Author Archives: Mike And Lauren

Analyze Your Spending | Fix Your Finances

How to use mint.com’s “trends” feature to analyze your spending and fix your finances! We are only looking for problem areas in our budget this video, not tackling creating a budget from scratch.

Next week we’ll start outlining sample budgets depending on where you are at financially. It was too much to fit in one video.

We also share a couple of quick tips for calculating how much your savings could be worth in 10 years:
Mr. Money Mustache Article https://goo.gl/H54L0e

Monthly Expenses: MULTIPLY by 173
Weekly Expenses: MULTIPLY by 752

What Is Your Financial Situation? | Fix Your Finances

Before we can begin to talk about budgeting or investing, we need to get an idea for where you’re at financially. The easiest way to do that is to start tracking your spending for a month.

You can do that by hand, but there are websites and software that will do it for you. We use https://mint.com. We have been using it trouble free for over 5 years. It’s tracked and categorized almost 6500 transactions!

While we’re waiting for data to accumulate, you can calculate your net worth to see where you stand financially.

NOTE: If you are a viewer outside of USA, you can purchase a program called “You Need A Budget” (YNAB) that makes manual expense tracking easy.

Fix Your Finances – Series Introduction

Our most requested video topic is basic personal finance. In this new video series we want to cover the fundamentals of managing your money with simple explanations that anyone can understand.

Topics will include:
Budgeting
Credit Cards
Living Below Your Means
Getting Out Of Debt
Emergency Funds
Insurance (Health and Life)
Taxes
And many others!

Let us know if the comments which topics you’d like covered so we can add it to the list!

Vlog Fail #1

 

 

Our goal this week was to show you where we work. Unfortunately, we did a really bad job vlogging. Lauren had a difficult time filming at work and Mike just had a bunch of clips with no context or explanations.

We decided to post it anyways, because WE’RE ON VACATION!!!

Remember, no live show this Tuesday, March 10th.

What Is Your Emotional Threshold When Investing?

 

A recent Jim Collins post (we know, big surprise) got us thinking about what our emotional threshold is for investing in one lump sum.

In 2012 Vanguard did a study that showed lump sum investing was more profitable than dollar cost averaging 67% of the time. With results so clear, shouldn’t investing large sums of money be easy?

Jim’s Case Study:
https://goo.gl/8nJCyl

Jim’s Dollar Cost Averaging Post:
https://goo.gl/jxydjb

Vanguard Study:
https://goo.gl/VGzpFO

Everyone Thinks About Money

People often assume we obsess over money. That’s actually pretty far from the truth. In fact, we propose you might think about money more than we do.

What’s more important is that you approach every financial decision from a place of strength and control, not weakness. In the video, we discuss a few reasons why our lifestyle lends itself to that mindset.