(Mar 30) I think that conventional wisdom says that you should stop paying into your retirement accounts until you pay down large amounts of debt...or at least credit card and consumer debt. One thing I need to figure out is what happens if we stop paying our minimum 5% into my wife's Fidelity account. That money is ...    Read       (2 Comments)

(Mar 26) For those of you that share the faith, I pray that this Easter is a blessing to you and your families. Kstew    Read

(Mar 25) I think one of the reasons that people have a hard time paying down debt is because they don't know exactly how much they owe. I think that we subscribe to the theory that most debt is bad...no such thing as "good" debt. I've been listening to Dave Ramsey quite a bit and I like ...    Read       (2 Comments)

(Mar 25) One thing that I love reading is how different people are building personal wealth. It is really encouraging for me to read CNN Money's "Millionaire in the Making. As if I don't need the extra motivation, I notice that most everyone that is building wealth is tracking their expenses very carefully. As I mentioned in ...    Read     (1 Comment)

(Mar 24) I've come to the conclusion that we need to increase our cash flow if we are going to pay down debt faster. Since we just had a baby 5 months ago, it probably is not going to happen with increase workload for either of us. I guess that means we're going to have to decrease ...    Read

(Mar 23) Right now we have very little money in our savings/retirement/investment accounts. Currently there is about $14,000 in our combined investment accounts. A very small amount, but as we reduce our debt, we will max our our contributions and look for other ways to save for the long-term. As I mentioned in a previous post we ...    Read

(Mar 23) FrugalGirl has a great post about gas prices. In our area, we are now paying close to $2.50 per gallon...yes, that is regular gas that I pump myself. Most of my gas (at least for work) is reimbursed at the federal rate of 40.5 cents per mile. When the feds wrote this tax it was ...    Read

(Mar 22) I'm really struggling to find a way to budget effectively. We do use Quicken to balance our checkbook...for the most part it is pretty accurate. I haven't reconciled for about 5-6 months, so it could be a little off. I'm really motiviated right now to move our finances from RED to BLACK, but don't really ...    Read       (2 Comments)