealth Tips # 6 – Trying Harder To Become Wealthy

September 20th, 2010

My Wealth Tips #6 is all about trying harder to become wealthy!

All to often when it comes to wealth creation, the middle class group thinks that it’s all luck when it comes to generating wealth. Or that you have to be a top socially gifted, genius like Bill Gates to be able to create an incredible complex company like Microsoft to make you rich.

I’m here to say, it’s not so! For one, you don’t need the kind of money a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates has! For us normal middle class folks, we should just try to get to the level of wealth where our passive income (money from dividends, rents, etc), is a bit more than our expenses.

Now you might be thinking, how?

Well, luckily in the Yakezie blogging network, we have a few excellent examples! One such example is the blogger named Jeff at Deliver away Debt, who had obtained a massive amount of debt (over $100,000) but has been able to reduce his debt down to $50,000 in the time period of a year and a few months! Now you might wonder what was his amazing income stream that helped accomplish this? He delivered pizzas, and lived very frugally.

Wait, what does debt elimination have to do with wealth creation?

Well, let’s imagine that Jeff continues working side jobs and keeps his frugal ways after his debt is totally paid off. If he applied the same discipline, that would mean that he was able to save about $40,000 a year, so in a 10 year timeframe, he should be able to accumulate about 1/2 a million dollars if he were to earn a 7% interest yield!!!


Amount	Interest
Saved	Rate	Earnings
$40,000	3.50%	$1,400
$81,400	7.00%	$4,298
$125,698	7.00%	$7,399
$173,097	7.00%	$10,717
$223,814	7.00%	$14,267
$278,081	7.00%	$18,066
$336,146	7.00%	$22,130
$398,276	7.00%	$26,479
$464,756	7.00%	$31,133
$535,889	7.00%	$36,112

Not to shabby!!!

At Money Reasons, I’m trying to do exactly that. This is one of the main reasons I joined the Millionaire Club, I hope to have a net worth of 1 million dollars in 10 years!

So look for opportunities to become wealthier, even if they are small opportunities. If you go the extra mile like Jeff does above… you might just surprise yourself!

-MR

11 comments »

Posted in Inspirational, Wealth

Tags: trying harder wealth tips

MR Cache 2010, Sept 19 – Multiple Problems And A Big Win

September 19th, 2010

Weekly Thoughts:

So far this has been a pretty bad weekend, I didn’t get anything accomplished. My site has gone down 3 times for an hour each. Once me fault, and twice become of my host.

The I watch my daughter play soccer! She was quite literally a star out there on the field, with even the opposing team saying nice things about her performance. She made 3 goals and owned the field.

I guess every dark cloud has a silver lining…

I’m only doing a few links this week because I’m very, very behind on everything this weekend!

My Favorite Reads of the Week:

Budgeting in the Fun Stuff: Fit in a Fun Friday – Blogging – BITFS announces her 2 new websites: Crystal Clear Thoughts and It’s a Dog’s Life For Me

Everyday Tips and Thoughts: How My GPS Has Affected My Driving - This piece could have been called Ode to GPS (lol), but it’s all true! I love my GPS, it has helped make my driving much, much less stressful! Visit her and state you opinion of GPSs!

Financial Samurai: Why Pay Taxes If Government Employees Don’t? - The Samurai brings up so really great points about taxes! Check out the great comments too!

Free Money Finance: Help a Reader: Moving in with Parents - This is a post from letter that a reader sent in, it reminded my a lot of my post: Living With Your Parents While Being Young, Successful And Married. I guess such scenarios are more common that I thought.

Len Penzo: What a $168 Cheese Sandwich Can Teach Us About Hype & Value - Wow a $168 dollar Cheese Sandwich! Yeah, it’s made with expensive stuff, but does that really equal a better tasking cheese sandwich, or is it because it’s made by a celebrity chef? I’ll stick the the cheap version in the U.S. that are tried and true.

My own favorite post of the week:

I finally broke down and confessed my sins in: Frugal Sins Of A Personal Finance Blogger.

Carnivals:

Personal Finance Carnival-The Millionaire Nurse Edition

Engineer your finances - I missed this last week…

4 comments »

Posted in Weekly Review

Sometimes Life Throws You A Curveball Example

September 18th, 2010

I had big intentions Friday, but sometimes life throws you a curveball and you have to do whatever you have to do to keep your head above the water!

