Maybe paying down a mortgage can be an alternative to saving money if your confidence in "the market" and the ability of pensions to work as planned has been totally destroyed.
Paying down a mortgage at a low interest rate is foolish if we see growth as we have in the past two decades. However, if things get VERY bad it could be a wash. Hmm. How pessimistic are we feeling?
* paying rent is the major cause of not having enough money. If you can find away to avoid any rents it's worth it!
It is not always possible or reasonable to take any of this advice.
I know I won't regret a penny I spend on art commissions. The 401k could be a toss up. As always the standard advice applies (and is easy to say and hard to do if you don't have enough money)
* diversify: have a pension, savings, keep track of your Social Security but also buy a house or apartment if you can.
* Avoid things like bitcoin and gold unless you are an expert in commodities.
* Always look at reoccurring expenses cumulatively over at least 5 years.
anything else?
If you don't need the little item in a timely manner. If you can wait a few weeks aliexpress is much cheaper and it's literally the exact same plastic stuff from the same places... sometimes it's even shipped in the same box just with different people taking cuts of the product.
If you can't wait I understand that feeling of being trapped. I had some of the same worries.
This is the best idea I've seen for "what democrats should do" that seems like something they COULD really do. So, we should ask for it.
It's kind of basic. But it's not like we are asking them to tie themselves to a building or lie down in the road. They could do this and it would have a positive impact. It would remind people what these agencies are supposed to be doing and make it clear who is responsible for them breaking.
In line with the concept of this post I've decided I will spend half of the money I've saved on art commissions. They other half I will "save for retirement" which is a topic that gives me anxiety as I don't have a lot of confidence in this country holding together well enough for such planning to make sense.
There is a chance it could be a sucker move and I can't rule that out as glibly as I have in the past. To save money you have to have some confidence in your civilization.
Money saving and finance tips *can* be very effective... if you have some money.
And if you do, it is worth taking the time to see if you are using your money well. For example, do you spend a lot of money at an online retailer because it's "easy" to shop with them but, as of late, the quality and reliability of the products they deliver isn't worth the premium price? *waggles eyebrows*
It's kind of horrible how much money I've saved since dumping amazon.
They are trying to get rid of efile. A blatant hand-out to these firms.
A "financial literacy" course for working professionals who are doing OK financially and not worried about money (and thus probably could tighten their budgets in substantial ways) but with the understanding that 2/3s of the money recovered by improving their mortgage rates, cutting useless subscriptions etc. would be donated to practical material help for working poor people in their area.
Assigned as penance for anyone claiming that poor people "just need to budget better."
"spend less than you make" by definition can't work if you make less than is needed to cover your survival needs.
Shout it for the people in the back!
And every month millions of poor people manage to make it work* anyway. Stop a person in a grocery store and ask them "How much total are the items in your basket?" who do you think can answer that question with the most accuracy? To the penny.
*This is not something I am celebrating. To be clear.
I'm still trying to understand what it is that people think they never learned about taxes? What a percent is? How to read a table? Those are important skills.
Making up fake tax forms and slogging through them sounds like some kind of educational torture to me.
In a similar situation with not enough resources and two few students my goal was always to try to give them a taste of what I thought was missing from so much of their educational experience. Starting with the idea that they could create meaningful knowledge that their ideas are worthy of respect.
And I also try to share with them some of the joy that I find in mathematics. This is hard work and only when I had fewer than 18 students was it effective.
20 is too many.
I have worked with idealistic people who wanted to make education "more relevant" for students in inner city schools. They could see the kids were really NOT getting the liberal arts education & the power that comes with such an education. Thought "well at least I could teach them to budget better" These people also tended to think that poor people are bad at managing their money (I find the opposite is the case, poor people are experts at managing money, making it do more.)
The kids HATED it.
Also... what the heck do people mean by "how to do taxes" anyway? It's an *algorithm* How could that take more than 10min to understand?
When I see that meme what I take from it is that a lot of people remember the word "parallelogram" from math class and they don't know what the significance of it was or why they had to be so stressed out about it. They also recognize that taxes involve doing math. Maybe they suppose that it's through math that rich people pay so little tax?
Also, and I have thought about this, because I take education very seriously, making lesson plans on "how to do your taxes" for 8th graders (when you generally learn about parallelograms) sounds like such a horrible idea.
The kids would be bored out of their eyeballs. I do teach my seniors about things like banking, loans, reserves etc. but many "applied math" topics are boring and difficult to adapt into excellent lessons.
In some schools education is just ticking of boxes for topics. The classes are too large, the experienced teachers too few, the administration is too focused on switching textbooks every two years to "solve the problem" rather than cultivating schools as learning communities. Those who are most invested in teaching, leave and find places where they can really teach.
"I'm so glad I learned how do 'do my taxes' in school and not how to assess if an argument is true or false for myself."
Saw a post the other day: "I'm so glad I learned what a parallelogram is and NOT how to do my taxes in school."
Generally, people who say such things don't know what a parallelogram is OR how to do their taxes. They have been failed twice. They were presented with the signifiers of a liberal arts education but received none of the substance.
This isn't their fault and replacing alienating signifiers of a liberals arts education with signifiers "trades training" won't do what they think.
I really hate the concept of renting textbooks. Renting digital textbooks even more. When you take a course you are supposed to have what you learn forever. Naturally you won't remember it all, it won't always stay active in your mind, but you should be able to return to your notes and the textbook and "rehydrate" the knowledge. Discover that you can now connect it to all of the things you have learned since.
When the textbooks are rented? I feel like something deeper must be broken.
Yeah, I've also seen my work and the work of my peers being sold on there by other people.
I share my work with any teachers I'm working with. But, also I like to customize my lessons to each class. I make changes every term, posting new material refined for the needs of the particular students and informed by what I've seen in the past.
But maybe I could look at it again. I have some bad associations with that site but I don't remember exactly why.
Oh, and it is a little thing, but Royden still has signatures. It's a properly bound book. A REAL book, if you will.