Archive for the ‘goals’ Category
Friday, May 8th, 2009 |
This is one of those days where I just start writing and write until stuff comes to mind. Having said that, I have no responsibility of what may be said and the order they’re presented.
I guess you can call it my “hmmmm” moment in RDL.
For starters, I’m currently wondering when will the tattooing thing going to take off like I want it to? I’ve been handing out business cards to at the oddest of places. Fast food drive thru attendants that have tattoos. Waitress’s that have tattoos. I’ve even posted my portfolio on a couple of message boards. I’ve since tattooed on one customer from a message board and none by manually handing out my cards. For some odd reason, I’m getting customers out of the blue through word of mouth though.
Another thing that’s been on my mind is my income and outcome. For some reason, I have money even though I feel like I’m broke as hell. I’ve been spending a lot lately and it doesn’t seem to be catching up with me. Hopefully it’s all in my head.
Seems like I’ve inherited my middle daughter’s softball team. The head coach officially asked me when did I want to practice in front of the other parents. Kind of caught me off guard as I rambled while trying to think of the audacity. We all finally agreed on Saturday morning (tomorrow).
I’m at a cross roads with the wife and her job situation. It’s nice having her home taking care of the home but at the same time, it’d be nice to have another source of income coming in. To top it off, (not saying it’ll happen) I was reading about this guy that had a stay at home wife and as soon as the kids left, she got bored and wanted a divorce. A divorce I could handle (not want to but could deal with it), but she get’s half of his everything all because she was a stay at home mom. Oh well, I guess you can’t live thinking of the possibilities, or can you?
Now I’m left with wondering how much spending money I should take on the October cruise we’re going on? I did my first betting goal on my first cruise (bet $100) on one blackjack hand. Now I want to accomplish my next goal of placing $500 on one blackjack hand. By the way, I lost the $100 bet. Not only will there be gambling, we’re going to South beach the day before the cruise for a day of partying. I’m thinking $1000 should be enough for the entire trip.
We seem to be looking at some more money come in soon. My wife is getting a small settlement (under $5k) from when she got in a car accident last year. It’ll basically be money we spent on her medical expenses being reimbursed plus some small additions of pain and suffering of her sphincter or whatever.
I’m also wondering when will this egg sized hematoma inside my scrotem from vasectomy complications go away? The doctor says it may be a couple of months and it feels like it’s shrinking a little bit but I’m skeptical of doing anything active because I know it’s there. It’d be nice to play some softball or flag football (might even give it a shot at quarterbacking tomorrow)
Another thought is… when will the market be up to near it’s all time peak again? We’d tend to make a lot of money if that was the case since we currently have about $40k in the market at the moment. This weeks gain was nice but somewhere near it’s all time high would be GREAT!
There you have it… those are my most current random thoughts I decided to write about. What are some of yours?
Posted in Informational, Personal debt, goals, purchases, success | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 |
Yup.
This is one of those articles that should have no place in a financial freedom blog.
Let’s be honest. Who am I kdding?
There’s a reason I haven’t been one of those success stories I constantly read about. You know the one, (The typical Dave Ramsey caller just sending in their last mortgage payment and get to yell “I’M DEBT FREE!!!” with some idiot named Jimbo in the background). I Loathe to become “Jimbo”.
Or do I?
How is it I can hear the background so clearly in their household? And how did they pay off $120K in mortgage debt in five years while only bringing home $60K/year between them? I started thinking about the difference between me and them and quickly realized that the reason that their background is so quiet is because of the absense of kids.
Now, I’m probably an atypical parent that makes jokes about kids being worrisome or being around. Truth is, I’d be lost without them. I have a great nuclear family and couldn’t /wouldn’t ask for anything more out of what the wifey and I have made. Having said that, we currently have 4.7 to be exact (one due in July) so there has to be an end to this madness somewhere right?
RIGHT! On April 10th, 2009. I sat down on the Dr. Teitjan’s slab in Lee’s Summit, MO and did the unthinkable/most femenizing thing a man could do…
I GOT SNIPPED!
Not only did I get snipped. Teitjan had problems finding my left vas deferens and poked and prodded for 20 minutes too long causing post operative complications. It’s not his fault my vas defrens was retracted further than normal so I blame him for nothing. However that doesn’t stop the hemotoma I’ve now developed immediately afterwards because of the complications.
So as I’m typing this article almost 3 weeks to the day later, I have a hard lump the size of a egg in my scrotum. It’s not as bad as it sounds and Teitjan says it should go down after several weeks while the body slowly absorbs it.
