Hope for your financial life and beyond

Keep Your Emergency Savings Fund Under Your Mattress?

April 1, 2015 by 14 Comments

What should you do with that emergency savings fund money you’ve been accumulating?

I don’t know. Why don’t you just keep it under your mattress? That’s probably the best idea.

(Cricket noise…)

April fools! (Sorry, just couldn’t resist.)

emergency savings fund under mattressNo, no, no…a thousand times NO! Please don’t keep your emergency savings fund money under your mattress. That’s one of the worst places to keep cash around the house. Under the mattress or the bed will be one of the first places a burglar looks for valuables.

Now there is nothing wrong with keeping cash around the house. You might need some for a spur of the moment issue. Banks aren’t always open and you might not be able to get to an ATM. But you don’t want to keep the emergency savings fund around the house.

Why?

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Filed Under: Insurance, Saving Tagged With: , , ,

4 Reasons Your Budget Isn’t Working

October 7, 2013 by 36 Comments

budgets that workSo, the budget doesn’t seem to be happening for you each month? Can’t figure out how to do budgets that work?  Well, take heart. At least you are trying. That’s more than can be said for a good portion of the human race who just make excuses for why they don’t want to attempt one.

If you are having trouble, that’s OK. Budget success doesn’t happen overnight. It took my wife and I six months of making adjustments and having emergency budget meetings before ours began to settle down and become consistently stable from month to month.

Budgets That Work

This I know with complete surety, developing a quality budget changed our life. But it wasn’t without some missteps along the way. In those early days, I found these four things wrecked our budget every month.

1. We left items out of our budget

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Filed Under: Budgeting, Spending Tagged With: , ,

“O Lord Jesus It’s a Fire!” – Saving For Emergencies

January 24, 2013 by 15 Comments

o lord jesus its a fireEver walk to the refrigerator, maybe to get you a cold pop, and when you opened the door the light did not come on and there was no cold air? Or maybe you’ve been BBQ-ing, the fire got too hot and you burnt the chicken. Guess we are going out for dinner.

Maybe you’ve had an unexpected bout with bronchitis that required expensive medicine. Or you suddenly remembered it’s back to school time and the kids had no shoes to wear for PE class. Perhaps something bigger has happened like a house fire where you were displaced from your home and possessions for a time.

Our reaction when crazy life events happen is basically to say, “O Lord Jesus, it’s a fire!” and then we do our best to put the fire out. Usually that requires the spending of money to make the situation right or normal again. The question for us then is “How can we be prepared when the fire comes?”

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Filed Under: Planning, Saving Tagged With: , ,