When you own your own home, you have to be ready for unexpected repair costs at any time. And sometimes that can get expensive. But home warranty policies have kept my repair costs way down and made it easier to get things fixed. Here is my 14-year experience. I learned about home warranty policies when […]
I have maintained a long term care (LTC) insurance policy since I was in my mid-50s. I do not like paying out the $176 premium every month, but I have done so now for about 10 years. About a year ago, the insurance company got approval from state regulators to change my benefits duration […]
I just counted and I have 26 active credit cards. Adding all the card credit limits, I have a total of $319,900 in available revolving credit. But I pay off my balances every month and do not use credit cards to finance anything I buy. So what is the point of having all those […]
Why do you live where you live? Why do you reside in that particular place? Did you choose to live there? Or did that place somehow “choose” you? And what are the financial consequences of you living where you do? These are questions I never asked myself until I was in my mid-twenties, and […]
A comfortable and secure lifestyle can very, very definitely be achieved without spending a fortune on it. My basic living expense budget is $15,048 a year, which is about one third of my income. And I am perfectly happy with the kind of daily lifestyle I get for less than $1255 a month (which, by […]
A few months ago, I had to replace my roof. Some of the estimates I got went as high as $16,500. But by continuing to get estimates based on my “high-low outlier” approach, I was able to get an excellent job done — with the same materials — for $8000. Getting these estimates saved […]
As I was coming close to turning 65, I knew I had to make some important decisions regarding my health care coverage. For the previous 20 years, I had been riding the coattails of my wife’s employment, and paying sometimes nothing and sometimes a token amount for soup-to-nuts health insurance coverage. But no more. The […]
Two years of living expenses in a savings account: that’s what my cash reserves plan amounted to a few months ago. Then I started planning to write a blog post on the how and why of that plan. And in so doing, completely changed my thinking. I’ve gone from a cash reserves plan to an […]
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This is really great. I finally have got my spending, income and investing ducks all set up for financial independence. Hey, folks! I am FREE!. The last piece of the puzzle just fell into place. With the help of cash I just got from selling some vacant land, I have eliminated my mortgage payment. This […]
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