How to Save Hundreds on Your Cell Phone Bill

There is no doubt that in the 21^st century cell phones are one of the most disruptive technologies humans have managed to invent. How disruptive? There are nearly 330,000,000 cell phones in use in the United States alone, a statistic that gets even crazier when you consider there aren’t even that many Americans in the United States! But as powerful as the technology is it has a pretty major downside: cell phone plans are costly.

The American model of cell phone coverage worked, for many years, in stark contrast to the rest of the world. You sign a multi-year long distance contract and buy the phones allowed on that cell phone provider’s network, often for a subsidized cost. Man, remember when AT&T was the only place where you could get an iPhone? Meanwhile, in the rest of the world you buy the phone you like then get cell coverage month-to-month at the rate you can afford from whoever is willing to offer you the best deal. You pay the phone’s full price but the competition in the coverage market more than makes up for that cost in savings.

For years we had a backwoods cell market in the United States: restricted access to phones, long contracts locking you in to rates and providers, and no competition keeping those rates high. Then a funny thing happened: AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile and the government said, “No.” When that deal fell through T-Mobile hit upon a new business model best described as, “Man, fuck those other guys.” Soon they were offering long distance plans at half what the other big companies were, with the option to have whichever phone you like, and without a contract! The era of discount cell providers had begun and now we live in an era where if you’re paying more than $50 each month for your cell plan (particularly if you have a contract) you’re getting robbed.

The Best Career Decision You’ll Ever Make

My wife wasn’t yet 25 when she finally convinced me to start caring about my finances. We had just recently moved to Seattle, Washington after meeting in college. In fact, we had only recently graduated and packed up the life we knew to move all the way across the country when I was offered a dream job in the games industry. It was a lot for her to leave her family, friends, and everything she knew to follow me, just a college boyfriend, to start a brand new life together.

After moving we came to the time of the year in which we needed to do our taxes. The job I had gotten after college was the most money I had ever earned with a starting salary of $50,000. As a contractor I had a lot of expenses to pay that my full-time colleagues didn’t (healthcare, for example), but it was by far the most money I had been given in a twelve month period of time. Meanwhile she had earned about half that amount as she had switched careers entirely and bounced between a few jobs while we settled in. And yet as we sat to go over our various tax forms I realized something: she had the exact same amount of money in savings as I did. How could that be?

The Most Powerful Finance Tool in the World (and it’s free!)

My friend Sam created that graphic for me, tongue firmly in cheek. I find it fitting because today we’re going to talk about the single most powerful tool in the personal finance arsenal. Anyone can employ it. It’s more misunderstood than CDOs or credit default swaps. Best of all? You guessed it: it’s absolutely free.

The tool? Your budget.

What to Buy When Buying Stocks

A lot of people make a very nice living telling folks like you and me what stocks to buy, then taking a cut of our money. It’s a pretty old game, and it’s rigged in their favor. It’s so rigged, in fact, that the cut they take of our money can soak up as much as two-thirds of our long-term gains and they’re not even legally required to act in our financial best interest! But I have a secret, a trick to prevent those modern day snake oil salesmen from stealing the majority of your life’s savings. That secret? Index funds.

Turn Debt into a Game with the Snowball Method

 (This is the second of a two-part series on debt repayment strategies. You can read Part One here.)

The problem with debt is that it’s so easy to acquire. Every day you confront a marketing industry that spends billions of dollars every year convincing us to constantly buy, buy, buy. While we’re in the store buying they’re happy to offer us a credit card to buy even more while they take a cut from our future earnings so we can have that stuff NOW. And the average American? We’re powerless to protect ourselves. Which class in school taught you how to defend against billions in marketing efforts every day? Which credit card company patiently explained to you what APY means, or which of their hidden fees could secretly ruin your life? Is it any wonder the average household in the United States has $15,000 in credit card debt?

The worst part about debt is that all the psychology that goes into convincing us to accrue it, to buy buy buy, leads to a mental blocker that terrifies us to examine how much we really owe and take steps to pay it down. Focusing on the now is what got us into the debt in the first place (“With the new store credit card, you can have that jacket you love TODAY!”), and it paralyzes us into being too afraid to protect ourselves in the future and crawl back out.

Today we’re going to learn how to use the same psychology advertisers and retailers use to enslave us with debt in order to pay off that load and become debt-free for good. Today we’re going to talk about gamifying your debt with the Snowball method.

Why Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) Are the Most Powerful Retirement Account in America

Ever sit down to do your taxes and wish you knew about the crazy loopholes megatrillionaires use to pay $0 in taxes? You’re in luck: there’s a legal loophole in the United States tax code that allows regular Americans like you and me to set aside thousands of dollars in income and never have to pay a dime in taxes. It’s called the Health Savings Account (or HSA).

The Most Powerful Debt Payoff Method on Earth

(This is the first part of a two-part series on debt repayment strategies. You can read Part Two here.)

Debt is an insidious force eating away at your financial freedom. Give it enough rope and it will hang you as it does thousands of Americans. Did you know that last year the average American household had over $15,000 in credit card debt? (Source). Today we’re going to talk about a powerful approach to blowing that debt up in part one of a two-part series.

5 Ways to get to Millionaire Status with a Roth IRA

So you want to be a millionaire? Here’s how a Roth IRA helps get you there.

What in the hell is a Roth IRA?

It’s a tax advantaged retirement account for American earners. There are a few rules:

·         If you file taxes as a single person, you can open a Roth IRA if you earn $116,000/year or less

·         If you file taxes as a couple, you can open a Roth IRA if you earn $183,000/year or less

·         You can’t put more than $5,500 into your Roth IRA for 2016

·         If you have money left in your Roth IRA after you die, your heirs may be required to take minimum distributions from it

·         You must earn income in a given year to use a Roth IRA

Getting to millionaire status with a Roth IRA is easy because…

The 10 Step Plan to Your Financial Future

Nearly everyone who sets a New Year’s Resolution breaks it (80% according to this article). The truth is that it’s easy to set goals, but it’s hard to achieve them. If you’re not actively working towards succeeding at your goal, entropy is working at tearing you down to an inevitable failure. Today we’re going to lay out the framework for accomplishing a set of financial goals that resonates with many, many of the people reading this: getting rid of debt and saving for the future.

No matter where you’re starting from in your financial life, nor where you’re trying to get, the path to financial security in America is always the same ten steps. So let’s take a look at them…