My partner recently started a new job. Prior to her employment I had been paying into my employer personal supplemental insurance as well as spousal insurance. Now that my partner has employer provided and options for employer supplemental life insurance, what should we be looking at doing? Do I stop my spousal life insurance? Or for dual income is it not bad to have both partners have self and spousal life insurance in case of things like lay offs? Also any general life insurance advice is welcome. I've never understood if it is wise to have supplemental life insurance provided by the employer or found in the open market. Thanks.

As the title says I am trying to see where people stand on this. Obviously this is all personal preference. But that is what I am after.

After depleting our savings when buying our apartment 2 years ago, we’re about to cross 6 months liquid savings in just plain old savings account with ability to immediately withdraw money.

(To clarify that is 6 month assuming 0 income, which is very unlikely given the social system of our country - so realistically we have even more in savings.)

As you can imagine, the interest in this account is not great, so I want to set a limit as to when we stop dumping every spare penny into the savings account and begin doing other things (likely try to invest).

As the title mentions, the company I work at is offering free shares when buying back some of the company's shares, as well as a discount, depending on the amount of shares purchased.

Could any of you advise me if it would be a good idea to start investing into this? If not, could anyone suggest any other investment avenues to a complete n00b like me?

Thanks in advance!

The average retirement age in the U.S. is 61, according to a 2022 Gallup survey. But the target age for retirement is 66.

So for our kids, who are still quite young, instead of opening an entire other savings account for them, we decided to do "virtual" savings accounts.

Essentially, we have a spreadsheet with what money they have gotten from birthdays and other events, then we just deposit it in our savings. They can withdraw whenever they want.

In this spreadsheet, I've been trying to keep track of interest (in a basic way), to show how saving can also help them "earn" money. However, I don't think I'm doing it correctly.

See Google sheet: dates are not correct and interest rates are not accurate. I just wanted to show that we are attempting to give the "correct" interest rate for the given date. (I know interest rates fluctuate all the time, just trying to not make it not too difficult to maintain)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rwwIFVOGYt-lIx8Dtuv_6PGz28jSNQbH7LcZG2qKlfg/edit?usp=sharing

Thank you for taking a look, I've been trying to get this right for a while.

Comingle is an interesting idea that would act as a pseudo emergency fund to provide a stable week to week income for their users. It could act to stabilize your income if you have an irregular income or as an backup plan or insurance for when you lose a job or income source. It works by distributing the average of all their members contributions weekly to each user. Once the service starts, the end result will be a net gain for those with low income and a payment to provide a guaranteed monthly income for higher earners.

• For those with low income, any amount of extra money can aid in the pursuit of opportunity and keep things from turning desperate.
• For freelancers and gig-workers, reliable weekly income can ease the complications of sporadic cash-flow.
• For those with more income, Comingle lets you help others, sends you a little extra cash on slow weeks, and provides a safety-net if things take a turn for the worse.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with them. I just got this in an email newsletter and was intrigued.

Me and my wife are in our 40s, and currently in good health. I get insurance through work, but it's a high deductible plan. I have enough in my health savings account to cover the out of pocket maximum for a few years.

Cancer does run in my family, so I was considering a cancer policy. My grandmother has one with Aflac, and she received a good payout when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. I have seen that she also only has to pay a few hundred dollars per year for her policy, which seems pretty reasonable.

However, I never really hear these policies discussed much online. Can it make financial sense to purchase? (And I guess I would keep paying it for the rest of my life) Or are these something that should be stayed away from?

How can I properly compare paying abroad with my own bank versus using Revolut for it?

For example, I know that I will spend 1500 euro worth of payments, mainly through physical card payments in stores, in the UK. I am from The Netherlands. My bank account is set in euro's and obviously in the UK it'll be paid in GBP.

Revolut should be a very good way to pay in foreign currencies but I am not able to determine what the difference would be. There is currency exchange rates, currency exchange fees, payment in foreign currency surcharge, perhaps Revolut subscription fees. Is this everything I need to take into account?

Revolut EUR-GBP exchange rate

ING GBP-EUR exchange rate

Revolut fees

ING fees

Is it safe to treat stocks and ETFs in my brokerage account as savings and emergency funds as long as I have a significant number of lots with a Stop Loss or Stop Limit Order in place? My Savings Account technically doesn't cover 3 months of expense, but combined with my brokerage account it does. Is it safe to be have 1 month in savings and 2 months in stock/ETF with stop loss orders in place that if exercised equate to 2 months of expenses?

