Moving to www.liberatinggrace.net

Thank you everyone who has come to visit my blog. I have switched over to wordpress and obtained my own domain name. You can find my new and improved website at www.liberatinggrace.net. I hope you enjoy!

7 Vacation Missteps

Just the other week my friend, Christy Shuler, was down and discouraged about exceeding her budget on her trip to Vegas. I encouraged her to give herself grace and share what she learned with others. It is now my turn to teach others from my mistakes during my business trip/vacation. Well, do you want to avoid my missteps? Read on.

How I Saved Over $1,000 on My Last Vacation

This week I returned from my week long vacation in Montreal, Canada. The original purpose of going was for a business conference but my husband and I stayed 3 extra nights to enjoy the city. I am only sharing my savings from decisions that further reduced the cost of this trip from what my employer would have paid for. Want to saved $1,000 on your next trip? Learn from me.

Do You Want to Retire?

Most everybody wants to retire. Even if you plan on working until you drop, it makes sense to have some savings. After all, you may not be able to work for as long as you expect. Once you committed to saving for retirement, where should you put it? There are many options but I will focus on the main ones.

Eat Convenient, Cheap, Healthy and Tasty

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Unless you are a vampire, you need to eat food. Everyone does. However, that does not make us entitled to eat whatever food and however much food we desire whether we have the money or not. This is a category that sometimes gets out of control for me. I hope to continue the conversation about this huge budget item beyond this post and we can start more closely aligning our spending with our aspirations together.

Seeking Wealth? What Does That Say About You?

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Most people do not want to feel greedy or materialistic. We have all heard the saying “money does not buy happiness.” Stories are shared about true love that breaks through the barriers of differing economic statuses. Money does not matter when you have love. That is a great saying, except that money does matter in your marriage. Try googling “marriage and money” and you will see what I mean. Finances matter in your love life and they matter in every aspect of your life. The question is: how can we focus on building financial wealth without turning into a greedy Scrooge?

What is Your Financial Future?

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Knowing where you stand with money is crucial to developing a more effective financial strategy for yourself so take this quiz for a little self-assessment.

What is Your Money Personality?

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We all have our positive and negative spending tendencies. Being aware of where your money personality can help you tweak your financial life into an optimized system. Unlike most quizzes you find these days you don’t have to enter your e-mail or anything.

Budget Reduction: Fixed Cost Edition

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Budget discussions tend to be quite harsh on coffee runs, dining and movies but perhaps not harsh enough on cutting our monthly expenses. 

How Big/How Nice of a House To Buy

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I struggled so much with this and to be honest I doubted my husband’s and my decision for a while because we did not start off with the popular concept of a starter home. However, I finally feel good about it. Your conclusion very well could be different than ours but the concepts and processes work the same. 

Own or Rent?

You go to the bank and you notice that advertisement comparing the value of home you could own if instead of rent you were paying a mortgage. It looks like home ownership is the clear cut choice. Don't you want to have your money going toward ownership in a house instead of making the land lord rich? The answer may be no. It doesn't matter how much your apartment complex is making off of your rent. What matters is what is best for you.

Dream Seeking

As I discussed in Un-goalifying , I am moving toward my purpose by dream seeking. What does that mean? I’ll tell you.

Un-goalifying

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By both nature and nurture I am a high achiever. In certain ways, I love to create long lists of ambitions; the more items to check off the better. The high of placing the Nike swoosh next to my accomplishments is elevating. Yet goals choke me.

8 Ways to Get More for Less

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Managing your money is just about getting the best value you can. Here are a few suggestions that can save you money, while still getting the enjoyment out of things you routinely purchase.

Overwhelmed with Goals?

There are so things to works on in this world, do you ever feel overwhelmed? I do. I could make lists and lists of the different things I want to learn, the skills I want to use, the people I want to meet and places to visit.

My Dream of Semi-Retirement

Everyone knows that it takes a lot of money to retire and consequently people invest in various retirement accounts, hoping to have a large monetary value in their accounts. However, I don’t think many people think about how exactly those big retirement accounts are going to provide the income they are going to need.

What to Do With Your Money

So you are trying to “get ahead” financially and have cut expenses and increased your earnings as much as you can. What are you going to do with this money?

Income Creation

I have read my share of articles and books on personal finance and people love to talk about budgeting and being debt free but they don’t talk a lot about ideas that will get you a bigger budget to work with. 

High Interest Checking

Yes, you can make interest on your checking account! 

P2P Lending

P2P means Peer-to-Peer. The concept is that the P2P lending website connects individual investors (lenders) with those who need a loan (borrowers) as an alternative to going to a bank.