I agree with this. At one point years ago (and perhaps this is still the case) all the personal finance experts suggested either two checking accounts (his and hers) or three (his, hers, and joint). Then you agree on how to split the bills and each has his/her own spending money to do what they want with.

I'm an EverBank customer. I recently inquired as to why I need to have a $5,000 checking balance to qualify for ATM reimbursement when, naturally, I would want to keep the bulk of my money in a money market account to earn a higher interest rate (though to be fair with crappy rates these days the difference is…

Do some cursory homework on what you're going to need to retire, and commit to that savings level from day one. This need not be extensive - it can be as simple as gathering consensus from personal finance experts about the percentage you need to save (15% seems to be a pretty agreed-upon figure). Then do it, and…

Love me some Kirk Ferentz.

Honestly, motivation isn't a hard problem for me. The single most impactful thing I've done is to learn about what people's typical financial weaknesses are and develop mechanisms to avoid them. For example, some people have trouble committing to saving $X or X% for retirement because there's always something else to…

We save the equivalent of 20-21% of our net income each year. This includes employer matching funds and is spread across two 401(k)s (one of which has a Roth option) and two Roth IRAs. We also have a rollover/traditional IRA, but that is from a past job change and we don't actively contribute to it.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you here Kristin, but I view these as two separate things. The question here is how you budget when your income varies. Which I interpret to mean as, "How do you account for income when you don't know for sure what your income will be?" That's how I answered above - I use the bare minimum…

My wife and I are both salaried now, but once upon a time she was a nurse with a varying income due to a schedule that changed week-to-week plus shift differentials, etc. I budgeted around the bare minimum that we could count on, then everything above and beyond that was gravy - to pay down debt, buy that something…

Other feel it's their responsibility to fund their children's education, and their children should in turn pay it forward to their children. It's an individual choice.

Your friends' lives have changed. And I mean that from a simple logistical standpoint. Young kids are incredibly time- and energy-intensive. They no longer have much of either of those things to spare. Neither will you, if/when you have kids someday. This is pretty routine for parents.

Great summary. I was going to make the same points. The best part about having an IRA on the side is that you've got flexibility to move it around. I'm a Vanguard guy myself (no loads, low expenses) but say they jack up their expenses someday, I can move it. Any assets you've got in your employer's plan are stuck…

Absolutely agree. I'm in my mid-30s and I've been a personal finance geek for 15 or so years. I've read a lot of books and because I started young, my financial life has always been in good shape. I'd heard of Ramsey for years but never read/heard his work until a year or two ago when I downloaded an abridged version…

That's a valid point about keeping the flexibility of using those additional funds for something else (an emergency) until you've built up enough to wipe out the mortgage in full. That said, I would argue that you shouldn't be setting aside thousands of dollars over a period of months/years - either to pay down the…

You're saying I should put these funds in the 529 now instead of anything else? If so, I agree, that's is what will earn the most. But we're close to paying off these loans so it's worth it to me just to wipe them out. We'll only lose about 14 months of potential gains on the 529s had we put those funds there instead.

I agree with what you're saying. But Ramsey's advice is for people who have dug themselves a deep hole and need to get out. Presumably these are people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, sometimes doing payday loans and triage-type tactics to manage their finances. I suppose there's an argument for those people to put…

There's a cult around Ramsey, to be sure. I think it's the religious aspect of his teachings. Once you know and accept that his advice is for people who aren't that financial sophisticated and/or disciplined, it's pretty good advice. The whole debt snowball thing isn't perfectly financially efficient, since you might…

Good question. I would describe myself as very strongly anti-debt but not a rabid Ramsey type. As I mentioned in my original post, if there's a rational case for investing elsewhere I'd definitely consider it. In this case, the student loans were going to be paid off by Jan. 2018 and May 2019, respectively, and the…

Knowing next to nothing about the totality of your situation, I'd be tempted to leave things as-is and attack that second mortgage. I don't keep a close eye on mortgage rates these days, but a fixed 30-year mortgage at 4.125% seems pretty reasonable. As you said, it may be difficult to roll both mortgages into a new…

This is a great debate, and one my wife and I were just talking about recently. If we could carve out an extra $150/month in our budget to put toward our house, should we apply that directly to the mortgage so it will be paid off, say, seven years early? Or should we invest it in the hope that it grows faster and we…

I can get on board with the idea that a team would be hesitant to draft Michael Sam because of the publicity that follows him around - like this reality show, the hopes/expectations of the gay community and whatever extra pressure might come with that, and so on - becoming a distraction for Sam himself, in terms of…