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Older homeowners have more options to tap into the equity in their homes: reverse mortgages. The key to using a reverse mortgage is to understand how they can help your cash flow, often providing income to offset expenses in retirement, or enabling additional spending for a vacation getaway or recreation vehicle.
With a reverse mortgage, instead
Continue reading Reverse Mortgages to Improve Cash Flow or Provide Spending Money
This is a smart home-buying move that can save you big-time money on your mortgage debt if your FICO score is between 700 and 760.
Your FICO credit score plays a major role in determining the interest rate on your mortgage. If your score is 760 or higher, you’re in line for getting the lowest rate. But
Continue reading Mortgage Debt: Before You Buy a Home If FICO Score Not in Top Range
Prosperity is having sufficient assets to support your ability to live life for fulfillment and enrichment.
Here are some of the risks that can affect your trek to prosperity.
Spending
The most successful wealth managers know that they must be disciplined in their spending. It’s easy to let expenses increase as you make more and more money. If
Continue reading Risks to Your Wealth and Prosperity
A drastic step to help your cash flow and learn about your spending lifestyle is to declare a want-free month.
A want-free month is a one-month period in which a family spends money on necessities such as bills, food and shelter.
The purpose is to witness how much money is wasted on items that provide no real
Continue reading Declare a Want-Free Month to Help Your Cash Flow and Explore Your Spending Lifestyle
One form of debt, credit cards, when used irresponsibly, can have devastating effects on your finances:
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
One of the biggest issues is a mental issue. When using credit cards, it is easy to rack up the balances because you don’t actually see the money going anywhere. It’s really easy to spend
Continue reading The Credit Card Debt Trap: Ease of Use, Carrying a Balance, Small Payments
We’ll focus on two types of steps for the “live within your means” part of the trek.
Earning Steps
understanding how we can add value in what we do
career moves we can make that will improve our income
strategies that we can use to find a job
creative ways to improve our income stream
Spending Steps
understanding the factors that affect
Continue reading Trek IV: Special Situations: Live Within Your Means: Introduction
The activity: Explore how to improve income and expenses.
The trek: Improve cash flow.
The terrain: Prosperity Quadrant I (negative cash flow; negative net worth).
Difficulty rating: Easy
This portion of the trek has activities to improve income and expenses.
Activities to Improve Income
understanding how we can add value in what we do
career moves we can make that will improve our income
strategies that
Continue reading Cash Flow: Improve Income and Expenses
In America today, carrying some debt is unavoidable, and even desirable, for most households. But between mortgages, car payments, and credit cards, many Americans find themselves over their heads – unable to dig out from under a growing debt burden that consumes an ever growing portion of their resources.
Assessing Your Debt
How much debt is too
Continue reading Getting out of Debt – Assess, Budget and then Reduce
It’s important to manage expenses, and look for ways to reduce spending, when you are retired. In retirement you have fewer options to improve your cash flow. Your income is typically static in retirement. Also, to make your money last you need to be careful on how much you draw from your net worth and wealth
Continue reading Tips to Reduce Your Spending in Retirement
Here are some things that can get you started on your trek to prosperity before you’re 20.
1. Get a Job
Learn the value of work. It doesn’t need to be full-time, but an after school job in which you work 10-15 hours a week can be a great way to learn the value of work, and
Continue reading In Your Teens: Earn Income, Save, Budget and Control Debt
Even when one’s investments are doing well, facing retirement is stressful.
The good news is that, with the proper planning, a person can still retire without putting their nest egg at risk. Here are five last-minute steps pre-retirees should take before collecting their gold watches.
Adjust Your Asset Allocation
Whether retirement is six months away or three years
Continue reading Retirement Planning – Steps for Pre-Retirees
These are some spending areas where there is a good chance that you can save money, freeing up cash for debt reduction or savings.
Look at buying used instead of new. Cars lose much of their value the minute they are driven off the dealer’s lot – losing thousands of dollars in value in their first
Continue reading Reduce Spending – High Probability Spending Categories Where You Can Save Money
Household wealth in the U.S. increased by $2.67 trillion in the third quarter as stock prices and home values climbed, putting consumers farther along the path of recovery from the biggest destruction of assets on record.
Net worth for households and non-profit groups rose to $53.4 trillion from $50.8 trillion in the second quarter, according to
Continue reading Household Saving to Stay at Higher Levels Due to High Debt and Low Net Worth
A quick way to begin reducing your expenses is to look at daily and recurring spending. Here are a few categories where ongoing expenses really add up when annualized.
1. Coffee – According to the National Coffee Association, the average price for brewed coffee is $1.38. There are roughly 260 weekdays per year, so buying one
Continue reading Reduce Spending by Cutting Back on Daily and Recurring Expenses
Reduce your spending, freeing up cash from your cash flow to reduce your debt, getting debt relief and keeping you moving toward prosperity. Save money and improve your lifestyle – for free!
Free TV and Movies
At Hulu.com, you can watch full episodes of more than 300 shows from NBC Universal and Fox stations, including The Simpsons,
Continue reading Free Products and Services to Improve Your Lifestyle
Two quotes from October, 2007 help us to appreciate the carefree spending mindset that gave us the Great Recession.
The following underscores the lack of saving and the expansion of debt that occurred. This was well-known two years ago, foretelling the mortgage defaults that would begin to occur shortly and the deleveraging that would begin one
Continue reading Saving, Investing and Spending – Understanding the Great Recession
Robert H. Frank, a Cornell University economist, wrote a book called “Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class.” In it, he examines how the rise of an uber-class, with its extreme earning and consuming patterns, is hurting middle-class Americans.
Wealth Gap
First, a look at the wealth gap: Between 1949 and 1979, U.S. incomes
Continue reading The Wealth Gap and its Effect on Spending and Saving
This step on your prosperity trek…
This is an action step for families that are planning to retire.
This step will improve cash flow and preserve net worth by estimating your retirement expenses.
Difficulty rating: Moderate
The starting point for building a lifetime retirement income plan is to anticipate your retirement expenses and determine which are essential.
The task of
Continue reading Trek IV: Enrichment and Fulfillment: Enjoyment: Retirement: Define Your Income Plan
Your prosperity trek has a destination. By discovering your destination you lay the foundation for establishing your financial goals.
Identifying financial goals, along with knowing your risk tolerance and time horizon, will help you to determine your investment asset allocation.
Financial Planning and Goals
A key element of the prosperity trek is having a defined destination.
Having a clear
Continue reading Trek IV Prosperity: Set Financial Goals
This info from New Zealand is applicable no matter where you live. We have common human traits that encourage spending and the borrowing that promotes it. This from New Zealand’s Dominion Post:
Household debt could be cut by 20 per cent if people did not try to keep up with neighbors, stopped buying on
Continue reading Household Debt – 3 Steps to Reduce it by 20 Percent
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