March 2010

How to Save for College Without Sacrificing Your Retirement

As we prepare for the arrival of our son I’m thinking about his college education and how we’re going to pay for it. I know, that’s 18 years out. But with the soaring cost of education, if we don’t prepare and start saving now, we may not be in a great position to help much [...]

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Everything is new

This weekend as I was turning my compost pile (cue banjo music), I realized how completely different my life is now. Everything I do now is new to me. Five years ago I was a career-driven professional living in San Francisco and working in Silicon Valley for a large technology company. Now I’m an aspiring [...]

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Yakezie Challenge Carnival #5

The Yakezie Community is kicking butt. Our little group of Personal Finance bloggers now has 19 members in the WiseBread Top 100 with more Yakezie members knocking on the door. And PF bloggers continue to join the challenge everyday. To learn more about the Yakezie Challenge you can check out Financial Samurai’s initial call to [...]

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Live in a Foreign Country for 2-3 Weeks For As Little As $300

Do you want to see the world but lack a sizeable travel budget? Consider an international volunteer program. I was introduced to Volunteers For Peace about 10 years ago by a colleague that had completed three volunteer projects in Italy. I had been travelling internationally for work and had been to quite a few countries, [...]

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Why I Trade Forex

A couple years ago I decided to learn more about investing with the ultimate goal of taking a more active role in managing my portfolio. It was at that time that I was introduced to trading foreign currencies or Forex. What is Forex? Forex is the market for buying and selling currencies. Currencies from all [...]

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What is Your Vision for Retirement?

I’ve been so preoccupied with our short-term goals of building an Emergency Fund and paying off debt this past year that I’ve given little thought to our retirement. But as a member of the Yakezie Challenge I’ve been reading some very cool blogs by people that are creatively pursuing early retirement and some are even [...]

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Expand Your Knowledge and Feed the Hungry

I came across FreeRice.com a couple years ago. It has a simple premise – take a vocabulary quiz and for each answer you get right, 10 grains of rice will be donated to the World Food Programme. You don’t have to register or log in, just go there and jump in. Originally FreeRice.com only covered [...]

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When Do You Question a Professional?

I take a Do It Yourself approach when it comes to many things, especially my finances. But there is an exception…Taxes! My mind starts to spin and I just want to curl up in the fetal position when I even glance at tax code. So I pay a CPA to do my taxes. And it’s [...]

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Invest in Your Health: Grass-Fed Beef

Over the past few years I’ve significantly cut back on the amount of beef my family eats. I subscribed to the belief that beef was bad for you. But what I’ve learned over the past few months while researching the healthiest foods you can eat, the health factor of beef is less about beef itself [...]

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I’m Joining the Yakezie Challenge!

I’m a new blogger and I really enjoy it. I like the challenge of writing articles that I hope will be useful and interesting and I enjoy the interaction with my readers and other bloggers. But I’ve also found blogging is very hard work. It takes a lot of time and dedication to build a [...]

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