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.
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.
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.
Over the weekend I have been pondering over investment. We haven’t invested in a new account since opening and funding our first peer-to-peer lending account with Prosper. Ever since I bought a certified preowned BMW, three weeks back, I was having it in my mind constantly; What if I invested the money instead? How much money had I lost actually,as it was not only that I had to get away with $25,000 cash, but I lost potential income on the money.
OK, no more ranting about the car, although it was not a brand new car. Let’s focus on the investment aspect of my finance now. I have taken a few quizzes on the net, to determine the type of investor I am. The purpose was to gauge self progress and to check whether I am the type of investor I wanted to be at this age. Those survey’s all unite to declare me a risk tolerating investor, which I would have told about myself without taking those quizzes anyway.
It’s almost summer over here in south Florida, I can’t believe days are so hot already. Just a couple of weeks back, I had to wear a sweater while coming back from a late night party. Nonetheless, our garden is enjoying the weather. The seeds I sowed early March was not growing much beyond tiny seedlings till beginning of April. Now they are growing thick and fast
We are growing Basil, Cilantro, Eggplants, Tomatoes, Peppers and Lettuce this season. Since we are renting a second floor condo it’s a tough job to grow so many vegetables in a limited 7′ X 12′ space. I have grown vegetables and flowers in our patio since last few years. But, not so many in a single season. It’s kind of self test of my skills in gardening you can say.
We haven’t thought about this before untill we came across an article on Yahoo finance which listed things to carry and not to carry in the wallet. I don’t belive in some of the things they mentioned, like carrying a blank paper to note down few essential things when out on the road.
We carry smart phones and that come with notepad utility to take notes and obviously the phone numbers.
