Today we will discuss cash flow. Before we do that we need to review your spending plan. Your spending plan has two main parts: income and expenses. We do break them down in the spending plan, but let’s keep it simple today. Cash flow can be positive or negative. Positive cash flow means that you have more income than expenses. This is a very good thing. Negative cash flow means that you have...

We have a very close knit neighborhood and group of friends. Some of our friends have dinner groups. This is where four families of similar size get together to cook meals for each other. Each family takes one night a week and cooks and delivers dinner for the other three families. This way, out of four days you are only cooking one night. We were invited to join a dinner group this past month. I...

I was up early this morning thinking about savings. We had an incident this past week that made me very grateful that I had a rainy day fund. This triggered my thinking about saving for emergency fund, rainy day fund and my children’s education. I don’t know if anyone has gone through what I went through when thinking about this, but I was overwhelmed. I am going to put out some rough numbers...

Higher education is becoming very expensive. That means if you have children and want to have money set aside for them to go to college you need to start saving now. There is a great program set up to help with saving for higher education. They are called 529 plans.  These can be sponsored by states, state agencies or educational institutions. Why a 529 college savings plan? I believe that I am...