A couple years ago I was in need of an audiobook to listen to during a long drive, so I picked up Money Secrets of the Amish: Finding True Abundance in Simplicity, Sharing, and Saving. To say the least, it was an interesting "read." In case you were thinking about reading this book, I'll save you the time and give a quick summary. Here's why the book says the … [Read more...]
My Real Estate Objectives and Strategy
As I mentioned in Invest Overview: Fueling Your Net Worth and My Plan for Total Financial Freedom (AKA My Retirement Plan), real estate is a key part of both my investment and financial freedom plans. In a future post I'll share details and the financial performance of my rental properties. Before I do that, I wanted to highlight my objectives for investing in rental real … [Read more...]
My Entry into Peer-to-Peer Lending
As I mentioned in an earlier post, peer-to-peer lending (P2P) is part of my financial freedom/retirement plan because it allows me to diversify my investments while earning 6%+ on my money. But I didn't know much about P2P. Late last year I decided I needed to change that. FYI, I actually wanted to try P2P many years ago but I lived in a state that didn't allow you to … [Read more...]
The Best Way to Maximize Your Investment Return
In both Why Another Financial Website? and How to Measure and Track Your Wealth I mentioned how the financial media often doesn't understand financial principles (which is evident because of the terminology they use) and thus give out incorrect information. Well, they do many Americans a similar disservice when they focus on return rate to the exclusion of other investing … [Read more...]
Income and Spending Scenarios and the Impact on Wealth
We've talked about how cash flow over time leads to building wealth, which is also called net worth. Today I'll add a bit to past discussions by showing how these two work together in various scenarios, and what the wealth impact is in each case. Two Factors I've noted previously that there are two factors that account for whether you accumulate wealth or not: income and … [Read more...]
How to Manage Your Career to Make Millions More
Now that we've established that you can make your career worth millions more if you manage it correctly, let's discuss what steps you need to take to do this. You Must Be Proactive Before we get into details, let's discuss the one thing most people don't do that's costing them millions: they don't manage their careers. Most people simply have a "take-it-as-it-comes" … [Read more...]
Two Huge Reasons Why Your Career Matters
In Earn Overview: How to Grow Your Income I talked a bit about why your career is so important. I'd like to expand on those thoughts in this post. There are many aspects to growing and managing your career and we will discuss those during the life of this blog. Today we will focus on why you should take the time and effort to focus on your career. There are … [Read more...]
2015 Net Worth Review
As I noted in How to Measure and Track Your Wealth, I track my net worth monthly using Quicken. I update all my asset accounts and record all my expenses, then run a net worth report. I review it and compare it to my goal for the month (I have an annual goal I break into months) as well as consider steps I need to take the next month to make progress. I've been doing this … [Read more...]
Dividend Stock Investing as a Source of Passive Income
Last week I gave my initial thoughts on dividend investing. I thought it would be fun to follow that post with the story of someone actually doing it. This is a guest post from ESI reader (and a friend of mine) Mike Hunt. I asked Mike to share a bit of his personal financial situation and then share his strategy and results in dividend investing. Enjoy! ESI Meet Mike Hunt At … [Read more...]
Why I Panicked When the Stock Market Dropped
I have seen numerous articles on the recent stock market decline. The news media is in a frenzy claiming the end of the world is near, and that we're all going to lose everything by the time it's over. It's what much of the media does best: take an issue and sensationalize it to the point of terror. Or at least that's what they like to do. As you have probably guessed, … [Read more...]
