HEALTHCARE
Healthcare costs are killing our finances, and our futures.
Politics aside, the healthcare costs in the US are criminally expensive, dissuading many to seek the care they desperately need.
In 2009, then-professor Elizabeth Warren co-authored a paper about the cause of bankruptcies. Medical debt was high on the list, and many people, including the now-senator, have used that to claim that the number one cause of all personal bankruptcies was medical debt.
That claim has been toned down a bit by further research, but medical costs are still elevated far beyond those of other industrialized nations. …
CLIMATE FINANCE
How politicians went from actively attacking the problem to merely managing expectations for the end of the world.
Below is a response I wrote on Medium, talking about America’s overall response to climate change.
If anyone pays attention to environmental news, the key word went from “sustainability” to prevent climate change to “resiliency” to protect from its effects.
Now we’re using “adaptability” and “accommodation” since we’re finally realizing that a) we’re way past the point of no return and b) the effects of climate change will be bigger than any response or preparation we can muster.
It’s a political bait and switch, using semantics to try and keep ahead of the public’s realization that they were duped for…
Intolerable working conditions are finally not being tolerated.
If you’ve been following any economic news lately, you will have hear about the so-called labor shortage being faced by America’s companies the past few months.
Story after story shows owner after owner bemoaning the lack of workers available for their open positions.
What’s funny is that they should have seen this coming for months, as labor issues were set to persist for much longer than anything related to the pandemic.
What many companies are starting to realize is that the shortage is not in labor, but rather jobs with good pay and decent benefits.
What the Labor Shortage Isn’t
The labor shortage is not…
Buy now. Pay later. Damn the consequences.
Layaway is a relic from long, long ago; when credit cards were rare and people bought things with (gasp!) actual cash.
Oh, the humanity!
You can be forgiven if you thought layaway had met its demise in this digital age, but alas, it is making a comeback.
Bigly.
What Exactly Is Layaway?
Readers of a certain age are likely familiar with layaway. It was definitely a staple of my childhood, especially in the months leading up to Christmas.
For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, let me lay down some knowledge the 1980’s.
Layaway is simply paying for something…
FUNDAMENTAL FINANCE
Or just another hyped up personal finance topic?
One of the most vital pieces of your personal finance journey is establishing an emergency fund.
We touched on this subject briefly when discussing savings accounts, but there is much more to discuss than simply, “save $1,000.” There are three basic questions to answer when setting up your emergency fund, and we’ll go through each one in detail.
- What is an emergency fund?
- How much do I need to save?
- Where do I save it?
What Exactly Is an Emergency Fund?
The title is pretty self explanatory, but here’s a formal definition. …
HOUSING
It has nothing to do with you.
I have written a few articles about the benefits of buying a house even in the current high-priced economy. Those articles ring true if you can actually afford a home, but what about everyone else?
Story after story has been published about potential home buyers, most often first timers, being out vastly outbid in less time than it took to even submit an offer.
The demand for homes is damn near insatiable, but why is that? Home builders constructed 1.3 million housing units in 2020, which sounds like it should meet the demand, right?
Let’s take a look at the…
HOUSING
What changed my mind so forcefully?
A couple of years ago, I wrote an article wholeheartedly in support of renting instead of buying a house. I had felt that way for quite some time and planned to continue renting for the foreseeable future.
At the end of the article, I spell out six distinct milestones that you should meet before buying a house. I only met two of them, stability and maintenance costs, before buying my current house just 18 months after writing that article.
So what happened?
In a word: COVID.
To be more precise, the titanic political, economic, and public health and shifts we…
Stop being a pushover and take control of your money.
How many times have you heard the following advice?
- Make coffee at home, as those $5 lattes are destroying your budget and your retirement savings!
- Find the cheapest gas with an app; it’s worth the time driving all over town to save $0.02/gallon.
- Buy in bulk from Costclub, since single servings are for suckers.
All of these are protective in nature; failed attempts to hoard the money you have.
And all of them will make you poor.
You need to go on offense, find the big wins, and fight against the powers that be who are conspiring to take your…
This week saw a wide range of articles here at Money. Daily. We added a new entry to our Climate Finance series, with an older story about the updated IPCC assessment getting some great feedback weeks after initial publication.
3 Ways to Pay Off Your Mortgage Early
I just bought a house in May, so I’m at the very beginning of a 30 year repayment plan. While I know that paying extra on my mortgage payment will save me time and money, I didn’t fully realize a) how big the impact was and b) just how little money is necessary.
Fortunately, Daemon Littlefield wrote a great article showing…
FUNDAMENTAL FINANCE
How to spend your money on what you really, truly want.
When you think of budgets, you probably think of some soul-sucking, life-draining exercise of tracking your spending history down to the penny, then seeing if anything is left.
That’s what it used to be.
That’s the way I did it for years in my Excel sheet.
But that’s not what a budget is.
A budget is actually forward looking, with you assigning a “job” to every dollar you have. You are telling your money where to go, rather than having it dictate what you can or can’t spend.
So let’s dig into how to actually take control of the money…
Adam Parsons
Husband, father, engineer, author. | 4x top writer. | Editor of Money. Daily. (https://bit.ly/3hGfEzF)
