Personal Finance and Money Management

Last week, CFB staff writer Robb Engen entertained and enlightened us all with a post on retirement, and specifically how young people should focus on making good financial decisions rather than spending all their time thinking about retirement. This is a good article that’s worth a few minutes of your time if you haven’t already read it. Oh, you have? Fine then, moving on.

Robb makes some assumptions in his post about future stock market returns. I’ll let him explain further:

Investment returns are expected to be lower in the long term.  No longer do we see projections of 12-15% returns.

He goes on to predict a 6% return will be the norm going forward.

I’m curious as to why this is. Robb is

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When someone is going to rent any place either for personal living or a business has to think on many grounds. This decision turns even more difficult if he is going to buy some place. For both the decisions, one most important thing is how much money he has? He has to examine some financial issues.

Estimating Your Finances

In the start you have to calculate the amount you posses and estimate either it is enough for buying or renting new home. For renting down payment is the main issue. It includes advance initial payment and security deposit. In case of buying new home you must see the mortgage payments you need to pay each month.

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On Monday I talked about my experiences moving from Quicken to iBank. In short, iBank is a solid option, but it’s not right for me. I’m a bit of a power user when it comes to tracking investments, and the reporting features (and lack of a true portfolio view) were deal killers for me.

So… I next turned my attention to Moneydance from The Infinite Kind and crossed my fingers that I wouldn’t need to go further down my list of Quicken alternatives. Unlike iBank, which has a 30 day free trial, Moneydance has a free trial that is limited to 100 manually-entered transactions.

Given that Moneydance costs $50 (though you can easily get a $10 discount; more below) I wasn’t too crazy about this highly restrictive trial. A limit o

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I recently met with new clients who happen to be religious people. The couple is very nice. In fact, they are wonderful people. But they struggle financially. Why? Do they have lousy jobs? Nope. They are great earners. Are they big spenders. Not really. They live very frugally except for the one item – a private, religious school. They strongly believe in sending their children to religious school at all costs – so they do.

You know the first question that Joan (the wife) asked when they came into my office?

“Should we refinance our mortgage to pay for our childrens’ education?”

They showed me the tuition they were paying to send their children to elementary school and I just about fell off my chair. The first

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