A Personal finance blog for saving money and earning more and thus having a better life
Confidence can only come with knowledge and skills to put that knowledge to good use. When you are financially confident you can afford to live worry free. A confident spender knows how to make the choice between thing A and thing B. Similarly, a confident investor has a fair idea about risk and return that could arise from a particular investment. So in order to be successful in managing finances, you need to be confident with your abilities.
This post is from a guest author Benjamin Davis is the man running the show on From cents to Retirement. While doing his Ph.D., he developed CFS and fearing he could not work much longer, he decided to create passive income streams to be able to retire early. His future goals including owning 100 rental homes in the next years and turn his blog into a reference blog for early retirement, inspiring others with his own story. Enjoy the post
I was born in Portugal, to an Italian and Canadian family. My family worked hard for me and my brother to go to college, so we always valued education in the family. In 2012, I decided to do my Ph.D. abroad and having multiple offers in hands, I eventually decided to go to Germany. I took a research position which would allow me to do my Ph.D.
Everyone needs pampering, and everyone likes to feel appreciated. After 7 years of marriage, every once in awhile I take SMB, my wife, for granted (especially since I started blogging). I thought she accepted me putting numerous evening and weekend hours into blogging. But, she didn’t, she thinks OCAAT is my second wife!
Also, my frugal ways don’t really match with hers. We were raised in contrasting lifestyles – I never had plenty of things in my life, whereas she got whatever she wanted. We know that marriage is a bond of love with mutual compromise, which keeps the bond.
This is my experience with HP laptop computer replacement. I always had HP laptops, some fascination with HP you may say. The previous one, HP Pavilion DV 5600, was dying after 6 years. I needed another one as the blog wouldn’t have otherwise survived. I don’t blog from work laptop and I can’t think of typing posts from my iPhone.
I ordered another HP, this time a Pavilion g7 notebook, the monstrously big for a laptop, via HP.com site. As if to celebrate the new acquisition, I did set up a home office too. The office was set up over the course of the weekend, the laptop arrived the following Monday through FedEx.
Happy new year readers! This is my first published post in 2015. Hope you had a wonderful start to this new year. May this be your most successful and productive year. As they say, you start with an empty 365 pages book, so make sure the start-up or the preface is good for the entire book to be a good read.
I had one of the laziest last few days since Christmas. We went to India just after thanks-giving. Attended a gala family marriage ceremony. Came back tired with few extra pounds. Still trying to lose that excess. This was supposed to be a vacation, but ended up more tiring than regular work weeks.
I took a leap of faith and bought our home, our first home. In a series of posts I’ll write about the buying experience, the lessons learned and best practices. in this article I am going to write about mortgage loan shopping, and how did I shopped for mortgage loan comparing 10 different banks, sitting in my office cubicle.
I heard stories on extensive and hectic mortgage shopping that involves going around banks, making phone calls to bankers and what not. Even my colleagues had to go through hours and hours of research and travel to get the best mortgage.
Well, my method searching only lasted for 1 hour. I made no calls and received 10 calls from bankers on my cell phone.
Here I am again with another personal story. This is about our small 2 BHK apartment. Over the last couple of months an urge to buy our first home started to develop in me. All my friends, even the ones who came to this country from India are now home owners. Even my sister-in-law is a home owner too, in Houston. Lately were questioned by many about it. They even started making guesses about our financial situation, or the lack of money.
This is a strange situation to be in. It becomes very difficult to explain people who ask the same question multiple times. They simply think paying rent is waste of money. Some even calculated the amount of rent we paid in last 8 years and thus the money we wasted. Yes, we paid rent without building equity on a property of our own. but we did save on things we would otherwise would have spent money on.
This post is inspired by JD Roth’s post, who indirectly (and unknowingly) inspired me to start this blog. Even the name of this blog was inspired by JD’s earlier blog “Get Rich Slowly”. Coming to the point,since we love to travel, I thought ending the year with a note on our travel performance would be a good move. And doing so, I can be somewhat more personal to you. In summary, 2013 was a good year for us with respect to travelling. We went to as many as 5 places in last 12 months!
Amazing view on New Orléans Swamp tour
I get 28 days of paid leave in a year, so managing 5 destinations to travel to is not a bad performance, right? Usually we travel to our home country, India, every two years, and when we take an India trip, most of those 28 days are used up. We are planning our next India trip in Oct-Nov 2014 so, 2014 is unlikely to be a good year for travel.
This is second post this month about gardening in the patio. earlier I wrote about winter care for potted plants. In this article I’ll tell you how to start a patio garden with minimal cost. We didn’t spend more than $10 when we started living in this country.
Are you currently without a yard? Maybe you live in New York City and you’re lucky enough to have a patio. Or, for the rest of us, perhaps we do have a yard, but don’t want to take the time to develop a large garden. Then a patio garden might be perfect for all of us! Let’s take a look at some cheap ways to start and maintain our garden on the patio.
While we spend much of winter keeping warm indoors, plants growing in pots in your patio/balcony can have a tough time coping with the cold weather. In this post I’ll talk about few of the methods you can try to safeguard your plants. Thus helping you to avid the cost of replanting, re seeding or buying a brand new plant.
We live in an apartment, we have two patios to place our pots. At any point of time we have more than 10 pots with flowering or fruiting plants. Even during winter as winter in south Florida is like fall months in rest of the country. For us container gardening is a year round pleasure.