Tag Archives: fix your finances

Breaking the Emergency Fund Rules | Fix Your Finances

Once you get out of debt, it’s time to build an emergency fund of 3-6 month’s expenses. How much to keep in your emergency fund depends on things like your job security, insurance, income sources, how many people you’re supporting, and much more.

In the video, we talk about how we don’t really have an emergency fund, but more of an “opportunity fund.” Normally, you should never spend your rainy day savings on anything that isn’t absolutely necessary. We tend to break the rules 🙂

What’s your emergency fund story?

Why Get out of Debt and Other Questions | Fix Your Finances

Last week’s video about how to get out of debt was well received, but there were a few questions people had about paying off loans.

Most importantly, why should getting out of debt be your number one priority? In addition, we answer the questions:

1. What if I’m upside down on my car loan?
2. Would you stop investing while you paid debt?
3. What about debt consolidation loans?

If We Woke up in Debt | Fix Your Finances

How would we get out of debt if we woke up one day with student loans and a credit card balance? By taking extreme measures to cut spending and earn extra income.

We discuss everything from cutting up our (hypothetical) credit cards to selling our excess furniture and gadgets on craigslist. Although it’s easy to stand on the sidelines and say “that’s what I would do,” we hope this is a help to someone out there.

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!