Timeline of my big Friday Plans to improve the www.Moneyreasons.com website

4:00 - I get off work, I have some big plan for revamping pieces of my website tonight! I can’t wait to sink my teeth into it after dinner! The kids are home, they want to play with the turtles (we have 3 very small turtles, 1 is only 2 weeks old). Don’t tell my wife, but I like them too
4:45 – The wife and I talk about dinner and the plans for the weekend in general. I’m still exited about revamping pieces of my website, but we talk for about 45 minutes. It’s cool, though… It’s still all good.
5:30 – My boss calls me, he need me to remote into work at 10:30pm to work on something. That’s hours away, I’m cool with that.
5:45 – Time to get Pappa John’s pizza (yum it was good)!
6:30 – Finally I’m on the computer, First I try to put twitter icon back on, but the graphics don’t line up well. I get tired so I shelf it for another day. I start thinking about drawing something for Saturdays post on the www.moneyreasons.com website. I wonder if I can still draw as well as I could when I was a teenager? Hmmm.
7:30 – I’m playing with my Banner Header now. I have a graphic, but it’s only the title words “Money Reasons“, I wonder if anyone realized that I changed it a week ago? Another Hmmm.
8:15 – Oh no! Something that’s not suppose to happen to a seasoned techie like me, happens!!! I inadvertently, save my header code over my style.css code… Aughh! My theme is no longer recognized and my site looks horrible, panic sets in!!!
9:00 – I’m still fighting this issue. My website still comes up, but without the theme… It looks horrible!
9:20 – I finally get it back, but I lose all the work I did on the banner earlier. Grrr.
9:30 – After poking around I’m satisfied that my website is working again! Whew. My daughter wants to me to read her a bedtime story. So we start to read… Zzzzz.
10:45 – I fell asleep! My wife wakes me up saying I thought you had to work at 10:30?
10:50 – I scramble to log into the systems at work, ready to apologize to the guy that I was going to help.
10:51 – I connect to the VPN where I work! I start to IM the guy (POW)
10:52 – I get disconnected from the VPN where I work!
10:53 – I realize the problem is on my side! I call my ISP and they said “Yeah, we’re replacing a piece of hardware on the routers down here because one of them is acting flaky“. But I need the connect to work, I exclaim. They say oh it should take no more than a few minutes.
11:35 – Aliens must have abducted my ISP support because that few minute took almost 45 minutes!!! I hope the aliens were more gentle than I would have been… or do I?
11:40 – I reconnect back to the VPN of my day job and do what needed to be done. Now I think about the humorous article I wanted to post for this coming Saturday.
11:50 – I’m too frustrated and it’s too late to do anything other than complain.
Now - Well, the post isn’t the funny post I hoped it would be, but it is interesting and shows how when we plan for something, it doesn’t always happen the way we hoped it would play out..

Have a Great Weekend! Life is funny sometime!

If you have a similar story please do tell!

-MR

14 comments »

Posted in Humor, Problems

Tags: bad day Life is funny Murphy's law

Frugal Sins Of A Personal Finance Blogger

September 17th, 2010

I’m consider myself a Frugal Blogger, and I am mostly, but I have my frugal sins that I commit. And now, I would like to confess some of them, please try not to hate me! (lol)

Frugal Sin #1:

I’m like Neo in “The Matrix” when it comes to not following David Bach’s “the latte factor” advice, …the rules do not apply to me! Or at least you would think that is what I believe. I have a McDonalds latte at least 4 days out of the week. On top of McDonald’s latte’s, at least four times a month, I sneak in a Starbucks latte in too! I also go to the local cafe shop and drink a few of their lattes per month.

This sin cost me about $15.00 extra a week, ($60.00 monthly).

Frugal Sin #2:

I’m currently not carpooling! I have a buddy at work that I’m sure I could carpool with again (we have in the past, when gas prices went over $3.00 a gallon), but I enjoy my alone time driving to work too much to give it up. When I drive with my buddy, I feel like I have to entertain him, but I like listening to audiobooks, music, NPR, and other things. Sometimes I even think about blogging topics.

This sin also cost me an another $15 dollars to my weekly expenses ($60 monthly).

Frugal Sin #3:

And what may be the most outragious sin of all… We still have a landline phone! We have 2 cell phones, and a gmail voice account… and yet we still have a landline with Verizon? My wife wants it just in case we need to call 911, but it’s not really necesary! I wonder at what point in time, I will start to get embarrassed by the phone? Maybe when we have company over, I’ll throw a blanket over our landline phones, or will I grab them and throw them in the utility room? Oh the shame…

This sin also cost me an another $6 dollars to my weekly expenses ($24 monthly).

So my frugal sins only cost me almost $150 dollar a month, but still that’s $150 dollars that I could be saving for investments!

Please don’t tell my mom…

Would you like to confess some of your frugal sins here? I think you’ll feel better if you put those nasty sins out on the table and in the open!

-MR

33 comments »

Posted in Costs, Frugality, Humor

Tags: Costs frugal sins

Losing Technical Relevancy With Kids

September 16th, 2010

I just realized something today, I’m losing technical relevancy with my kids. Not in the way that they think of me as their dad, no… more along the lines of knowing what’s important in their lives!

I thought I would be able to cherry pick the best things from my childhood and let them share in those experiences that I deemed incredible. Well, now I realize that what I thought was important is no longer relevant! Time has moved on and my personal childhood joys are now obsolete.

I would like to say that kids are different today, but really they aren’t. What different is technology and the way kids adapt to it and thrive!

From an early age, kids are exposed to electronics… even at the infant stage! They push a button on a bear and it growls, or its eyes light up, or it sings a song or whatever the new fancy is. Next, it’s the portable gaming systems like the Nintendo DS, my kids (including my 6-year-old) take them everywhere! Then it’s cell smart phones, like the Apple IPhone, that do everything except iron your clothes! My son and daughter already plan on laptops, soon I’ll hear one of them ask for an Apple IPad for a Birthday or Christmas… it’s just a matter of time.

Electronics and computer (and computing devices) are exposed to them constantly… and they soak it up like a sponge! The stuff I had as a kid looks like a joke compared to what kids have these days!

Then there is the sports! Kids need to start sports when they are young because the competition is so fierce! If you didn’t start your kids out in sports around the ages 5, 6 or 7… it may be too late! And the other parents involved; OMG, you would thing that sports were a matter of life and death.

Yes, it was different when I was a kid, the things back then now seem very slow and hokey to kids today. Electronics and the internet have really changed the game with respect to kids.

My poor parents can no longer understand what I do on the computer, let alone my kids. My parents are truly of a different time, and watching them on a keyboard is like watching a fish out of water flop up and down in the grass. The technical chasm between my parents and my kids is huge!

Readers, do you feel the same as my parents sometimes?

I know that I’m personally trying my best to keep up… I don’t want to become totally irrelevant with respect to technology!

-MR

7 comments »

Posted in Kids

Tags: electronics Kids technical relevancy