Blog Posts
Now, I have made a lot of mistakes throughout my life dealing with finances. From digging myself a large debt hole to not maxing out all retirement accounts, but one of the biggest mistakes that I have made is not understanding the 457 deferred compensation plan.
Two weeks ago as I was working on some articles for the website, I stumbled on an interesting article about social security. The article was titled, "Millennials and Retirement: How Bad is It?" by Alicia H. Munnell on Politico's website. The article dug into the numbers of savings for retirement. The data that they shared was from a study conducted by the U.S Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, titled, "Survey of Consumer Finances, 1983-2016." In the article, they shared the following graph.
A couple years ago, my employer began offering a FSA (Flexible Spending Arrangements) for healthcare expenses. Once they began offering this product, I had to do some research to decide whether it would be a good deal. I initially couldn't decide, because I didn't want money just sitting around not growing!While researching the FSA, I stumbled upon the HSA (Health Savings Account). I discovered that the HSA is a much better product. Despite this discovery, I still found that investing in a FSA was worth it for the Summit of Coin family (that may change toward the end of 2018).
In the future, we plan on sending our daughter to college. And like most parents, we worry about the cost of college and how we will pay for it. Well some stats on college tuition found my inbox and I thought that the information in the article was so important that I had to write an article about the rising tuition costs.
At the beginning of this month, I was listening to a podcast (like usual). It just happened to be the Dave Ramsey Show and Dave was going on a rant about the media. He was frustrated that the media only reports the doom and gloom of the stock market crashes, but never reports positive stock market reports.This frustration stemmed from the fact that the S&P 500 earned 20% in 2017 and there was no mention of it on the nightly news. The nightly news may mention a daily gain or loss, but rarely mentions the gains over the course of a year.
