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How to Build An Emergency Fund

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What's an Emergency Fund? Everyone knows the word 'emergency', but in the context of personal finance it's worth understanding what we mean by an emergency. A financial emergency could be the loss of a job, unforeseen medical bills, car or home repairs, or anything else that could happen to you or your property that you'd want to have some cash on hand for. If you're investing efficiently, it's best to only have the cash to cover your standard expenses and a bit extra that you might really need in a pinch if a few things went south at the same time. The rest of it should be growing on it's own while you keep adding more to the pot. How Much Should I Set Aside? This is going to be somewhat unique to you and your situation. Here's the approach I would take: 1. Figure out your expenses. By now you're probably familiar with Mint as a great tool to organize and track all of your finances and expenses automatically. Figure out how much you
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How I Hired and Fired My Financial Advisor

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How it started About 7 years ago, I hired a financial advisor. Let me pause while all the do it yourselfers and index fund junkies burn effigies of Buck Stacker. I'm so sorry to disappoint you, but you know what, I'm not sorry I did it and I want to tell you why. When I first entered the world of investing I was confronted by an enormous variety of financial products and data. Mutual funds, ETFs, REITs, expense ratios, beta, sharpe ratios, yields, dividends, capital gains, turnover. The list of terms was endless, and the internet is chock full of "experts" with different theories about each of them. I read as much as I could but it never seemed like I knew enough to be confident in what I should do with my investments. So, I did the most logical thing I could think of. I started asking older people I knew what I should do. A family friend who offered some helpful guidance when I was started out my career mentioned to me that he had a firm he used to manage
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Tracking Your Investments: 10 Minutes Will Save You Thousands

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In case you haven't read the post about tracking your money for free with Mint, check it out here . Okay, now that you've surely signed up with Mint, you might be wondering what other tools are going to help you keep everything in order in a 21st century kind of way. In particular, Mint will track your investment balances and transactions well, but it doesn't delve too much into your investments themselves.  So, with that in mind, I wanted to share some thoughts about one of my favorite free tools out there for tracking your investments in more detail, Personal Capital . Much like Mint, Personal Capital links to your bank and investment accounts and pulls in the account balances for them in a convenient combined interface available on your PC, tablet, and mobile to make it easy to see everything under one roof. Like Mint, Personal Capital can show you all of your funds in a number of formats, including historical graphs and reports so you can see all of yo
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First Thing's First: Where Is All My Money?

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If you've found your way here, you probably like free stuff and no-brainer tools that will grow your stack while you sleep. This post is about to help you accomplish both goals. The best part is if you've got 5-10 minutes you can get started right now! Just for fun, I asked a couple of friends how they keep track of their money. The answers I got ranged from "I have a word document with all of the accounts listed" to "I figured it out years ago and just look at my last tax return to see where everything is." to "I have a post-it note in a drawer with my account numbers but I lost it I think.". That was scary to me, but it also means a lot of people can benefit from some good news! There's a way better way, and I've got it covered below! Mint! One of the best things you can do to start getting smarter about your money is to simply understand where all of it is. Mint is a free website with a slick mobile app that helps you do just that
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Responsible People Have Pockets

Origin Story Once upon a time, on a warm New York City evening in 2001 I went out to play basketball in Riverside Park. I was fifteen but well behaved enough (usually) to have a flexible curfew, and got home around midnight. When I got home, it dawned on me that I'd forgotten my keys. Not realizing how late it was and that my family might be asleep, I rang the door bell. When no one answered I rang again. And again. And again. This went on for what felt like twenty minutes with no response. Kids didn't really have cell phones at this point, so the little squeaky doorbell was my only option. Eventually, my dad answered the door, three quarters asleep, his hair pointing in every direction imaginable, with a very perturbed look on his face. I said I was sorry for waking him up and explained that I hadn't planned to be out so late so I didn't bring my keys, plus my basketball shorts didn't have pockets so where would I have kept keys anyway. As my winding excuse c
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