The Value of Mentorship
What do you get with you shadow an experienced real estate agent for two years, prior to joining the business? Ask Anne Green. Anne is…
The post The Value of Mentorship first appeared on Century 21®.
What do you get with you shadow an experienced real estate agent for two years, prior to joining the business? Ask Anne Green. Anne is…
The post The Value of Mentorship first appeared on Century 21®.
Welcome to October’s business report where I show you how I made money online and traveled full-time last month. It’s time to look at this month’s update and see how I did. If you’re new to Making Sense of Cents, you may be wondering why I would want to publish my business report each month. This […]
The post How I Made Money Online In October appeared first on Making Sense Of Cents.
Robert Farrington from The College Investor recently went to bat for one of his readers. “I feel like my advisor isn’t steering me in the right path,” his reader told him. “When I mention [index funds] to him, he changes the subject or diverts to other topics.”
Farrington ran the numbers and discovered that his reader’s financial advisor stood to gain $7247.50 in commissions by recommending expensive mutual funds. But that’s not all. “When you add in the expense ratio, this portfolio is costing the investor $11,004.71 in year one,” Farrington writes. “And potentially costing the investor $1,879.21 or more per year after!” (And that doesn’t include any commissions and fees created by rebalancing the portfolio periodically.)
As an experiment, Farrington looked at what it would take to move his reader’s existing portfolio to low-cost index funds. The results were shocking: “By simply investing in a low cost portfolio, we were able to reduce total costs from $11,004.71 to just $176.60. That’s a 99% reduction in costs.“
This reminds me of a story from my own life.
Rental properties are my favorite way to invest money! Over the years, I have bought more than 30 residential, commercial, and single-family rentals, which may not seem like that much but some of my properties have more than 60,000 square feet. I have been in real estate for almost 20 years now and I have … Read more
There are several different types of annuities, each designed to fill a different investment niche among investors. Variable annuities offer all the benefits of annuities in general, but they also enable you to earn investment income for both stocks and bonds. Much like target date funds, they represent something of a “fund of funds” offered […]
The post Variable Annuities appeared first on Good Financial Cents®.
If you have read my posts on annuities in the past, you know that I’m not really a big fan of them. But deferred income annuities are an exception. They provide safety of principal, reliable investment returns, and an income for life â all of which is a hard combination to beat anywhere else. In […]
The post Deferred Income Annuities – How to Never Outlive Your Money appeared first on Good Financial Cents®.
It’s back to basics month at Get Rich Slowly! Today, we’re going to take a l-o-n-g look at how to use credit cards wisely. Believe it or not, credit cards can be a useful tool — so long as you don’t fall into debt.
For a long time, I thought credit cards were evil. Starting in college, I abused credit cards. As a result, I ended up deep in debt. Those two decades of debt sucked, and they led me to believe that credit cards were dangerous.
Well, credit cards are dangerous — but they’re not evil. Credit cards are a tool. Like any other tool, credit cards can be used to build or to destroy. Just as you’d treat a chainsaw with respect, you need to be careful with credit to avoid hurting yourself. If you use credit cards wisely, they can actually give you a financial edge!
Because this is a long article, I’ve create a table of contents so that you can jump to the section you need. (Or, you can read the entire thing, of course.)
Table of Contents
- How credit cards work
- Why use a credit card?
- Essential credit card skills
- How to use credit cards wisely
- How to choose a credit card
- How to dispute credit card charges
- How to cancel a credit card
Survey of Consumer Finances. The latest study, from 2016, found that:
Clearly, lots of Americans continue to struggle to use credit cards wisely.
That said, not everybody who uses credit cards goes into debt. In fact, the Survey of Consumer Finances shows that over half of Americans use credit cards without going into debt. They treat them as a convenience.
True story: Last year, I went into a bank to apply for a new travel credit card. During the half-hour process, I chatted with the banker. “We banks don’t like people like you,” he told me. “I’m sure you’re a nice guy, but you pay your bill every month. We don’t make any money on you. Fortunately, 90% of people who use credit cards suck with money!” He told me banks are willing to lose money on the handful of folks who use credit cards wisely because they make so much money on the people who abuse them.
One of the biggest benefits of homeownership is the ability to build wealth over time. However, you only stand to make a profit after you sell. Using a strategy called house hacking, you can potentially generate passive income from your property to put toward your mortgage, household expenses, or even other investment opportunities. House Hacking… View Article
The post What Is House Hacking? first appeared on Total Mortgage.
With foreclosures flooding the market, it’s “standing room only” at real estate auction sales these days. “Foreclosure…
Annuities, come in all shapes and sizes, but fixed indexed annuities are one of the more interesting types of annuities. They provide a unique combination of protection of principal, as well as the ability to earn investment returns that are higher than what you can get on fixed income investments. The perfect investment? No investment […]
The post Fixed Indexed Annuities – Participation on the Way Up, Protection on the Way Down appeared first on Good Financial Cents®.