Fighting Fair: How to Disagree About Money in Marriage

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Don't let money be a sore point in your marriage

Marriage can be hard enough some days. Throw money into the mix, and things can get downright ugly.  However, just as disagreements in other aspects of your married life don’t have to result in permanent rifts, disagreements over money don’t have to ruin your relationship.  As with all things in marriage, money issues need to be worked through. Here are some ideas for overcoming disagreements about money in marriage:

Know Thyself

One of the best things you can do is understand your relationship with money.  In order to articulate your position on money to your partner, you need to be able understand.  Think about why you spend (or save) money the way you do.  You should also come to grips with why you don’t like the way your spouse handles money, and determine whether or not your own preferences and money prejudices are coloring the situations.
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How to Create SMART Financial Goals – Is It Time Bound?

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We’re reaching the end of our SMART goals.  We’ve gone through making the goal specific, being able to measure it, making sure it’s attainable, and looking at how relevant it is.  Now we’ll ask if your goal is Time-Bound?

A good goal will be time-bound or timely.  It will have a starting point, an end point, and measurable time or milestones in-between.  Time adds dimension to specific, measurable, attainable, and relevant.

By making your goal time-bound you give yourself a framework to focus with.  Without deadlines for your goals, it’s easy to let your goals drift away and be put off for other things that may seem more pressing.  You need to know when your goal will end.  A finish point can be a big part of whether your goal was a success or not.
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How to Create SMART Financial Goals – Are They Relevant?

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Having a goal is a great motivator but it still needs structure if you don’t want to be another statistic in the failed goals category. Making your goals SMART is one way to organize your goal to help ensure success.

We’ve looked at making a goal specific, making sure the goal is measurable, and looking to see if the goal is attainable.  Now we will look at how relevant your goal is.

When looking at the relevancy of a goal, we’re asking ourselves how important the goal is in the grand scheme of things?

Is the energy we’re going to put towards this goal the best use of our time and resources or is there something else that may be better?
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How to Create SMART Financial Goals – Are They Attainable?

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In this series on SMART goals, we’ve talked about being Specific about your financial goal and then making the financial goal Measurable.  Now we’ll talk about your goal being Attainable.

Let me preface by saying that I think a person, any person, is capable of doing many incredible things.  You may be truly amazed at what you can achieve if you earnestly put your mind and resources into reaching your goal.

But there are limits.
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How to Create SMART Financial Goals – Make Them Measurable

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When we last talked about goals I told you that you should make your goals S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) to help you in achieving them. We discussed making a goal Specific so that you have one concrete goal to shoot for and you know exactly what you want to accomplish rather than a big general category that’s hard to finish.

Today let’s talk about the next step – making your SMART financial goal Measurable.

You need to make a goal measurable, you need to know exactly how much you are going to achieve.  Without a way to measure your goal, how can you track your financial progress?  How will you know if you are making headway towards the financial goal?
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How to Create SMART Financial Goals – Be Specific

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It’s that time of the year where people decide to start fresh and make new goals (many of which are financial goals). But did you know that according to a 2007 survey by British psychologist Richard Wiseman, 88% of resolutions end in failure?  We tend to try and do too much with little willpower to achieve our resolutions.

One way we can help ourselves to success in our resolutions is to make them S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.

Today, let’s focus on Specific.

To achieve your goal, it helps to make it specific.  Many times, we make our goals too general, which makes a goal difficult to follow through on.
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Busting Common Investing Myths – A Tweetup With Motley Fool’s Tom Gardner and ShareBuilder’s Dan Greenshields

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Understanding stock selection

A little while back I had the pleasure of attending a Tweetup at the NYC ING Direct Cafe hosted by Sharebuilder‘s president Dan Greenshields with special guest speaker Tom Gardner, CEO of The Motley Fool.

For those wondering what a Tweetup is, it’s basically an organized meeting of sorts over the social site Twitter.  The meeting was held at the ING Cafe and people from all over could follow along and participate via Twitter.

The premise of the Tweetup was to help investors bust common investing myths and take the complexities out of investing.

I tried to takes notes as best I could so I could pass them along to you.  Keep in my I’m paraphrasing here and some of the words are mine, but I think you’ll get the general ideas of what was being said.

To start, Tom Gardner talked about four basic investing rules we should all follow (this is just part of his full list of rules):
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The Inner View of Your Interview by Ron Haynes – Excerpt

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Inner View of Your Interview

This is a guest post from Ron Haynes, editor of The Wisdom Journal and author of a new eBook, The Inner View of Your Interview, exposing the motivations behind today’s top 100 job interview questions. Ron has been interviewing people for various positions for over two decades and uses his new eBook to give job seekers an insider’s peek into the mind of an interviewer.

The Inner View of Your Interview has a central theme: all job seekers should tailor their resume, cover letter, and job preparation to each individual company rather than take a scattered approach. When a job seeker learns to focus on a target company’s greatest needs and tailors all responses to job interview questions on meeting those needs, he or she quickly becomes a top candidate in the interviewer’s mind. And for the job seeker, there’s few places any better!

Inner View of Your Interview

Know the secrets of nailing your interview!

Think how Question 91 [from the book] could be answered if you were interviewing at a startup, at a mid-sized sales oriented company, or at a stodgy old Fortune 100 firm:

Question 91: Sell me this pen (pencil, stapler, adding machine, desk, clock, etc).
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Getting Free Premium Cable Channels – How Paying Attention Netted Us HBO, Cinemax, And More

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Back when we moved into our new home we had to sign up for a new TV/Internet/Phone provider as our previous company wasn’t in our new neighborhood. As far as cable goes, we like to have the basic channels but we’ve been fine without the premium movie channels.  If we wanted to catch up on a series or a movie we had Netflix.

We were able to get a good deal on a combo that would actually be a few dollars cheaper than what we were paying for from our old provider and this new deal actually included some premium channels like Showtime.  Cool, I’ll take a movie channel.  When talking with the representative I asked if the package would include channels like IFC (Independent Film Channel) and Sundance  (you ever see Spectacle: Elvis Costello with…?  Awesome music interview show!).  I was just making sure since I liked those channels and they weren’t considered premium on our previous provider.  I was told they were included so I was happy.  Fast forward to our installation day and our technician told me that IFC wasn’t included in the package I ordered.  Grrr.
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Sell Your Crap – Interview And New eBook From Adam Of Man Vs Debt

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Sell Your Crap by Adam Baker

I was excited to hear that Adam of Man Vs Debt was working on a new eBook.  I was even more excited to see the finished product – Sell Your Crap: Turn Your Clutter Into Cash.
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