A few months ago, I discussed the crossover point, the dollar amount you need so that proceeds from your investments exceed your living expenses. Here’s a visual example: In the above graph, the person is investing 30% of their income each year and receives a 4% raise each year. That person reaches a crossover point

Quite often, my wife and I find ourselves very thankful for the financial situation that we’re in. We’re healthy and of sound mind and we have the financial capacity to afford everything we actually need and we are able to live in a beautiful house with two healthy children. We’re lucky. One of our closest

I touched on this concept about a week ago when I discussed Maggie’s horror story, but it’s true – when one hand is doing the right thing while the other hand is making mistakes, you can end up in an even worse financial situation because of it. Take this situation that James found himself in:

After a weekend completely off of the internet and off of writing, I had some serious catch-up to do yesterday afternoon here at The Simple Dollar. I take this site pretty seriously as a hobby / side business, particularly as we move into a new house, and I want to consistently write high quality entries,

On Memorial Day, I always find myself reflecting on relatives and friends who have passed away. I try to think of the things they’ve taught me about my own life, my choices, and my values. Here are a few that are particularly relevant here. My paternal grandfather taught me that being frugal doesn’t mean being

I spent some time reading through the site recently and I realized how often I talk about myself and my own experiences on here, everything from my specific goals to my values and dreams, as well as a lot of the financial realities of my life. Now, given that this site focuses on personal finance

I’ve been asked so many questions by email about my 101 Goals in 1001 Days idea that I decided a follow-up post might be in order, because many of the questions have been repeated and they are rather interesting ones. Before you read this, I’d recommend looking at the original 101 Goals in 1001 Days

I admit to being an environmentalist, and a pretty “far out” one, too – I was raised with a Mother Earth News / Organic Gardening type of father who instilled a ton of basic environmentalism in me, and I try very hard to reduce my environmental footprint. Let me put it this way: one of

I came across this article at Grad Money Matters recently and it got me thinking about the question on several levels. First, what would I do with my money in that situation? This was the aspect that Grad Money focused on. For me, I’d do everything I could to set things up so that my

Over at Get Rich Slowly, J.D. wrote an interesting article about the relative importance of money and job satisfaction, which was itself a continuation of a pretty large online discussion on the topic: – The Brazen Careerist gives five reasons not to change careers – Paul Graham talks about how to do what you love

When a significant goal is reached, many people often feel the desire to celebrate in some fashion. However, I’ve often noticed that the “celebration” goes quite a long way towards undoing some of the good work of reaching the goal. Believe me, I’ve fallen into that trap, finding excuses to “celebrate” everything whether it was

While I was working on writing the essays for Goals Week, I kept getting excited to define some of my own goals, and so I finally took the initiative and gave the “101 Goals in 1001 Days” meme a shot. About “101 Goals in 1001 Days” I first became familiar with the 101 Goals in

We’ve all done it. We’ve set a goal for ourselves and simply failed to reach it. Sometimes we don’t even get close. What happens after that? We feel like a failure. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve failed at a diet, and I’ve chronicled my personal finance failures here in detail. It’s

Since we’ve covered microgoals, short term goals, and intermediate term goals, it’s appropriate to tie up this little series with a look at long term personal finance goals. What’s a long term goal? For most people, a long term financial goal usually involves a very large purchase equaling multiple years of salary (like a dream

Once our house is bought and furnished, our next goal will be focusing on a pair of vehicle replacements that will occur roughly five years from now. We would truly prefer to pay cash for both vehicles if at all possible, so that means we need to start saving now to reach this goal. What’s

As I mentioned earlier this week, right now we are focused on saving for a number of short term goals, mostly related to properly outfitting our house once we move in. We currently have minimal furniture and minimal appliances as well, so we are going to have a lot of needs when we first move

When I was just starting out my professional career, I had all sorts of crazy dreams: an amazing car, an amazing house, and so on. I believed my life was headed in such a direction that such things were an inevitability and that they would just simply come to me. I wanted them badly, but

A big part of my day-to-day life is defining and accomplishing microgoals. Microgoals are things that I can achieve in one week or less if I am diligent about it, and they’re quite useful in many aspects of life, including personal finance. Let me give you a pair of examples. Right now, I have two

Earlier today, I wrote about techniques for defining personal finance goals that you can reach by making them as specific and as realistic as possible. So, how do these techniques really apply to some real world personal finance goals? I took five of my own goals and spent some time working them out to make