Easy Change

I'm going to Grad School! For me, in my mid-thirties was the last time I would have expected to be doing this. After over 8 years at my job, I realized that I needed to learn new technologies and also revamp my skills. One might ask why not use Coursera or some other free tools to learn new skills (and I will talk about those in a separate post). In particular there are three items that I am trying to address with grad school: 1. Name Recognition/Degree Currently I hold a Bachelor's Degree of Computer Science. Unfortunately, the school I went to is a well regarded liberal arts university where only BA degrees are offered. In my field, many people want to see a BS. And I personally understand why the difference matters. My education certainly had plenty of theory and programming, but being a liberal arts degree (a double major with a foreign language), I feel strongly that this puts me head and shoulders above many people who are poor communicators in IT, but behind those wi...

Well, the payoff's finally complete. With the advent of electronic banking, I've been paying many of my bills using my bank's online bill pay. I like the convenience of knowing exactly when the amount is going to hit my account. This is easy to plan since most of my bills that are paid this way are actually paid as an electronic debit instead of a check. However, for some institutions this might not be possible and therefore a check will be cut. So, for your situation, mileage may vary on online bill pay. But when it comes to my student loan/credit card payoff which happened this week, it is a great feature. I scheduled the payment and I knew exactly when the money would hit my account. Now the bill is completely paid off and has given me even more wiggle room in terms of my measurement of free cash flow on a monthly basis. The key here is what to do with the free cash flow. Currently, it appears that I will be doing some sort of a three-way split with the funds. I plan on ...

This article over at FreeMoneyFinance really got me thinking about my student loan debt. The fact is that I have three different student loans right now (and that's after consolidating several years back). But the reality is that I still regret not paying more down on them. I know that I didn't totally mess up, but I feel like much of the struggle that I am in right now (and it isn't as bad as I am making it sound) is that I didn't get rid of the loans when I should have and instead I spent too much money on "stuff". I don't really regret anything that I bought, but I feel like I should have been able to retire that debt sooner. The lessons I've learned, and I hope to pass on to other people that are taking student loan debt are the following: 1. Find out how much money you will owe. (do this while you are in school.) 2. Figure out whether the interest rates are fixed or variable. 3. Check with your financial aid rep to find out what loans are federall...