Now enough about my castration. Back to Jimbo in the background. Jimbo is able to pay his mortgage down so quickly because he doesn’t have the pleasure of paying for $80/month gymnastic classes, $250 for softball registrations, $640-$1400/month in daycare (when the wife was working), $1000 Christmases, $80 every time a violin string gets severed. I stopped there but that doesn’t include the co-pays and extra money we have to pay for health care costs for the kids.
Sounds like I’m bitching about my predicament with the kids. Trust me, I’m not. I love my life and the challenges that present themselves. The kids keep the wife and I young, entertained, and constantly appreciative.
So while I’d love to have that paid off mortgage in the next five years, I’m going to have to cut back on my intensity towards my goal because our family is evolving at the moment. We’ll eventually get there, but I’ve come to understand that Rome wasn’t built in a day (we’re only 32) and sometimes it’s just not in the cards.
The reason I’m writing this is because even though I can get preachy/demanding towards my goal, I have to realize that my goal is to really be healthy and fit for my kids for as long as I can. I’ve always realized it and have never put the kids or my family second. I just felt I needed to say it loud in case some of you may have forgotten.
Having had this cum-bah-yah moment… we still need to get to work on our secondary goal on becoming debt free so having kids doesn’t let us off the hook.
Posted in Inspirational, Personal debt, Uncategorized, goals, relapses | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 |
My (pre-lump sum) financial goal for 2008 was to have $13K in our savings account. Just so happens, we currently have $15.7K in our savings account. And that’s post lump sum.
HOW (you might ask)?
Well it’s not all bad. I’ve been positioning myself and my family to be more prosperous for the future (starting in ‘09). Basically I’ve invested in myself and the market. As I’ve once hinted on, I’m planning on becoming a tattoo artist and I’ve invested approximately $10K in that which will give me a lifelong trade and a chance to make some really good $ down the line.
Besides that, I’ve thrown $20K in this down market with all of this turmoil surrounding us. I dind’t buy in at the bottom but I’m comfortable where I bought in. Because of our blessing, so far we’ve given away $3.5K ($500 left to give) to various friends and family in need. We also had to pay $2000 to our health insurance plan. To top it all off we went to Miami for Christmas which set us back about $3500.
So all in all, we have a comfortable 6+ months emergency stash saved up even while my wife & I losing our jobs at different times during the year.
Because of our investments I believe ‘09 will be a much better year despite all the negative things that are happening around us. I haven’t decided what our ‘09 financial goals will be because everything is so much up in the air right now. I have to be honest, I hate instability and now is a really unstable time for us.
My wife’s pregnant and jobless (laid off). I don’t mind it as I expect her to continue to be unemployed because I refuse to believe someone will hire a pregnant lady to do a white collar job. So I have to make things happen for us which I started working on around the time I thought I may be getting the pink slip from Sprint (which I eventually got).
I’ll let you in on more when i know more.
Roger.
Posted in Generate income, Informational, Personal debt, goals, purchases | 4 Comments »
Friday, November 7th, 2008 |
Jesse Jackson, Colin Powell, my mother and countless others around the world had the same sense of accomplishment, pride and overall acceptance at 10pm CST once it was official that Barrack Obama was named the 44th president of the United States.
Obamas victory was a victory for America. Not because of the majority vote but because of it’s significance. His winning the election signifies the country is moving well past the hate filled days of slavery, white pride and power. It instead lays the foundation for us to stick together and to know that we can and will prevail in the face of adversity.
My only regret of it all is that my grandfather didn’t make it 3 extra months in order to celebrate in the moment. I can imagine him now, tearing up and snotting with his tissue in hand while showing admiration for something he thought he’d never see in his lifetime.
America, we have a chance to do something special here. Barack preaches personal responsibility for all. Some think he’s their savior for their financial woes while forgetting that it was their bad spending and debt habits that got them there in the first place.
THAT’S RIGHT! It’s time for YOU and ME to become personally responsible for our actions. By doing so, first we must educate ourselves. We must know that prime mortgages are a precursor to failure. We must know that, “keeping up with the Jones” will have us as stressed as them.
So before looking for a handout with foreclosure help or jobless claim help, think about what got you there in the first place. It wasn’t Obama, IT WAS YOU!
Prime lending? You have to educate yourself instead of getting caught in the NOW moment.
Jobless? (again) You have to educate yourself instead of looking for someone to magically pick you out of a lineup in order to secure employment.
Of course there’s circumstances that go beyond this article where things aren’t so pronounced but then again, maybe they are. Maybe if we’d take personal responsibility those unpronounced things may not happen to us also.
