Search results for emergency fund
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Posted
Sep 29 2009, 02:59 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
A whole year's worth of food for one person for only $799.99? And that's after a $200 discount. Is this too good to be true, or should we order?
Well, there is one small catch. The offer is for 78 one-gallon cans of dehydrated and freeze-dried food, plus a wheat grinder. Now, that's an emergency fund you can eat.
Actually, the ad exposed us to a movement we weren't very familiar with. Called "food storage," it's about amassing enough food on hand to survive common disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes, or "economic crisis" or for "religious reasons," according to a Web site called Food Storage Made Easy.
While most people would consider enough food for a few days or a few weeks to be a sufficient emergency supply, these folks think in terms of a complete year.
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Posted
Jul 02 2009, 05:23 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar:
An acquaintance from my previous career wrote to me recently asking about the steps I took when I made the switch to working at home:
It's official: I'm ready to get out of here. I'm tired of working here and I have a lot of people lined up to hire me for home catering and cooking. I'm sure you did a bunch of planning before you made the leap. What exactly did you plan?
I know at least one other former co-worker who is contemplating a similar move into a freelancing gig, though his plans are decidedly less clear at this point.
What exactly did I do during that transition period? I started making a list and soon realized that there were several things I wish I had done. Before I knew it, the e-mail had ballooned into a guide that I thought might be useful to other people.
Here are 15 things I did (or wish I had done) during the months leading up to my transition to working for myself.
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Posted
May 15 2009, 07:41 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog The Dough Roller.
A co-worker recently sent me an article written by Helaine Olen entitled, "The end of personal finance -- Decades of advice turn out to be so much garbage." Published at Slate's The Big Money site, the article received kudos from an unlikely source, BoingBoing.net, in a guest post by "Life, Inc." author Douglas Rushkoff.
The article begins with Olen recounting how, in 1997, a financial adviser she was working with to write a financial-makeover feature dismissed the notion that gold was a good investment. Gold was trading at $300 an ounce and now trades at about $900. As a result, she views her decision to leave gold off the table as a mistake. (It wasn't, but we'll come back to that in a moment.)
Olen than proceeds to argue that personal finance is, or at least should be, dead. She attacks stocks and the "efficacy" of the market because it was down 40% last year. She describes the personal-finance industry as a "self-help complex," and argues that the idea that people can manage their money on their own is a lie because prolonged unemployment can burn through six months of emergency savings.
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Posted
Apr 22 2009, 07:52 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Paul Michael at partner blog Wise Bread.
Suze Orman is telling us to pay ONLY the minimum on credit cards. Wait! What?
You're not seeing things. No, this is Orman's latest advice and it is a complete 180 degrees from her usual advice. Why? Two words -- the economy.
I did a double take when I walked past the television while my wife was watching Oprah, and Suze was a guest on the show. I'm used to hearing the same advice from Suze -- pay off credit card debt -- so I thought I was hearing things when I heard her say "only pay the minimum" and build your emergency fund.
I sat down and started watching as the audience gasped and cheered.
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Posted
Apr 21 2009, 11:45 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
He's 68, has $280,000 or so in retirement savings, no debt, and wants to take his wife of 40 years on a $30,000 trip around the world. Denied, said Suze Orman. He can't go because he doesn't have an eight-month emergency fund.
We'll have to take the word of "Moneymonk" and one of her readers on this because we didn't see Suze's show. But the scenario she recalls and Suze's advice didn't sit well with Moneymonk.
"Suze, retirement is supposed to be enjoyed. This is their time. Let them have it," Moneymonk wrote. "Suze, whatever happened to PEOPLE FIRST?"
What's really taken personal-finance bloggers by surprise is Suze's about-face on paying off credit card debt, which until recently was her top priority. She used to say: "Your first step is you have to get out of credit card debt. After you're out of credit card debt, you need an eight-month emergency fund."
She now says people should pay only the minimum due each month on their cards until they have that emergency fund in place.
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Posted
Apr 17 2009, 07:50 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar.
