Personal Money Report Card: How Is My Money Doing?
It’s human nature to measure ourselves up against others. It’s practically a hidden sport for many people to be wondering about how their family members, friends and neighbors are doing financially. How often do you hear the quasi-greeting “How’s work?” or “How’s business?” whenever you attend a school or family reunion? Sure, you can probably chuck up the question to something more figurative, so you’re tempted to respond in vague terms as well. But in reality, most people are probably curious about how they stack up against everyone else. At any rate, our snooping tendencies also often influence the way we live our lives — we’re often swept into following expensive fads and “keeping up with the Joneses”. But it’s our opinion that this is not the reason why we should be keeping score. Keeping an eye on our money is also not an excuse to keep a stranglehold over the family bank account. Instead, let’s keep score in order to be mindful of where we are potentially making errors such that we can make corrections and improvements in our financial dealings and habits. Let’s use tools, ideas and methods that will allow us to better understand our relationship with money. Let’s measure ourselves against the people we used to be — hopefully it’ll wake us up and inspire us to be better shepherds of our money.
The articles you’ll find here may satisfy your voyeuristic tendencies, but we’re hoping that they may also teach all of us some lessons. We share our mistakes in order to impart lessons and we divulge our successes in the hopes that they will inspire. We share our personal money stories and our financial score cards, and we’d like to invite you to join our financial journey. We want to stay accountable to ourselves, with regards to money. We’d also love to know how you’re doing.
It’s one of those things I fiddle with — those little financial tools from CNN Money or Bankrate.com that tell you how financially adequate you are. Aren’t you curious about how you stack up against the general populace? These money tools are meant to dish out test results to help us keep track of our […]
At the beginning of each year, it’s typical for everyone to declare their goals and assess how they’ve done in the previous year (or years past). I think I’ll follow suit with this compendium of updates on this subject. Earlier on, I had set forth some goals that I hoped to achieve at some point. […]
In the corporate world, there’s such a thing called a “status report” that a department or group head will typically require each member of a team to write up on a regular basis. It is written up every so often to take stock of one’s accomplishments (significant or otherwise), to see how much one has […]
If you’re a regular here, you would be aware of my interest in fun interactive tools and web sites on the subject of personal finance and money management. I’ve already showcased quite a few interesting tools here. But this time around, I thought to show you this CNN Money graphic that gauges your financial health. […]
What would you like to do when you grow up? That’s the standard question we all ask our kids at one point or another, when dreams are sweet and fertile and options are limitless. When I was a kid, I wanted to become a professional tennis player and a horse trainer, and at one point, […]
INGCompareMe is a new web tool from ING that helps you compare your bank balance, savings and investment levels against those of your peers. The first rule in finance? Know yourself! Are you curious about how well you stack up against others when it comes to your personal finances? Do you wonder what your net […]
Our Personal Financial Goals and Updates, The Year In Review Like several other bloggers, I ended up quitting my job in early 2008. I didn’t expect that the rest of the year would go to pot, financially speaking, and if I knew this ahead of time, I may have thought twice about leaving the workforce! […]
We listed our Honda for sale on Craigslist, our favorite online classifieds web site. Sold it in 4 days. Remember the car we bought a month ago? Well now that we have that car, we had to sell our old one. We sold it through Craigslist and the process was easy as pie. We had […]
Here’s my personal experience as a long time subscriber to a popular investment newsletter. Timing the market is one subject that remains anathema among staunch long term investors. I would certainly consider myself a long term investor, having been in the market since 1990. However, here’s something I’m only now admitting: that I have since […]