Paying for Christmas: Class Action Rebates

You’re getting ripped off. Every year the products you regularly use steal money they rightfully owe to you. In the first of a two-part series I’m going to explain how I get the money I’m owed and use it to help pay for Christmas gift giving. Then, I’m going to show you how make sure you’re getting what you’re owed too.

Should You Hold Onto Student Loans for Tax Benefits?

After we paid off $110,000 in student loans in just four years my wife and I received a lot of nice notes from family and friends supportive of our efforts to prioritize getting out of debt. I was surprised, however, by the few notes I received from concerned friends telling me I was losing out on valuable tax deductions by paying off all that debt! Were they correct? Were my wife and I leaving money on the table by paying off our student loans early? I decided to crunch the numbers to find out.

The Secret Number That Can Make You Rich

Is $100,000 a lot of money to earn in a year? Is $1,000,000? What amount determines if someone is “rich”? The answer? It’s not what you make in a year that determines how wealth you are but an entirely different number that rarely gets talked about.

Reader Mailbag: Acorns and What to do Without a 401(k)

Have money questions? Got a topic you wish I’d cover that I haven’t gotten to yet? Reach out! You can contact me directly through the blog! My email is in my contact information, or you can reach out on our comments section on any article. Today we’re going to tackle our first reader mailbag article (names changed to protect readers’ identities). Here we go!

How to Pay for Your Tesla Now

A few weeks ago we witnessed as a species the largest product offering in history as Elon Musk announced the opening of pre-orders for the amazing Model 3 from Tesla. For $1,000, 325,000 people agreed to purchase the car when it becomes available (and the number of buyers continues to grow). At a price point of $35,000 each that represents a revenue windfall of $11,375,000,000, including an immediate influx of $325,000,000 right now! Today I’m going to explain how you can pay for your Tesla right now and about buying new cars in general.

Are you paying someone to rob you?

We keep our doors locked at night, chain up our bikes, and keep our valuables locked in our safe deposit boxes (or at least in a good hiding spot in a closet somewhere). It’s a painful thing to consider the possibility of being robbed. Few acts are so personally violating as having the bounty of your hard work taken by someone who did nothing to earn it. And yet for millions of Americans across the country they get bilked out of thousands of dollars every year, and they pay for the opportunity! Who are we inviting into our finances to do the burgling? Financial advisors.

4 Huge Mistakes I Made That You Don't Have To

Everyone makes mistakes. Small mistakes. Giant, colossal, f-up mistakes. Sometimes we make financial mistakes. Today we’re going to talk about some of the terrible mistakes I made that eventually led me to facing the music, getting my sh*t together, and cleaning up my finances. Also, starting this blog. Let’s go!

How we spent just $10,000 on a Wedding, Two Receptions, the Dress, Rings, our Honeymoon, and More

I’m not sure how long the wedding industry has been a giant scam, but those of us who have gone through the process of getting married recently know exactly what I mean. Visit a cake baker and say, “It’s for a wedding,” and watch the prices magically jump 50%. Tell a caterer you’re getting married and watch them swap out their menus for their “60% more expensive deluxe version” conveniently serving the exact same shrimp cocktail you get from their “it’s any other occasion” menu. When Mrs. Stark and I decided we wanted to get married, we knew we’d have to do it on our own terms. With a maximum budget of $10,000 we managed to host a wedding for 100 people, four round-trip plane tickets to the Midwest from Seattle, a honeymoon to Hawaii, a breakfast reception for our family, the dress, and two wedding rings. This is how we did it.

Rethinking Retirement

Today is the first in a multi-part series about what we think of when we think of “retirement.” In today’s discussion we analyze what “retirement” means colloquially, how it differs from “financial independence,” and we’ll touch on re-thinking it entirely. Let’s get started shall we?

How Much That Splurge REALLY Costs You...

