Personal finance blogs often dwell on savings, investing, and self-sacrifice for the greater good of your financial life. But when it comes down to it, if you don’t spend your money on the things you love, you’ll go crazy and end up spending $499 on a new dining set at Costco just because you kept [...]
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The 5 Books That Changed My Money Life
I’ve been talking a lot lately about the importance of educating yourself about money before you start investing and saving for retirement. Money education shouldn’t follow investing so if you have any interest start today. The benefits of even a little money education will pay-off huge in the long run. I started learning about money [...]
How to Save for Retirement While Working Abroad
*Update 5/24/2010* A reader recently e-mailed me and told me about her troubles opening up an account with Vanguard since she was a foreigner working in Singpaore. It appears it is incredibly difficult for Americans who live abroad to open taxable accounts with brokerages and banks. I’ll be updating this topic this week with new [...]
Batch Presents for Savings on Big-Ticket Items
There are a lot of big purchases in our lives – TVs, laptops, phones, iPods, Kindles. A lot of the time we think we can’t live without these items for more than a couple of days – maybe a week at most. Often if they break or wear down, we immediately go out and buy [...]
Why You Shouldn’t Save Money Like a Young Chinese Woman
“[Chinese women] under 32 have an effective savings rate of zero.” This quote comes from an article from Financial Times (via Jezebel) highlighting the 21st century yue guang zu or “spend-all-your-salary clan” women of China. These twenty-something, working-class women are spending the bulk of their monthly paychecks on glamorous items like clothes, jewelry, expensive restaurants, [...]
How to Make Nachos in Japan
I love sushi and I’ve been introduced to some delicious Japanese foods, but sometimes I just want some food from America. Luckily, so does my girlfriend and she loves to cook. She searches food blogs and has creatively constructed 10-15 meals that taste like I flew back to Chicago and am eating at my mom’s [...]
Use the Enthusiasm of a New Year to Automate & Guarantee Savings in 2010
2010 is here along with new resolutions and hope that better times are ahead. Unfortunately, history shows we’re not too good at sticking with our new year’s resolutions. According to the Fox affiliate, Fox50.com: “By the end of the year, [ ] nearly 97 percent of New Year’s resolutions won’t be kept.” It’s also shown [...]
Simplify Savings with the Envelope System
The envelope system is a popular budgeting tool that allows you to easily keep track of monthly expenses and limit spending in certain categories. I was initially attracted to the envelope system for its ease of use and suggested it to my girlfriend for our monthly food expenses. When she arrived in Japan in September [...]
Welcome to FF!
Hi, my name's Austin Morgan. I teach English in Japan and write about money for twenty-somethings. Feel free to contact me with any questions and I hope you enjoy the site!