Posted in Inspirational, education, goals, purchases | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 |
I was just sitting around thinking about finances and other things that randomly run past my brain when it occurred to me that throughout my entire debt free blogging I have no financial goals outside of getting (almost) debt free for ‘08.
More specifically, at the beginning of the year when I create my financial budget and distribute it to people, I usually have a round-a-bout number of how much we’ll have in savings at the end of the year. Last year, my ‘07 goal was to have $10k in the bank which I easily beat. I ended up writing checks totaling $20k check last year paying off most of our bills.
Last year completely drained our savings, and it took approximately 6 months to get out of tight spending mode. This year though, when doing our budget for the year we were on pace to have more than $20K in savings. Then I got laid off in March which put a damper on that projection.
With me taking a $15k pay cut this year, we’re now projected to have close to $14k in savings at the end of the year. Not a bad number but I’d like that to be better and it will (significantly) since we’re getting a lump sum in a few weeks due to my wife’s company being bought out.
So despite the lump sum payment we’re going to receive, I’d like our savings goal to be $13K at the end of the year. The way I usually come up with the number is, I take the projected savings we’ll end up with at the end of the year and subtract $3-5k. Since we’re in the 3rd quarter of the year It looks like we’ll be around the $13k range. If not, I may have to think of more ways to be creative with the budget in order for us to obtain that goal.
In the meantime, I’m working on tweaking my budgeting spreadsheet to be more user friendly. I’ll distribute it for ‘09 closer to when that time comes.
Posted in Generate income, Informational, Personal debt, goals | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 |
I sometimes get lost in my quest to become debt free and liberate my family from the debt monsters of the world while trying to change my family’s legacy. With that in mind, I’ve never thought about “How much money is enough”, until I checked my email today and saw the article topic staring right back at me.
Needless to say, I clicked the link and within the article there’s a 4 step process to figure out how much is enough. For me, I’m thinking I have a more simple formula.
Short Answer: Being debt free is enough money for me because without debt our lives tend to change. No longer are we FORCED to go to work on dreaded Monday’s. No longer are we bound by legal contracts to credit card, mortgage, and loan companies. Instead we can focus our attention on PAYING OURSELVES (which we should do anyways).
In the previous blog entry I wrote of a goal of mine. To be at a point to where I don’t have to work if I don’t want to. If we pay off our home and her student loan payment, I’ll quickly be at that point. The beauty of it is… after those are paid off, it’s smooth sailing. Income will be just that… INCOME!
But for the lazy (which I tend to be) here’s the 4 steps from the article:
Link
Step 1: List your top five goals or desires.
In contrast with the hundreds or even thousands of cravings and urges you feel each day, your deepest desires may include benefits to others and not solely to yourself, may be characterized by patience rather than a childlike urgency and may carry a sense of profound importance: “I yearn to do or have this before I die in order to feel truly fulfilled.” You may wish to begin by listing all the desires you can in 60 seconds and then select the five which most fit this definition.
Step 2: Put a price tag on each goal.
If your deepest desires include things like buying a home, you (or your financial planner) can fairly easily convert that goal into a monthly or lump-sum financial requirement. But if your goals include states of being — such as a desire to work half time and spend more time with your kids or volunteering for a cherished cause — you’ll need a replacement income source.
For these types of desires, list the amount of annual income you’d need to replace. Our rule of thumb is that you’ll generally need an investment portfolio equal to about 20 times your annual withdrawals. So if you’re hoping to have your investments cover $25,000 a year of expenditures, for instance, you’ll need to have or save $500,000 to cover it.
Step 3: Calculate your “enough for life” number.
By adding up the total of all the lump sums needed, you can calculate how much is enough for you to achieve your deepest desires.
Step 4: Create a financial plan to get there.
If your financial net worth exceeds your “enough for life” number, great news: You can stop worrying and live the life you most want to live. I don’t mean to be glib, but if you know you have enough to take care of your deepest desires, as well as your basic necessities and retirement savings, it may be time to stop chasing each extra dollar. Instead, solidify your sense of abundance by sharing your good fortune with others, through philanthropy (or just plain old-fashioned generosity).
Posted in Generate income, Informational, Inspirational, Personal debt, education, goals | No Comments »
Monday, July 21st, 2008 |
I’m constantly thinking of ways to be thriftier, cutback, or minimize debt in order to change my family’s legacy. So far all we have as debt (besides the mortgage) is my wife’s $31K student loan ($288/month).