I've been using You Need a Budget for family budgeting and I like it but it is expensive. I've played with Buckets a little bit and looks like a contender. Anyone move from YNAB to Buckets?

Home prices weakened month to month, according to Black Knight. While still gaining, which they usually do at this time of year, the gains fell below their 25-year average. This after significantly outdoing their historical averages from February through June. It’s a signal that a slowdown in prices may be underway again.

Behind the cooling off: mortgage rates. They rose sharply last summer and fall, causing prices to drop. They then came down for much of the winter and a bit of the spring, causing home prices to turn higher again. Now rates are back over 7% again, hitting 20-year-plus highs in August.

Add to that, new listings rose from July to August, atypical for that period of the year. Some sellers may be trying to cash in on these historically high prices. Active inventory, however, is about 48% below the levels seen from 2017 to 2019.

“While the uptick in new listings is good news for home shoppers, inventory remains persistently low, even with record-high mortgage rates putting a damper on demand,” said Danielle Hale, chief economist for Realtor.com.

The jump in home prices since the start of the Covid pandemic, combined with much higher mortgage rates has crushed affordability.

It now takes roughly 38% of the median household income to make the monthly payment on the median-priced home purchase, according to Black Knight. That makes homeownership the least affordable it’s been since 1984.

Where all my cash hoarders at and where do you park your savings?

Also, how do you decide how much cash to hold vs invest?

Personally I enrolled in Robinhood Gold for the 4.9% APY. It costs $5/month.

General financials:

I can afford to pay them off in full and have plenty left over for general life needs

The interest rates on them should be 4.53% according to their chart of when it was awarded.

If I do hold onto the money and pay off monthly I can put everything into a CD but I'll still be losing .03% if I lock in the student loan money maybe I'll beat but .07-.43% so not a ton of upside unless there's sudden political will to actually follow through on student loan forgiveness.

Is there anything else I'm missing when considering this? I am leaning towards just pay off as I've been planning for this, but I want to make sure there isn't something else to do.

Interest will start accruing again on September 1, after rates were effectively set to 0% since March 2020 for federal student loans. Now, interest rates, which are fixed and vary by loan, will return to the same rate they were before the freeze.

For most borrowers, the first payment will be due sometime in October – but not everyone has the exact same due date.

Borrowers can expect to receive their bill, listing their payment amount and due date, at least 21 days beforehand.

Generally, borrowers can expect their monthly payment to be the same as it was before the pandemic pause. Unless a borrower made optional payments or other changes to their account, like consolidating their loans, federal student loans were essentially frozen in time.

What are you invested in? Target date funds, ETFs, individual stocks? Do you think of your portfolio as aggressive, neutral, or conservative?

It occured to me the other day in a discussion about lifestyle creep that a lot of discussions about retirement assume you earn at the 10- or 20-year historical average returns of the S&P500, but it would be very unusual to be 100% in the S&P500 for your entire working life. So, the effect of small changes in cash infusions (i.e. splurging on large but infrequent purchases) is lessened when you consider that most people will be invested more conservatively and real returns will be lower.

So what do you have setup?

Currently about 70% of my retirement account value is in a 401k, which is 100% in FFLDX, a Fidelity target retirement 2055 fund. I'm not as pleased with the returns on this. It says I'm up 11% 1Y but I frankly don't believe it because it's worth barely more than the cash that's been put in to it in that time. Our fund picks for our 401k are kind of crap. The other 30% account value is in a Roth IRA, which I have distributed as:

55% FXAIX (FID S&P 500 ETF)

20% FSPSX (FID international ETF)

15% FSMAX (FID domestic whole market ETF)

10% FXNAX (FID bond ETF)

I would consider this overall rather neutral, maybe even conservative considering my age (31). What do you think?

I'm a long time PocketSmith user currently switching to Quicken. PocketSmith is a decent product but has some glaring issues that don't seem to be on their radar and I feel like my finances have honestly become too complex for PocketSmith's simplistic philosophy.

Quicken is the 800 lb. gorilla of personal finance and has been for decades. It's fairly complex but also way more feature rich than most personal finance software. My main complaints about it are that it's a (mostly) Windows Desktop only platform and that handling attachments is more time consuming than PocketSmith. In reality, PocketSmith doesn't handle attachments that well. I just built an app to help streamline the process which is not an option with Quicken.

We run a couple small businesses along with our personal finances, which Quicken accommodates just fine.

What personal Accounting software are you using and what do you like about it?

Definitely a trend I see around me (Europe, 30 years old).

All of my friends able to buy got at least 30k - 50k from their parents.

Is it the same around you? How do you deal with this?

