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.
