Category — Blogging

For the few readers I might have had on this site, you’ve probably noticed I haven’t posted in a few months. This is due to a few reasons, most of which is me brushing up on my programing and business skills for my full time job. The other reason, as you may have guessed from the title, is that I am getting a little tired of writing about personal finance all of the time. I am tired of thinking of little “hacks” to save money. I hate the idea of pinching pennies. To me personal finance isn’t something that you should fret about every day. Personal finance has become something that you just do.

I hate feeling bad about spending money, especially on quality things such as organic food or electronics such as my camera. Reading other personal finance blogs made me feel like I was never doing enough to be frugal or to save more money, and I began feeling burnt out on writing about personal finance.

I have not gone to the dark side of spending money though. Au contraire, I have increased my 401k savings to 20% of my pretax pay, and my wife has budgeted enough to max out her Roth IRA by the end of the year. We still have some debt left, but we have paid off over $26,000 in debt over the past two years, and we are slowly paying off the rest. We are still driving one car, we still don’t have cable. We don’t have iPhones, and we don’t get Starbucks regularly. But we do spend our money on things like organic vegetables and grass fed beef, and I am not going to feel bad about shopping at Whole Foods just because other personal finance authors think Walmart is the best place to buy your food.

The truth, for me anyways, is that if you are doing the right things like saving a decent portion of your income, planning for variable expenses like car repairs, paying down your debt without putting on new debt, and making smart investments, who cares what you do with the rest of your money? If buying a latte every day makes you happy, then why not do it? Because a personal finance author tells you that you shouldn’t?

Should I tell my wife that we shouldn’t save for a vacation because the economy is bad? Nope. As the popular saying goes, life is a journey, not a destination. I want to enjoy my time here as much as possible, and I don’t want to wait until I’m retired to do it. Most personal authors are always saving for some other time. That’s great. But I get 4 weeks of vacation a year, so shouldn’t I use it while I can?

I don’t want this to come off as a rant against saving money. I think more people need to get the basics of saving and investing down and then put those basics into practice. But really, do we need more than the basics? Once you’re saving 15-20% of your income, should you really worry about how much more you can save? Why should I save every cent I can just so I can spend it at some other point in time? Personal finance is all about balance unlimited wants with limited resources, and trying to maximize your happiness.

I will try to write more often here, but no promises. Until then, save and spend wisely!

One year ago today I wrote my first post for Free From Money. Here we are one year later. I haven’t written nearly as much as I would have liked, and my traffic is still practically nonexistent, but there’s always 2009, right?   

I thought I would go back and look at a few of my favorite posts from the past year. First up is my favorite: Understanding Compound Interest, What They Don’t Teach You in School. Knowing how compound interest works is absolutely essential to getting ahead financially. Knowing how to use it is key to having your money work for you. Not knowing how compound interest works can get you in over your head in debts that never go away.

Next up is Break the Credit Dependence Cycle: Using ING Sub-Accounts. Variable expenses like Christmas shopping or back to school shopping come every year, yet many people don’t prepare for them by putting a little bit of money away every month so that they’ll have enough when they need it. On a longer cycle, things like cars and computers need to be replaced. Instead of financing them, start saving now so you can buy them cash when the time comes. Again, compound interest is your friend when you start saving over a period of years.

A more recent post was Getting Paid Less at a New Job. I have been at my new job for about 3 months now, and so far I love it. I have also taken advantage of a pretax commuter card, which has saved me money on BART, and you may have noticed more book reviews recently. But the fact remains that I am not really getting paid much more than I did before when you take into account the increased commuting hours and the cost to ride the train every day.

On the home side is my post on Saving Money on Food: Four Ideas for Grocery Shopping. Food makes up the second largest part of our budget, after rent. Not only can eating at home can save you a tremendous amount of money versus eating out, it can also help you lose weight since you can control your portions and your ingredients.

Last up is my thesis post Will Stocks Always Go Up? Conventional media tells us that stocks always go up in the long run, and that anyone with a long term view for investing should be buying stocks like they’re being discontinued. I’m really not so sure, and this post lays out the basis of my thesis for the next 10 years or so. I have drastically cut back the percentage of our portfolio investing in stocks, and it’s going to take a lot for me to raise it.

So there are 5 good posts from the past year. Here’s hoping that 2009 has 50 good posts for you to read through. If anyone has any suggestions on the site, or a topic they would like to know more about, please leave a comment or shoot me an email to let me know. Thanks for reading my site!

Rich

Edit:

Whoops! I forgot to adjust the time on this post before I hit the publish button. Free From Money won’t be one year old for 2 more days. But close enough I guess.

A few days ago I signed up to have Google migrate my Feedburner feed over to Google, but now it seems the old feeds are no longer updating, either through RSS or through email. I have decided to go back to the original Wordpress theme and stop using Feedburner/Google for the time being. So if you were one of my 10 subscribers, and you still want to receive my feed, you can re-subscribe with this link:

Free From Money RSS Feed

I am still trying to work out a way to enable an email list for those who want to go that way. In the meantime, if you previously used email, won’t you consider switching over to RSS? If you’re unsure checkout my previous post on tracking more information using RSS feeds.

Update:

I have started a new feed through Feedburner, which I will use for email.  So if you would like to continue receiving emails the option is now available.  I do highly recommend using RSS though for convience and to keep your email inbox clean.

When I began this site I thought of the name free from money, which I thought was appropriate. The dot com version of that name was already in use by someone who was parking ads, so I had to settle for the dot net version instead.

Imagine my surprise when I received an email in my inbox last week offering to let me ‘bid’ on this domain name. I did a quick search on Google for Pat Kennedy and Leader By Choice and found a website claiming the offer is a scam (surprise surprise). So I did nothing, since it wasn’t that important to me to have the dot com domain anyways.

I receive multiple emails over the next few days, but I waited. Apparently there is a 5 day return period on domain names. This is so that you can ‘return’ the domain if you realize you made a spelling error or something similar. So there is no risk for a company to buy a name on the cheap, and then turn around and try to sell the name to you for a profit. If you don’t take the bait they simply return the name.

So 6 days after I received the first email I checked to see if freefrommoney.com was available, and sure enough it was. So I went ahead and ordered the domain through dream hosts, which worked out even better because I still had a free domain name that came with the hosting service.

Now I need to decide whether I should change the name of the site to FreeFromMoney.com, or keep the site as FreeFromMoney.net. In either case I will have the secondary domain forward to the main page. The question is which one to keep. Any thoughts on which is better? Does one domain sound more appropriate than the other? Please leave a comment and let me know!