Full disclosure time here at The Bill Stark Blog: I suck at staying in my budget for my weekly personal spending. Time and again when it comes to Budget Night at the Stark household my wife has chastised me for not being able to stay within the boundaries of my budget for eating out at work and buying the things I want. One solution to my over spending problem? Looking at the math behind what those added expenses truly cost. The results led me to change everything.

Would You Drop Cable for $40,000?

When my wife and I paid off over $100,000 in student loans in four years we didn’t do it simply because it felt good or for some moral purpose. When we paid that debt off we saved ourselves thousands of dollars in interest. That’s not noble, it’s self-serving. Today we’re going to look at what happens when you spend just a few more dollars each month on your mortgage (hint: you get rich faster!). Let’s go…

Stop Paying Your Boss So You Can Work

How much would you pay your boss for the chance to keep working your current job? $10,000? $20,000? $30,000??? If you’re like most Americans you’re unwittingly paying your boss thousands of dollars to work your job and not move up in your career field. Today we’re going to put a stop to that and put a plan in place to get you your money.

Budget Night at the Stark Household

For many it’s a day filled with such dread that most families skip it entirely. But there’ a way to make using the most powerful financial tool in your arsenal into an enjoyable highlight of your month. So how do the missus and I make budget day one of our favorite parts of the month? That’s what I’m here to discuss today!

Has the 401k Failed Americans?

The Economic Policy Institute recently released a report and detailed study posing the question, “Have 401ks failed Americans?” As the United States has shifted from a pension-based retirement society to one in which workers rely on their own 401ks we’re experiencing a first in our history: the majority of workers’ retirement savings are self-directed. That poses new challenges for the nation as a whole. So have 401ks failed Americans?

You're Not a Bad Person

It’s easy to work on your personal finances once you’ve had a few successes. The adrenaline and endorphins you get from doing something right snowballs into wanting to do more things to help your situation. But getting to that point? It’s a psychological mess of guilt, fear, and paralysis that prevents perfectly reasonable people from making seemingly obvious financial decisions. I know personally: that was exactly me only a few years ago. Ignoring my mail, refusing to take calls from numbers I didn’t know, assuming that whatever my money troubles were they’d be dealt with if I just ignored them long enough. When I finally realized the downsides to that approach I felt immensely guilty. But you know what? None of those decisions made me a bad person. And no matter how much you’ve f*cked up your finances, they don’t make you a bad person either.

How We Paid $110k in Student Loans in Just 4 Years

March 12^th, 2016 is a momentous day for the missus and me. Why? Because it marks our official debtfreeniversary: today we conclude paying off all the debts we owe. The bulk of our debt, $100,000 in student loans, we managed to pay off in just four years and before a single payment was actually ever due! So, just how did we manage to get rid of our debt? I’ll tell you…

The Casino You Visit Every Week

Casinos are master classes in the art of getting consumers to spend. Their labyrinthine designs force non-gamblers to walk the farthest distances through them in order to find their way out, all to maximize the likelihood you become a gambler. The things you’re most likely to need sit deep inside the centermost areas lest you simply skim past the slot machines and card tables to grab something easily on your way to the hotel. The things you walk by are designed to entice with lights, sounds, and a sense of wonderment to get your purse strings loosened. There isn’t a clock to be found to indicate whether you’ve reached the time you said you would leave, and oxygen is pumped inside to help you remain refreshed and energized for longer so you never get too tired to stop gambling.

For those of us pursuing the path of financial fortitude casinos are not a place we’re likely to spend much time. But there is a place we go to nearly every week that is designed much the same as a casino to keep you in it as long as possible, to maximize the amount you spend, and to overwhelm you with billions in psychological research to ensure they get the most of your bucks. That “casino”? Your local grocery store.

Marketing, The Bill Stark Blog, and I Give you $5

Like many websites, The Bill Stark Blog is all about making money. Unlike most other websites, however, the person who this blog makes money for is not me, the owner, but you, the reader. The only cost you pay is typing in the URL to your web browser. I have a nice job and a comfortable lifestyle thanks to the 10 Steps, protecting my family’s life from lifestyle creep, and using the most powerful financial tool in the world to keep us honest so I don’t need a side hustle of a website when I can instead return the favor to the people who taught me how to get my financial life on track by paying that knowledge forward.

