I remember growing up my grandmother having a trust and that it protected her assets (possessions). I had no idea what that meant or how it worked. The more I learned the more I knew that I had to make sure that my family was protected. We completed our first estate plan in 2010 and it was a great learning experience. We used an attorney that specialized in estate planning and I would like to...

I was reviewing some financial calculators I was going to implement into the website and decided to do a little experiment. I went through 5 different scenarios of saving for retirement. I did this for ages 20, 25, 30, 35 and 40. Each person was to get the same returns on their investment, have the same inflation rate, have the same retirement age and live for the same amount of time after they...

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...