If your traditional bank’s savings account yield is less than impressive, many online banks, community banks, and credit unions offer high-yield savings accounts with better interest, terms, and incentives. Pick the one that’s right for you. Source

UFB Direct is a subsidiary of Axos Bank, a diversified financial services firm that administers deposit accounts and credit products for everyday consumers, small businesses, and commercial enterprises. Anyone with a U.S. address can make deposits and apply for loans. UFB Direct has a focused but competitive lineup of deposit accounts, including savings, checking, and Source

When money is tight, groceries are one of the first areas where you can save a lot of money fast. You don’t have to overspend to feed your family well. With a little strategy and an intentional shopping list, you can stock your pantry with cheap, filling, and versatile foods that help you cut down … Read More about 40 Cheapest Grocery Items to Buy When You’re Broke The post 40 Cheapest Grocery Items to Buy When You’re Broke appeared first on Budgets Made Easy.

You’re constantly falling off the bandwagon when it comes to reaching your financial goals. They seem so big that you’ll never reach them, and you just can’t remain focused. Sound familiar? Over the past couple months, I haven’t been my usual highly-motivated self. Instead of working ahead and paying attention to my bottom line, I’ve been slacking. Recently, I realized why. These last two months of chaos have lacked structured goals, so I’m essentially wandering […]

An old friend called me the other day and while catching up, we got onto the subject of investing. With all the uncertainty in the world, with artificial intelligence and large language models constantly evolving, and with market valuations as high as they are… what’s an investor to do? Where should we be putting our money? You can make a case for almost anything. The market is overvalued and so buying the S&P 500 when the Shiller PE Ratio is at 40 feels insane. The mean ratio is around 17. But the market has been performing well! And has performed well even at such lofty ratio levels! Add to that how AI and LLMs are upending the world. I do not envy the position high schoolers are in right now when deciding what to do with their lives. Law and coding do not seem like fields where you will have a good time as an entry level employee. While it feels uncertain, one thing that we forget is that the future is always uncertain. The market is overvalued? Invest anyway. The economy looks weak? Invest anyway. AI is taking over? Invest anyway. But you must take action in spite of that uncertainty. We won’t know what the stock market will do in the next week. Or month. Or year. The Fed will make it’s decisions, the markets will react, and maybe we will enter a recession. Maybe not. The media has been talking about a recession for two or three years, but it has yet to materialize. Or impact the stock the market. But in the long run, we believe it’ll go up. Which is why it’s still smart to make contributions to your retirement, even if the PE ratios are insane. To hammer this home, I want to show you two charts: First, there’s always a reason to sell. (Or not buy.) It comes from Ritholtz Wealth Management and shows how historically there’s always a reason to sell your stocks. Bad jobs numbers. Fear of recession. Pandemic. It’s a non-stop stream of bad news. And, honestly, it’s quite compelling. There are bumps along the way. Sometimes big ones. But notice the S&P 500 chugs along up and to the right. This next chart comes from A Wealth of Common Sense and shows the return of the market over different time horizons. It shows your annual rate of return based on when you started investing (the column) and how long you waited (the row): If you invested in 2000, you had negative annualized returns for six years before turning positive. If you invested in 2008, you had four years of negative returns before turning positive. Those are big bumps. But the table is overwhelmingly green. And the red chunks are during periods of massive upheaval – the dot com bubble and the Great Recession. The pandemic hardly registers a blip! Now may not be the best time to invest in the stock market. Maybe you should wait until

Thanks for all the comments and tips on my last post about our upcoming trip to Washington DC and NYC! I’ve compiled all the suggestions and plan to use many when we travel! I realized I hadn’t mentioned a timeframe – we won’t be going until the Spring. Hopefully by then the government shutdown will be resolved! Thanks again to everyone who reached out and left a comment! Today, I wanted to talk about budgeting for home improvement projects. Since moving into our house just over 5 years ago, we’ve made it a goal to do one or two small projects each year (usually $2,000 or less). Past projects include adding astroturf to our backyard, installing solar screens to help with electricity (and protect us from the Arizona heat!), and replacing our too-small water heater with a tankless option. These were done gradually across time, and usually paid for with a “third paycheck” month, so the cost didn’t disrupt our regular budget. That system has worked well, but lately I’ve been wondering whether we should intentionally set money aside for these projects each year. We already have a house “emergency fund” for major issues like an HVAC replacement or roof repair, but I see that as separate from smaller planned upgrades. One part of me thinks – “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Why complicate something thats working? The other part of me thinks – “What if we want to take on something bigger that isn’t an emergency?” The thing that comes to mind is replacing our downstairs flooring. Currently it’s a mix of tile and carpet and both are in pretty rough shape. We have several cracked tiles (from the home settling) and the carpet is pretty beat up from dogs and kids. I’m not rushing out to make any flooring changes right away (frankly, the price tag scares me!), but it’s something I think about – especially if we plan to stay here another 5 years (which is our current plan). When I did some googling, I learned there’s no “one” answer for how much people spend on home improvement annually. This one article suggests the average is about $9,000 per year. Then I googled what Dave Ramsey says. I’m not a 100% Ramsey-follower, but his debt aversive thought process appeals to me. According to Ramsey, no more than 25% of your budget should go toward household expenses, including mortgage, property taxes, insurance, and any home improvements or upgrades, combined. Using that as a guide, we have some room to start saving for future projects, if we want. So now I’m curious – what do you do? Do you plan and budget for home improvements that occur regularly across time? Do you live with things as-is and then tackle everything before selling? With my first home, we did almost nothing until the end, when we spent thousands fixing it up for sale. It would have been nice to enjoy some of those upgrades while we still

Managing money effectively is an essential life skill, yet many people find budgeting to be a daunting or tedious task. Fortunately, technology has made personal finance easier than ever before. With an explosion of mobile…

Dear Kristy, I just wanted to say that you have truly changed my life… Messages like this make my ears perk up. Despite having last heard from this particular reader about a decade ago, I remembered them. Back then, they had just discovered FIRE, and peppered us with questions about savings, investing, taxation, etc. Chief among her concerns was that she earned $60,000 a year and lived in an expensive city in the USA. Was […]