Since I started The Simple Dollar, friends, family and neighbors have come to me regularly to chat about money issues. Most of the time, the questions are pretty simple and the answers come quickly. What intrigues me about these conversations, though, are the little things that people say that reveal bigger truths about their experiences with money.
One refrain that always seems to come up is what I like to call "weekday misery, weekend pleasure." To put it simply, quite a few people who speak to me hate their job. They absolutely loathe it. Yet, because the job pays substantially better than anything else available to them, they stick with it.
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Posted
Mar 30 2009, 01:06 PM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Jim Wang at partner blog Bargaineering.
I remind our fair readers that the second episode of the "Personal Finance Hour" will be on at 6 p.m. Eastern, 3 p.m. Pacific today. Please join J.D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly and me as we talk about emergency funds. (Get Rich Slowly and Bargaineering are both partners of MSN Money's Smart Spending.)
We will discuss how we've set up our emergency funds, answer reader questions, and take calls. If you have a question but don't feel like calling in (or can't), please e-mail me before the show and we'll try to answer it on the air.
To listen, you can call (347) 327-9144 or go to the show's page here and hit "play." To ask a question, you can go to the show page and ask in the chat box, or if you're on the phone, hit "1″ to light up the switchboard. There are other ways to get our attention, like Twitter (@jdroth, @bargainr, or @pfhour) and AOL instant messenger, but the phone is the best way and chat is second. (If you're on the phone and want to tweet one of us to get our attention, that's cool too.)
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Posted
Mar 17 2009, 01:00 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
In years past, the MetLife Study of the American Dream found that people defined the dream as financial security plus a "never-ending chase" to have more and more stuff.
Perish that thought. It's a recession victim. It appears that our collective sense of entitlement has been replaced by a realization that we're just hanging on by the skin of our teeth. A press release about the study said:
A disturbing 50% of Americans say they are only one month -- or only two paychecks -- or less away from not being able to meet their financial obligations if they were to lose their job, and more than half of these, a startling 28% of the total respondents, couldn't survive financially for more than two weeks.
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Posted
Mar 13 2009, 07:02 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar.
Lauren wrote to me, lamenting her difficulties with an emergency fund:
I want to have an emergency fund, but every time I think about the amount of money I would have to save, I talk myself out of starting. Instead, I find something else to spend the money on and then something happens and I regret not having that fund.
Over the last couple months, I've bought a big pile of DVDs to cure the winter blues. I've easily dropped hundreds of dollars on them. A few days ago, my car broke down and the bill was hundreds of dollars.
Can you help me get started with an emergency fund? I feel like I'm missing something.
At almost the same time, I spied an interesting comment over at Lifehacker:
My goal is the eight-month saving expense plan that Suze Orman always talks about. To have enough saved up to FULLY pay all expenses for eight months (is) really difficult to do, but as long as you keep the focus on it, once it's accomplished, it'll be such a good emergency buffer.
It seems that, in this economy, a lot of people are thinking seriously about their emergency funds. Frankly, I think that's a very good thing. An emergency fund is a key part of a healthy personal-finance situation. The biggest problem, though, is that it's intimidating -- eight months? That's a lot of savings.
Trust me, it's not as hard as it sounds. Three years ago, my wife and I were nearly bankrupt. Today, we have an emergency fund that's actually larger than Orman's recommendation. We'd be fine easily through the end of the year if things fell apart. You can do this. Here's how:
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Posted
Mar 04 2009, 10:22 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
People are selling their used books at unprecedented rates. For instance, used-book buyer Powell's Books says it hasn't experienced this amount of business before.
"The Portland, Ore.-based company has bought used books from customers for more than 30 years, but said Wednesday that it has never matched the volume it has seen in the past six months," The Associated Press reports. Its online business has been particularly brisk since it began offering cash for books through PayPal.
Cash is good, particularly if you're unemployed or don't have an emergency fund.
What's the best way to sell your old books? Pinyo at Moolanomy compared numerous online options. The best news for starving students: Compared with regular books, used textbooks go for a lot.
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