Invariably, every few months, we get a wave of posts talking about “what would you do if you won $x,xxx,xxx?” Or, what you would do with a smaller windfall. And invariably, a majority of the people talk about how they would save the money. And in some cases they are right. But, most of the [...]
In our house, we have a gas fueled furnace for heat and an electric fueled central air unit. So, as you can likely deduce, our gas bill is much higher in the winter months and our electric bill is much higher in the summer months. But, our bill hardly ever fluctuates. Why is that? We’ve [...]
Rob Stretch is the founder of VAbenefitblog.com, a new blog that keeps veterans aware of their benefits. Follow us on Twitter also @vabenefitblog. One surefire way to save plenty of money on a mortgage is to take advantage of one of the three government-sponsored mortgage options, whether it’s a VA loan for veterans and active [...]
Everybody makes mistakes. It’s just how quickly you discover them and if you recover and learn from them that makes the difference. Make a mistake and ignore it, and you’re likely headed for disaster. Learn from the mistake, and avoid making it again, and you just might save yourself. Recently, while catching up on our [...]
Several things have happened recently that have made me decide that it’s time to upgrade the way I track my finances. First, the software I currently use (Microsoft Money 2006) is no longer supported. At some point it’s not going to work anymore. Not for a while, but that combined with other factors says it [...]
As you’ve probably gathered, I’m a bit of a budget enthusiast here. It’s a budget that got our finances back on track and it’s a budget that keeps them headed in the right direction. Our budget tells us when we’ve overspent and helps us adjust to bring us back to balance when we have overspent. [...]
I dislike getting a refund from the government. I don’t have any good reason to give them an interest free loan, but any changes I make to my W4 don’t seem to make any difference. I keep getting a refund every year. This year, the numbers were really off, because we added a dependent last [...]
Personal finance isn’t all just about the best ways to save money and live frugally. There are other things to consider; other rules that should be followed. Some have absolutely nothing to do with saving money.Many of the posts here at Beating Broke deal with saving money, budgeting, and living frugally. On many occasions I [...]
Just what is reactive personal finance? It’s the management of your personal finance in reaction to events or situations as opposed to the management of personal finance in anticipation of events or situations. The best example of this is a budget. A budget is built and held to in anticipation of events in your financial [...]
They weren’t exactly forgotten, but unpaid all the same. Our habit for doing our budget and paying bills consists of throwing everything in a pile and then sorting through the file when we sit down to enter all the data for our budget into the spreadsheet. One of the first things we do is go [...]
