Category: TuesdayTip

Tuesday Tip Jar: Side Hustlin’ with Four-Legged Friends

Dave Johnson1 Comment

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Welcome to another “Tuesday Tip Jar” where I will share awesome savings and financial tips as I find them. I might not have something for you every Tuesday, but when I do, you’ll find it here!

If you’ve got a financial tip you think others would benefit from, please send it to me via my contact page at the top of the blog!

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My wife and I absolutely love animals. Currently we own 1 Black Lab (Sylvester), 1 Chiweenie (Hoppa), 1 cat (Rico), 1 tortoise (Stormy), and 2 Hermit Crabs (Shelby and Bubba.) Previously we’ve owned lizards, snakes, bunnies, a pig, and many other dogs and cats. By the time I’m done writing this post we’ll probably have a guinea pig, because they are cheap and my daughter won’t shut up about getting one. I think we’ll also make the leap and get chickens next year. We’re all very excited.

Fun Fact: My 11 year-old son did *not* in fact name his pet tortoise after the pornstar/stripper/Trump buddy, Stormy Daniels, but thanks for asking! (I get asked a lot.)

As my wife and I looked for awesome side hustles to bring in some extra scratch, one of the options mentioned to me was Rover.com. Rover is a site that allows two things:

  1. It allows others to watch your pets for you.
  2. It allows you to become a pet sitter for others!

Their plan is relatively straightforward. My wife (who will be primarily responsible for the animals while I’m at work) filled out a simple questionnaire that asked things like if our yard was fenced, what dogs and cats we have, and what size of dogs we’d like to take care of. It took about 15 minutes to answer fully, and after adding a few pictures of her, our pets, and our home, we were off and running!

(You can sign up for sitting cats as well, which we did.)

The site allows you to offer the following services:Read More »

Tuesday Tip Jar: Get Your Kids Excited About Investing

Dave Johnson1 Comment

tipheader-1

Welcome to another “Tuesday Tip Jar” where I will share awesome savings and financial tips as I find them. I might not have something for you every Tuesday, but when I do, you’ll find it here!

If you’ve got a financial tip you think others would benefit from, please send it to me via my contact page at the top of the blog!

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My Dad spent every penny he earned.  If he earned 10 bucks, he spent 10 bucks. If he earned 1,000, he spent 1,000. If he earned 10,000…

You get the idea.

My in-laws are similar. They didn’t put any money into savings for most of their adult life, and struggled to make ends meet for many years.

So my wife and I were raised with that mindset, and thus spent many years ignoring savings, living for the moment, and in general being pretty silly with our income. The result is a mountain of debt, this blog, and a promise to ourselves that we will break this cycle with our kids.

My kids don’t get allowance. We’ve always been of the mindset that their allowance comes in the form of friends staying over and eating our food, them going to movies, us renting movies at home, vacations, and all of that sort of stuff. They do chores, but we explain to them that it’s all just part of being in this family, and working alongside mom and dad to keep things in order.

What we have done extensively however is helped them to hustle. They sell things in yard sales, on Facebook, or via side ventures, and they make a fair amount of money that way. My son just recently self-funded the purchase of a iPhone (a generation or two old), and some AirPods. Hell even I don’t have AirPods!

The agreement we have made with them however is when it comes to saving and investing. Our formula for them works like this:Read More »

Tuesday Tip Jar: Get Involved with the Online Financial Community

Dave Johnson2 Comments

tipheader-1

Welcome to another “Tuesday Tip Jar” where I will share awesome savings and financial tips as I find them. I might not have something for you every Tuesday, but when I do, you’ll find it here!

If you’ve got a financial tip you think others would benefit from, please send it to me via my contact page at the top of the blog!

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Family is important. A good strong family will support you when you are down, cheer you when you are up, and tell you candidly when that all-natural deodorant you’ve switched to isn’t doing its job as well as you think it is.

With some things however, you may not always feel comfortable discussing the matter with your family. For me, finances fall squarely into that category for a few reasons. Unless it’s my wife, who I blabber to about finances until I’m blue in the face.

So when my wife finally told me I needed to go at least 30 minutes without saying “401k,” “savings,” “bills,” or “debt,” I knew I had to find an avenue for discussing financial strategies and seeking others who could aid us in our journey to financial independence.

Luckily we live in a day and age where there are a million ways to find people willing to talk with you about any subject you could possibly imagine. Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, Forums, and on and on. There are lots of options for finding like-minded folks, and I’m already blown away by how supportive the people in these virtual communities can be.

Last week an awesome reader to the blog told me that I should check out a group on Facebook called ChooseFI. I had never heard of it before, but he told me that it was a podcast as well as highly supportive Facebook group dealing with helping people to achieve their goals.

Awesome for sure, but let’s roll this back even a bit further…Read More »

Tuesday Tip Jar: An App for Teaching Your Kids to Invest

Dave Johnson1 Comment

tipheader-1

Welcome to another “Tuesday Tip Jar” where I will share awesome savings and financial tips as I find them. I might not have something for you every Tuesday, but when I do, you’ll find it here!

If you’ve got a financial tip you think others would benefit from, please send it to me via my contact page at the top of the blog!

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Quick Tip Jar Follow-Up: A few weeks back I posted about a government run service that allowed you to search for and reclaim lost money. At the time I was somewhat skeptical, but today I got two checks in the mail for both of my claims!

So if you’re in need of a bit of extra cash (or even if you aren’t), go read that post and find out if you have missing money owed to you. All the credit goes to David Bach and his readers for turning me on to this rad site!

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Today’s “tip” is going to be a bit odd in that I haven’t actually even fully tried it out to see if it works yet as well as I hope it will. Here’s the story:

Part of the lesson my wife and I have learned being in debt is that we never want our children to find themselves in this kind of situation. While the goal is to be able to help them financially one day if needed, we’d very much prefer to instead just simply teach them how to never need help!

Part of this lesson comes in the form of teaching them to invest their money, and so I’ve been on the hunt for a good investment app that frankly skews a bit towards kids. Now obviously kids can’t go around buying stock in Starbucks or Tesla, and they need a parent or some other adult to do it for them. So you need what is called a “Custodial Account” where an adult buys the stock for the kid and helps them build a portfolio, and then when the kid turns 18, they get the investments turned over to them.

Kind of like the nerdiest beer purchase for underage kids of all time.

But not all apps allow for this, and the ones that do are often so dry that your average kid isn’t going to be interested in paying attention to their cold design. So I started asking around and doing some research, and it shook out to 3 frontrunners…

Read More »

Tuesday Tip Jar: What to do if It’s Getting Ugly!

Dave JohnsonLeave a comment

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Welcome to another “Tuesday Tip Jar” where I will share awesome savings and financial tips as I find them. I might not have something for you every Tuesday, but when I do, you’ll find it here!

If you’ve got a financial tip you think others would benefit from, please send it to me via my contact page at the top of the blog, or leave it in the comments below the post!

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I’m in New York this week on business travel, so apologies for shorter posts, but at least this is one that could really save your bacon!

Back in January when the poop hit the fan for us we were in a bad way, and when I say that I mean there was real concern that we were going to lose our house. It was a really big fan, and there was a lot of poop hitting all at once!

My uncle in-law happens to be a life-long financial planner, and when we went to him cap-in-hands and pleaded for him to help, one of the things we all quickly agreed on was that we need some short term cash, and we needed it now.

That’s when he suggested reaching out to our banks and asking them to move a payment to the end of our loan.Read More »