spending plan

Whether you are a millennial, retiree or someone somewhere in the middle, the year's end can do some serious damage to your finances. While the concerns are cross-generational, there are certain things more applicable in December depending on your age. As the year winds down, many Americans stress...

It's amazing the allure of ignorance. People gravitate toward a life of "winging it" to escape the realities of the necessity of budgeting. Whether you make bank or barely enough to eke by every month, escapism is a Band-Aid that just delays the festering. It doesn't prevent...

From Sunday School classes to middle school counselor-led assemblies, employee workshops to in-services and retreats, the lessons of humility have been pounded into the majority of American society's subconscious at all stages of life. However, once the conferences are over, the retreats long left...

While some may argue investing strategies are rather straight forward and mathematical — and they wouldn't be incorrect — what is often glossed over are the formulaic changes inevitably implemented as different stages of life are hit. Just as other priorities in life change...

Regardless of how old you are, there's something you should be doing to prep for retirement. From basic planning strategies to hunkering down for the last lap, keep track of where you are on the journey. It starts much earlier than most people assume. Before 25 While advice for young adults...

When you've found yourself in deep debt, the kind that can physically make you ill when you think about your income versus your spending habits, it's easy to cajole yourself into a state of submission. By actively ignoring the issue (too much outflow for too little income) and passively...

Debt happens to many people, but some face a debt situation unlike the "average" graduate who carries loan debts and has a plan for paying them off, or the homeowner who has a mortgage payment and a car loan. Seemingly insurmountable debt, however, is a different beast. This debt is the debt that...

Employment has entered the retirement conversation in a new way. No longer does the topic only come up in an adverse existential way or through the negative (“I no longer am employed,” “employment was a part of who I used to be”), but it has become a continuation of the...

Many times, budgets become sidetracked by good intentions. A nephew could use a few thousand dollars this semester, the house down the street that you've always dreamed about is up for short-sale, there's a beautiful new car "at a great price." However, with proper guidance and prodding, one of the...

Whether you call it a budget, savings strategy or spending plan, keeping track of what you spend money on throughout the month and year is an essential part to gaining and keeping financial security. While not all of these items will be relevant to every budget, they are likely to help jog your...

For whatever reason, there is likely to come a time where you will have to breach an extremely personal — and therefore often equally uncomfortable — conversation with your parents. Akin to "the talk" parents give their children, "the money talk" children eventually have with their...

So much has been written and theorized about Millennials and money; juxtapose that with fears of under-investing in the market and government-assisted retirement programs depleting at a rate that cannot keep up with population growth under current taxation, and the present and future for...

While this holds true for everyone developing a spending plan/savings strategy, the crux of the matter is that for “Sandwichers” – the current demographic of adults with aging parents in need of financial support and their own young-adult children who aren’t yet...

As Financial Literacy Month comes to an end this week, it's a perfect time for an honest financial conversation. Regardless of who you are, how many years you have under your belt or what your financial situation is, you have absolutely phenomenal capabilities to be financially secure. Be...

”Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.” –Aristotle How we verbalize a concept makes that concept concrete. The connotations of our phrasing can turn identical situations...