I’ve been considering paying it off when I get a chance but is it really worth it to do that and drain my cash stash? Before we were getting the $40 gift I was on target to possibly be able to pay the student loan off middle to end of next year.
Now since we have this opportunity it sorta changes things. I’m 75% certain we’re going to invest it on a rental property for long term income potential. The way I look at it, the $600-$800/month income from a 3 bedroom home could go towards paying off the student loan as well as provide a means to reach one of my other goals which is to retire by the age of 40.
Not fully retire, but to make it to where my wife & I will not have to work or deal with the daily stress of working if we don’t want to. Basically, my plan is to get as much rental property as I can with cash and have them pay our salary to manage them. I’ve always said my 1st rental property would be the one I’d learn from my mistakes and I feel like it has taught me a lot to bypass obstacles on the next go round.
That’s why I believe in purchasing homes with nothing but cash. Of course, I had to get started with the first property and it was a great learrning experience and has a potential to be a great purchase later on down the line once the economy corrects itself. At the same time, the $180/month profit after paying the mortgage currently isn’t worth it. The profits just sit in the business account for maintenance in case something goes wrong with the property.
Currently, I’m stuck with the dilemma of should we move into our second home or stay put? Housing prices are at a great low right now and foreclosures are all over the place ripe fo the picking. However, we proably wouldn’t be able to sell our home and I’d rather NOT pay 2 mortgages. I think we’re ready to move but then again, I love our house and neighborhood. Nice quiet well kept cul-de-sac, no housing association rules, and my kids can play in the street without me having to watch for coming cars.
I feel like if we move, then we’ll lose a lot of that. One benenfit of moving would be that the kids could be in a better school district. Another would be we really need the space as we currently have 2 bedrooms upstairs and 1 downstairs with 4 kids living in the home.
Now that I think about it… It’s a no brainer… We’re moving.
I just don’t know when.
Posted in Generate income, Informational, goals, purchases | No Comments »
Monday, June 23rd, 2008 |
From: http://www.mymoneyblog.com/
I’m always flattered when anyone (online or offline) asks me for investing advice, but at the same time I’m very cautious about giving it out. And it’s not just the usual *I’m not a financial professional* legal concerns, but the fact that it’s hard to give useful advice in a few paragraphs or a 5 minute chat. Over time, I’ve been refining my “amateur, informal financial advice over coffee” speech. My goal is to give specific ideas but to keep it simple. Let me know what you think.
1. Put your money in a Vanguard Target Retirement Fund. These mutual funds are an all-in-one basket of different low-cost index funds. You get some US stocks, some international stocks, and some bonds. The mix is automatically adjusted for you. No, they might not be perfect, but they are pretty darn good and very simple to hold. I have specifically have told my own mother to open an account at Vanguard. I withhold any theory talk about passive investing because this is when most people’s eyes seem to glaze over.
Just buy the fund with the date closest to when you want to start making withdrawals. All lifecycle or dated funds are not made the same. The ones in my 401k stink, and I don’t even like the Fidelity Freedom 20XX funds.
The Vanguard funds do have a $3,000 minimum initial investment. Until you have $3,000, just stick your money in an savings account paying decent interest and with an automatic deposit system. I know it sounds nice to “start investing with $100″ (and here are some ways to do that), but honestly, if you don’t have $3,000, your focus should be more on saving money by spending less/earning rather than investing at this point. There is no need to rush.
2. Read a good investing book
Websites and blogs are great, but it is still very hard to replace a good book. They tend to be professionally edited, better organized, cover all the bases, and are easy to refer back to. I think the following books are great and are definitely worth the $10-$20 cost:
If you’re not convinced (perfectly understandable), first borrow it from the local library and then buy a copy if you like it. Read as much as you can!
3. Hey, no skipping ahead. Please do #2.
My friends ask me for advice. I say to read a book. Months later, most of them (not all) haven’t read any books but still want advice. Yes, I know, this involves effort. (Gasp!) Please, spend a weekend doing something that will dramatically increase your net worth in the future. If you don’t, then at least if you did #1, you’ll be ahead of most investors who pay too much money chasing hot stock tips or pay other people to chase hot stock tips for them.
4. Pay someone to do it for you
If it’s been years and you still haven’t read a darn book and don’t plan to, go to NAPFA.org and find yourself a fee-only financial advisor that you click with. Pay that person to keep you on track. If they are fee-only they are less apt to be biased on what investments they recommend. But remember, the person who will care most about your money is still you.
Posted in Generate income, Informational, Personal debt, goals | No Comments »
