Mouli's thoughts and musics over two decades
JD over at getrichslowly.org has a greatest hits of 2007 summary of his blog. Awesome summary. Thanks JD. Cross posting here for my audience here as well, and quoting JD:
I’m pretty happy, too. This past year has been amazing. I’m out of debt. I’m making money with my writing. And I seem to have found a way to help other people achieve their goals. I can’t ask for more than that.
Way to Go JD. Click here to read his original post.
Getrichslowly.org has a link pointing to a great NYT article, on how the little spending stuff does add up. My take on this is that, it is not that, the little spending should be avoided – defenitely not. But we should budget for that.
I am quoting exactly the same paragraph that getrichslowly quotes:
I [totaled] the extra and unexpected costs that had cropped up throughout the year: $4,900 for new windows, $3,100 in co-payments for my appendectomy and $1,500 in car repairs.
I deducted those chunks from our total income — and was horrified to conclude not only that some money was missing, but that someone had apparently absconded with $10,000. There was no way we could have spent it.
Was there?
I ran through the numbers again with my husband, and he reached the same conclusion: approximately $10,000 was missing in action. That was the vacation we didn’t take, part of the new roof we might need, some terrific wine we didn’t drink. Now we really wanted to know where that money went.
It wasn’t long before it showed up. After sitting there for a while at the kitchen table, stunned, my husband said, “Thirty dollars.”
He explained his theory. One day, we were about to visit friends and had offered to pick up dessert and wine — which came to about $30 . The next day we had a birthday to attend and a prescription to pick up, and we spent about $30. We took out the calculator: $10,000 divided by 365 is about $27.
It wasn’t that we spent $30 mindlessly every day, but once we started digging for the “we’re not really spending any money” money — a trip to Lowe’s, new shoes for my son, iTunes downloads for my husband, a new work outfit for me — all the little things fell into place.
Check out J.D’s post here.
And check out the NYT article here.
Wendy Boswell of Lifehacker has done it ! The Boswell family has apparently been planning this for a while. They both had side business which were making money. They had decided on a threshold, when reached, they would quit their daily jobs and get full time on their side businesses.
Wendy has documented the stuff that they have been thinking about, and what anyone should think about, when making a change (or thinking about a change).
Check the post here.
Getting Finances Done has a very nice write up on zero-based budgeting.
The basic concept here is that, all money coming in will be spent either by ‘actual’ purchases, or on paper. In other words, every penny/paisa/cent should be accounted for on paper. If it goes into savings, or into investment, wherever, it goes on to a spreadsheet row. Total income – total exp = 0 Check out the post here.
Yeah, people talk about it all the time. There is whole feed-crunching website on personal finance (pfblogs.org) etc etc. But I found this one article in motley fool to be incredibly succint and to the point. Check it out, and build confidence that, it is never too young or too old, to save enough to retire early.
[link]
Check out finance.google.com. It is still in beta. A clone of finance.yahoo.com, with all the ajaxy goodness that comes with all google products. My rating : very good. You can track your portfolio with it. It keeps tracks of your last few stock searches.
One very cool feature that I noticed was the ajax/flash graph which tracks the stock price. On the side of this graph is the list of press releases from the company under study. When you point to each of these press releases, a pointer shows up in the graph, giving the reaction in the stock prize when that press release went out. I think this is very cool. Often times, you will see important press releases going out, and the stock prize going up or down as a reaction to the release.
Check out finance.google.com
Amazingly productive sunday for none other than our own No-Credit-Needed. Very encouraging post. Check it out.
The big man of PF blogs AllThingsFinancial has started an amazing 24 day tutorial on how to get your finances into order, and start saving/investing etc. These tutorials are a collection of good links from other PF blogs. So there is a lot of variety.
Today is the fourth day – basics of investing [link]
A very cool article on what to do after an early retirement. We say that we want to do a lot of things. But once after retirement, most folks just couch it up in front of the TV with a bag of chips. How not to do this …. .
The article says, that is based for people in the US, but on reading it, I think there are several nuggets of info that are common world over.
Guy Kawasaki has a fantastic list of things that is a must if you want to do a really good speech. I have not heard him speak, but he is famed to be a very good speaker himself. He says that it took him 20 years to get to the point where he is. The post is titled “how to get a standing ovation” very aptly. All of us would want something like that.
Lifehacker, in its infinite wisdom, has a post giving us ideas on how to find the best free photos on flickr. Searching for a nice graphic for your ppt, or your desktop wallpaper, or maybe just the event that you had missed while you were out of town. Scroll down to the comments and check out the first link – the commenter searches for nature photos – and yes he does find some very good ones.
Ramit is at it again, with his second installment in his personal finance makeover for 2006. I have got to admit that he is good. Check out some of the stuff he says about how important saving at a young age is. Highly recommended read. And if you havnt read this first installment read that too.
first article [link]
second article [link]
Remember Tew, the young college guy who was making money the enterprising way – yeah the milliondollar webpage guy. This was a guy who was selling small pixels of his webpage for $100. ANd his target was a million dollars. And oh yes, he did it – until yesterday, hackers cripped the website and asked for a ransom ! I think the site is back up now. Tew promptly informed the FBI, the smart guy he is. Good luck dude. I think it was a great way to have earned your money – you deserve to keep it.