From time to time I’ll be able to hand you special deals you may not be able to get anywhere else that can save or earn you money. Sometimes to get those deals I have to get paid as well. I’m going to explain how you can always be certain I’m looking out for you, why I might offer something like this, and prove that at The Bill Stark Blog it’s always about you coming away more financially happy than when you arrived. After all, the highest “payment” I get is when you post a link from us on Facebook or share us with your friends.

Plus, at the end of today’s piece I’m going to give you $5.

How to Make Money With Your Tax Return

April 18^th is the day your taxes are due this year and it’s a date that is quickly approaching! For many Americans tax day is something of a holiday because we typically overpay our taxes during the year and then get a refund from the government at the end of the year. That means millions of us get a windfall to the tune of hundreds or thousands of dollars. In the past your impulse might have been to spend that money quickly on something frivolous and soon forgotten by the time the next tax day rolls around. As a reader of the Bill Stark Blog you’ve now had your eyes awakened to the power of your money. This year let’s do something new with our tax refund: let’s use that money to make us even more.

Here’s how…

The Politically Radical Act of Living Frugal

$2,100,000,000,000. That’s the total annual global budget for spending on advertising. It’s an astronomically astounding number: $2.1 trillion dollars. Every single part of that multi-trillion dollar spend is targeted directly at you, trying to get you to buy something you had no intention of buying. It’s so powerful the average American has spent over $15,000 more than they earn trying to keep up. We spend so much on stuff most of us are one bump away from being broke. What if there was an alternative option to a life of consuming so much stuff it left you impoverished?

What if you said “No,”?

When You're In Too Deep

Recently on Facebook a friend of mine made a somewhat despondent post about their financial situation and how it felt they were in a hole so deep there was nothing they could ever do to get out of it. I reached out to ask if they’d been reading the blog to which they responded, “I’m nowhere near the financial space to begin taking advantage of the stuff you write about.” I wondered if that was true and started considering the fact that while I write a lot about maximizing situations like having access to a 401k I haven’t spent as much time writing about what to do in a financial situation with little means and the feeling that your situation is hopeless. Today we’re going to change that.

The Bill Stark Guide to Repaying Federal Student Loans

If you’re like millions of Americans you have student loan debt and you’re interested in figuring out how to pay your student loans back. Or perhaps you want to know how to lower your student loan payments, lower your student loan interest rate, or lower your student loan repayment total. Luckily for you there are loads of ways to accomplish all of these things with programs offered by the federal government. Today we’re going to talk about the many ways you can make managing your student loans easier.

Behold the Power of a Fully Operational Emergency Fund

(Don’t miss a thing! You can now sign up for email updates each time I write a new article. Simply use the email link in the sidebar or, if you’re on mobile, switch to web view and sign up there. Or you can add me to your RSS feed via feedburner: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheBillStarkBlog)

The biggest challenge to taking control of your personal finances isn’t having too little money, or owing too much, or even lacking information on how to gain that control. The reality is? For far too many people, caring about this type of thing just isn’t sexy. By reading The Bill Stark Blog you’re already well ahead of your average American and in today’s installment we’re going to talk about that oft overlooked, highly critical, super important, totally unsexy key to gaining control over your financial wellbeing and future: the emergency fund and its cousin the emergency cushion.

The High Costs of Being Broke

I’ve talked before about doing “ramen math” in college, when I was so broke I calculated exactly how to spend every last dollar and on paydays had to write a bad check to have enough gas to get to the bank to deposit my paycheck. I had to risk beating the gas station’s deposit to the bank with my own and if I missed? Bank fees, bounced check fees, even potentially criminal charges. At the time I had so little money there was no other option. My “ramen math” days taught me a lot of lessons but none was more important than this simple fact: being broke is really expensive.