Also, some data from a few days back:

https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2426785?scrollToComments=true

I recently started giving plain text accounting a go. For a long time I did not do any accounting, as my income was high enough to get by perfectly fine, but recently I wanted to get a lot more control over my personal finance in order to easier achieve more long term financial goals.

I've only been at it for about a month now, and I started out with ledger. So far I am enjoying the concept, but have not made much out of reporting yet. But I like the idea of also building my own reporting in Python on top of existing reports, and checking out the ecosystem around this (I understand BeanCount has a large Python ecosystem, so I will probably check this out once I have some months of data).

Are there anyone here doing this? I would love to hear some perspectives about this, both good and bad, from people having used this for a long time.

I'm talking about types of accounts, automatic transfers, etc. Feel free to mention specifics, but I'm more interested in higher level information like does your paycheck go to savings or checking, do you use automatic transfers, do you use a traditional bank account or something different, etc.

Basically, what happens to your paycheck? Do you like your process, or are you considering making changes?

Here's mine:

I have five main accounts:

• Fidelity Bloom Save and Spend for savings and spending respectively; each is a brokerage account
• Fidelity Cash Management Account - mostly fit the fantastic debit card
• Ally Checking and Savings

And here's the general flow of cash:

1. Biweekly paycheck -> Fidelity Save
2. Automatic transfer 2x/month from Fidelity Save -> Fidelity Spend
3. Automatic transfers from Fidelity Spend -> Ally savings and personal spending accounts
4. Automatic transfers from Ally savings to Ally checking; Ally checking is used for Target debit and automatic transfers to wife's IRA
5. Manual transfers as needed to Fidelity Cash Management - I try to keep this near $0, and only transfer for travel or if I need to withdraw from an ATM

I have credit cards and other bills set to autopay in full from my Fidelity Spend account 2x/month (roughly even between the two halves of the month). I changed my credit card due dates to line everything up years ago, so now everything is pretty much automated.

I like this setup because:

• brokerage has higher yielding money market funds
• pretty much everything is automated
• can have investments living next to spending money (e.g. my efund is Treasury bills, which live in my "savings")
• I keep more sketchy account linkages at a separate institution from my main savings
• I need a brokerage anyway for my HSA, and I'm considering moving my other retirement savings to Fidelity as well to further reduce institutions
• Fidelity has better 2FA options than pretty much any other bank

I used to use Ally as my main account, but I switched to Fidelity late last year and I really like it so far. Some changes I'm planning to make:

• get my hardware security token set up with Fidelity - I've been sitting on it for months, just need to make the call
• move wife's autopay to pull from Fidelity directly; she's not on the account yet, so I need to fill out some forms

Many steps remain before older adults see the benefit of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ upcoming talks with drugmakers.

I am looking for a target-maturity bond ETF for UK Gilts but I couldn't find any by using an internet search engine. I would like something similar to iShares iBonds Dec 2033 Term Treasury ETF but for UK Gilts instead of US treasury bonds. Does such an ETF exist? If not, what are the practical alternatives for getting UK government bond exposure that have the following characteristics:

• Easy for foreigners to purchase
• Easy to liquidate
• Has a fixed maturity date
• Has a low minimum investment requirement (e.g. less than 1000 GBP).

This is technically a question specific to Canada but maybe it can be applied to other countries as well.

I have a fixed number of stocks in a regular investment account and in a Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA). For non-Canadians the TFSA is like a personal investment account except there is no capital gains tax. Last year I maxed out my contributions to my TFSA but I wanted to save more money so I put some funds into a personal investment account. This year due to the economy I can't save as much so I have extra contribution room in my TFSA. So my question is, should I just sell all my shares in my personal investment account, transfer the money to my TFSA account and buy the same stocks there? Are there any downsides to doing this?

At the end of 2022, I discovered this software that I've been using all year. I'd like to hear your thoughts or experiences with GnuCash, or whatever system/program you use to track your personal finances!

For the ones unfamiliar, it's based on a double-entry accounting system; every transaction always has at least two accounts involved. Example: if I spend 200 SEK on a restaurant, it goes from Assets:Cash to Expenses:Food.

Starting by creating my own accounts, it helped me immensely to have an overview of my general financial situation.

Around March, I found enlightening to re-define what expenses needed their own category from what I was unconsciously lumping into 'others'. Having it all already logged, made it quite easy . The caveat is that all the entries are manual, but my finances are not as complex, so with 30-45 minutes a week I have it updated.

You can even create diagrams for your monthly expenses, or general balance, among other reports that come quite handy if you want to run a query.