Easy Change

Selling your house sucks. At least that is my view after seeing my parents struggle in various situations to sell their house. I work with someone who is very smart. He doesn't believe in real estate personally because he has also come to the same conclusion independently -- selling your home sucks. And in short, I agree with him now. That said, they need to sell. Why? Many baby boomers are in a similar situation where for many many years, they paid their bills dutifully and then continued to pay and live a nice lifestyle until they realized at the end of their working years that there was not all that much money available to handle things that needed to be paid for, particularly if they stopped working. Social Security to the Rescue? So, we'll just bank on social security? Not a great plan in my option. So at this point, we're back to more traditional methods of handling your retirement. Trading up in houses over and over and paying off an expensive house with h...

So, with a ton of time behind me on this blog I have decided that it is time to finally take the last plunge toward becoming debt free in 5 years. I know that this is not a terribly new idea in terms of personal finance but I think that it is a good thing to think about and a good goal to have. At this time, I continue to have a car payment which is a result of driving my old toyota corolla for about 10 years and then finally junking it this past summer at about 180K miles when the A/C stopped working and the expected repair bill would top 1000 dollars. Since there was some money in the checking account, I decided to buy a new car. One major theme that I would like to discuss this coming year is managing cash flow . I have always been conscious of this topic but I was especially conscious of it this year because I wanted to make sure that adding the car payment would not impact me too much. So, with a small downpayment, I took a loan at zero percent interest for 5 years. At this p...