The reality in America (as in most places) is that having more money is better than having less. That seems comically obvious but it means more than its face value: when you have money, it’s much easier to get more money. When you don’t have a lot of money you get charged fees and expenses simply because you don’t have more money. What costs are there to being broke? Read on…

Magic Dollars and the Most Powerful Force in the Universe

It’s been just over a century since the great Albert Einstein successfully predicted how gravity works and now we’ve confirmed he was right. What’s that got to do with personal finance? Gravity has long been held as one of the most powerful forces in the known universe but there’s a force that’s even more powerful. A force whose power you can choose to harness for yourself. A powerful force others will harness against you if you let them. This force’s name? Compound interest.

The Magic Dollar

How One Family Earns $100,000 But Pays just $11.25 in Taxes

The deadline for taxes in the United States is April 18^th this year. That’s coming up much more quickly than you think and if you haven’t done your taxes yet this year it’s nearly time. Before getting to collecting all of your tax forms and filing your paperwork, however, I’d like to introduce you to a family that’s about to do their taxes. We’ll call them the Savers: Mom Saver, Dad Saver, and Baby Saver.

Like many Americans the Savers don’t mind doing their share in paying the portion of taxes they owe. But they also know that good ole’ Uncle Sam offers them lots of incentives and programs with which they can save on their taxes. For 2015 the Savers decided they were going to make the most of these opportunities and see just how low they could get their taxable income and, thus, how little they could pay in federal taxes. Between the two of them Mom and Dad Saver earned a combined $100,000/year and they file jointly. Let’s dig in to see how they do on their savings.

The Deadly Costs of Lifestyle Creep

When I was in college I used to do something I called “ramen math.” It was the time towards the end of the month when money was really tight as you waited for your next paycheck, and to make every dollar stretch you had to get creative about every expense. How long could you live on just ramen? Would anyone notice if you walked out of the dining hall on campus with food in a plastic container? The most dire was getting gas: I’d go to the gas station/restaurant I worked at, fill up my car with gas, write a check to pay for it that I knew would bounce, then pick up my paycheck for the week and race to deposit it before they could deposit my check. Ramen math was an embarrassing but necessary part of my life and I knew that someday, someday I’d put it behind me and always have enough money.

The Great Diaper Debate

My wife and I are having our first kid in about a month and no matter how frugal you are having a kid costs money. How much? Depends on who you ask, but estimates peg it at approximately $250,000 and that’s before considering paying for college. A quarter ‘mil is pretty expensive even if you don’t pay it all upfront so we set out to examine a few ways to minimize those costs. Up first? Diapers.

How to lose $1,000,000 on Your 401k

February means it’s tax season and in 2016 you have until Monday, April 18^th to file without facing penalties. For many of us doing our civic duty is a bit of a pain; sure it’s nice driving on public streets, sending the kids to public schools, and living in a generally stable society, but why do I have to pay so much of the burden? The answer is: you don’t!

There was a time in America when saving for retirement wasn’t financially viable. A century and a half ago “poorhouses” existed to take in the infirm who, after a lifetime of working 80 hour weeks doing manual labor for a meager existence, found themselves destitute and incapable of generating additional income. They were sent off to live alone, under-cared for, and impoverished until they died. Luckily a horrified nation decided, “We can do better.”

The end result featured a strengthening of things like pensions and the creation of Social Security. Eventually the government decided there was a benefit for society in creating programs that incentivized people to save for the future privately as well. The best way to incentivize them? Pay them money! That’s how the 401k was invented.

5 Things You Spend Too Much on (and How to Save Thousands!)

One of the saddest realities of living in America is the simple fact that nearly two-thirds of us have less than $1,000 in savings. That means the average American can’t afford a sudden medical expense or car repair without taking on costly debt. How did we get ourselves into this position? For most of us it’s because we spend too much on things we imagine we need. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Here are five things Americans spend too much money on and how you can cut your costs and save.

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…