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Get Rich Slowly

personal finance that makes cents

Ask the Readers: How Do Children Affect Financial Priorities?Today

When you’re on your own (or even with a partner), money decisions are generally straight-forward. You set personal goals and you work toward them. But what happens when you add children to the mix? How do you plan for them and for yourself at the same time? Kat is expecting her first child this month, and needs advice on how to prioritize her finances:

My partner and I are just finishing the first phase of our relationship — starting our lives together. I am 25 and he is 31. More or less, I like where we are now financially:

• We’ll be debt-free by the end of the year.
• We have no mortgage — we are renting.
• We have no car since we chose to live near our places of work.
• We’ve started an emergency fund.

In our current situation, we can live comfortably on my partner’s salary alone (50% needs, then split the rest on wants and savings, like the balanced money formula). My income can be aggressively put into savings.

However, things are about to change since we are expecting our first baby later this month. (We have saved up for hospital expenses as well and gathered some baby stuff already.)

What I want to know is: How do we start this off right? I am putting our 2009 projections and goals in order now. If it were just the two of us, I would say that 2009 will be a year devoted for catching up o

Daily Links: Trial by Fire EditionYesterday

Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, has a new television show debuting on The History Channel tonight. “Trial by Fire” can be seen at 11pm Eastern, 10pm Central, 9pm Mountain, and 11pm Pacific. Tim writes:

The concept is simple: I have one week to attempt to learn what is usually learned over 5-20 years. I either crash and burn — or survive by the skin of my teeth — in a final test (trial by fire) each time.

This initial episode profiles his attempts to learn Japanese horseback archery, or yabusame. This is only a pilot, and in order for the series to picked up, it has to draw a lot of viewers. I know that many of you, like me, are Tim Ferriss fans. If you have a chance, I encourage you to check out the show! Here’s a YouTube preview:

10 Essential Steps to Take BEFORE You’re Laid OffYesterday

This is a guest post from Kevin Merritt, founder and CEO of blist, a web-based list-sharing and database application.

As a nation we have enjoyed relatively low unemployment for the last five years. At the end of 2007 the unemployment rate stood at 4.6%. By comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate peaked at 24.9% in 1933, during the darkest year of the Great Depression.

In October of this year the unemployment rate grew 0.4% to 6.5%, its highest rate in 14 years. Ten million Americans are now unemployed: 240,000 people lost their jobs in October, and 284,000 lost their jobs in September. That represents the biggest two-month loss of American jobs since 2001. Economists are predicting the unemployment rate will rise to 8.5% by the end of 2009, which means as many as three million more workers will be laid off in the U.S.

Because I’m a CEO who hires employees regularly, a few friends of mine who have recently been laid off have asked me for job-hunting advice. Some have asked me to review their resumes and offer suggestions. Unfortunately these folks are now in job recovery mode and aren’t able to optimally position themselves for landing o

Cost To Drive: A Simple Web Tool for Budgeting Road TripsDecember 3

Are you making a long road trip for the holidays? Curious about how much it’s going to cost you? Cost To Drive can help.

When Kris and I took our short vacation in early October, I did something a little different. Though I’ve never been a budget guy, I set a budget for the trip. I knew how much I wanted to spend before I left.

As part of my planning, I needed to find out how far we were going to drive, how long it was going to take us (I didn’t want to miss the ferry), and how much all of this was going to cost. I tried a couple of different methods without success before I stumbled upon Cost To Drive, a web tool that does just one thing: estimates the cost to drive from one place in the United States to another.

Cost To Drive is dead simple to use. Enter your starting point (address, city, state, or zip code) and your destination. Select your vehicle information, and then click a button.

That’s it. Cost To Drive calculates travel dista

How to Afford Anything (But Not Everything)December 3

You can have anything you want — but you can’t have everything you want. That’s the lesson I learned from a recent conversation with my cousin. And that’s the lesson photographer Ken Rockwell imparts in an essay that explains how to afford anything.

Our ability to buy expensive toys has nothing to do with how much money we do or don’t earn. Like everything in life, it has everything to do with how well you use what you have.

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What I’ll describe has always worked for me. I hope it helps you. Everyone’s situations are different, but hopefully my skinflint lifestyle will give you the idea. This is all about prioritization and not wasting what you do have, so if you prioritize differently or enjoy spending money on something I consider wasteful, go right ahead.

Rockwell says that it’s important to understand the difference between cheap and frugal. As we’ve discussed at Get Rich Slowly before, the cheapest option isn’t always the best. Sometimes the most expensive choice actually costs less in the long run. Cheap means focusing on price above all else; frugality means see