Personal Finance

Hearing the name floated around a few other personal finance blogs and having it personally recommended to me, decided it was time to try You Need A Budget.

As a Quicken user, I’m comfortable with the program’s functions and a little reluctant to switch to something new. Recently I’ve become more frustrated with the program’s budgeting capabilities, and considering the strong recommendation came from another Quicken user, I decided it was worth a try.

There are Four Pillars which You Need A Budget is based on.

1. Give Every Dollar a Job

2. Save For a Rainy Day

3. Roll with the Punches

4. Stop Living Paycheck to Paycheck

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Those of us in our twenties have been called a lot of things by our elders, but never have we been referred to as “Generation Earn”.

Kimberly Palmer, senior editor at US News & World Report and author of the Alpha Consumer column, decided she was fed up with the negative labels associated with young professionals and wrote a book to debunk the myth!

Finally… an advocate for those of us on the other end of the perspective.

Generation Earn

The Young Professional’s Guide to

Spending, Investing, and Giving Back

My interest piqued just from the table of contents. Broken into only three sections, the book still covers a wide spectrum of ideas, and current ones at that.  Job Juggling, Not Your Parents’ Retirement, When Parents Are Landlords, Lessons in Modern Frugality, and The New Rules of Philanthropy to name a few.

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Remember when Cliff Notes were the lifeline to all those classics you had to read in school? It was a novel idea – taking complex topics, like literature, and breaking it down into quick and easy to understand guides. Then emerged the “Dummies” series whose tagline is “Making Everything Easier” and covered how-to guides from computers and software to religion and spirituality.

Now a new series has hit the market, The Skinny On, which plans to bring the Cliff Notes concept into the 21^st Century. Based on the idea that our brains adapt to changing environments, the books are tailored to match the “faster, more staccato, bottom-line and visual reading experience” of the digital era.

The author, Jim Randel, graciously sent me two copies to review:

Networking: Maximizing the Power of Numbers

Creativity: Thinking Outside the Box

Just as the website claims, it only took about an hour to read each during my Thanksgiving roadtrip.

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After our wedding, one of the financial to-do’s* was consolidate insurance. When the agent asked me if I could ballpark the replacement cost of everything we were insuring I jokingly responded – somewhere between $100 and $100,000 should cover it.

Unless you live in a hurricane zone or have a taste for the exquisite, property insurance doesn’t regularly cross our minds. Once you own a home it becomes more of a consideration, but people still fall short in estimating the true value of what they actually own.

Starting out, we have very little, and often discount those items. Seems silly to insure our used futon doesn’t it? Maybe this ties into the disposal mindset we treat our possessions with, but I think it has a lot more to do with lack of documentation.

There’s tons of suggestions for tracking our property from maintaining binders of original receipts to making video documentaries of your residence, but I’ve absolutely fallen in love with this FREE software solution – What Your Own Home Inventory.

From the program itself…

This software will enable you to create a room-by-room inventory of your home. Having an up-to-date home inventory will help you to:

• Purchase enough insurance to replace the things you own
• Settle insurance claims faster
• Substantiate losses for your income tax return

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