How are you doing with your retirement savings? The most important first step is to start making contributions to your retirement savings as early as possible. Using a retirement calculator, if you contribute as little as two hundred ($200) dollars a month at twenty-two years old, you will have one million four hundred thirty ($1,430,000) dollars ...
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How to Take Control of your Life
Control is subjective! Control is the power to influence or direct people’s behavior or the course of events. Taking control of your life is much more personal and involves the financial, personal, social, physical fitness, work and personal relationships and career portions of your life. Are you one of those people who just complains about things ...
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Determination Beats Everything Else!
Determination beats everything! Determination is a personal quality that makes you continue trying to do or achieve something that is difficult. In other words, determination is simply not giving up! “The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ...
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Does a Spending Freeze Work?
A spending freeze is when you stop spending money for a period of time. You could lock up you credit cards and cash, avoid the mall and just stay home. How long could you go without spending money? When the federal government has a spending freeze, they just maintain a certain level of spending. They may tie spending to GDP growth or per capita ...
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What is your Legacy?
My legacy is not money! As I get older and things change, I think about what I may leave behind. Legacy is an amount of money or property left to someone in a will. It is much easier to leave money and property to your heirs. When I was growing up, I wanted my parent’s time, unfortunately they were always busy. In order to spend time with them, I ...
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Measure Twice and Cut Once!
Measure twice and cut once is an old proverb that is still relevant! It means one should double-check one’s measurements for accuracy before cutting a piece of wood; otherwise it may be necessary to cut again, wasting time and material. It also relates to all of life’s decisions! Often, you do not think through all the consequences of your actions ...
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10 Steps to Financial Security
What is financial security? Financial Security is having sufficient resources to support a standard of living now or in the future. What does this mean to the average person? A good working definition may be having enough money to cover your current and future expenses. Everyone has a different definition of what is financial security because our ...
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Car Free in Los Angeles
Yes, I will be car free in Los Angeles in three years. Why am I writing about it now? I am taking the first step to be car free in Los Angeles. I will retire in the next three years and have no need for two cars. Los Angeles is a very much a car town. Los Angeles used to have one of the best public transit systems in the country, but that was ...
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Summer Vacation Is Over!
Summer is vacation time for families! Most of the world goes on holiday in August every year. Students travel during the summer because they are off from school. For the last fourteen (14) years, I travel overseas during the summer. When students return to school, their teachers usually use vacation experiences as a subject for a composition or ...
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Start Thinking Outside the Box!
Thinking outside the box is one of those metaphors that really need explanation. Thinking outside the box means to think differently, unconventionally or a new perspective. Some business consultants challenged their clients to solve a “nine dots” puzzle which required a creative solution. Often we are caught up with rules or conventions to solve ...
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