In addition to my dad, my mom wanted someone else to know of a stash of cash she had hidden in the hem of the bedroom curtains. A fall resulted in a hospital stay and rehab for mom, and my dad needed to move in with me due to his health. I went upstairs to retrieve mom’s mad money and found an envelope with 70 neatly stacked $100 bills.
A few years later my mother in law was forced from her condo by a fire.

I have a high-yield savings account and several CDs at Marcus bank, owned by Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs and named after one of its founders, Marcus Goldman. I originally discovered Marcus bank while perusing rankings on bankrate.com.
Marcus is an online bank and a member of FDIC. All accounts are insured up to $250,000. Marcus charges no monthly fees. There is no minimum balance to open a high-yield savings account, but a minimum balance of $500 is required to open a CD.

When you make out the form to contribute some of your income for a 401K or Roth 401K, your HR department will default to setting equal deductions for each pay period in the year. However, you can change this.
You can request a larger dollar amount per pay period so that your 401K contribution is complete before year end.
This can be helpful if you may be leaving your job, voluntarily or involuntarily, before year end.

I recently heard a fascinating discussion about millionaires.  A financial advisor was speaking to an audience and made the comment that billionaires have jets and millionaires have two used Toyota Camrys in the garage.  His point was that millionaires become millionaires by living below their means and that most millionaires whom he has met live modestly.
He went on to say that there are an estimated 24 million people in the United States who are millionaires. 

I VIVIDLY REMEMBER my father explaining how small sums of money could grow exponentially. Using the example of a penny that doubled every day for a month, he showed how it could grow to more than $10 million. Indeed, as Albert Einstein didn’t say, “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.”
Many authors tout the benefits of saving beginning at a young age. Radio personality Dave Ramsey and his daughter Rachel Cruze,

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN a saver, and perhaps even pathologically frugal. Growing up, it pained me to spend money, even on food when I was hungry. Today, I have more than enough money, but I still resist paying full price for food.
Perhaps I’m just genetically frugal, or perhaps my feelings about money reflect my parents and my upbringing. My mom once shared that her aunt predicted that she’d make lots of money, but it would be like grains of rice and slip through her fingers. Meanwhile,

JEFF WAS A NEW engineer who began his nuclear power career a couple of decades ago as part of my group. He’d graduated from a middling engineering school with a stellar grade point average. Quiet, though not shy, he had a serious demeanor.
Jeff had a goal of purchasing a house as soon as possible. Needless to say, this was a tall order for someone just starting his career. He lived a spartan lifestyle,

WHAT DOES IT MEAN to “live within your means”? To answer the question, we first need to define “means.”

If your gross income is $60,000, that income isn’t your means. For starters, you need to subtract income and payroll taxes. To live within your means, you need to spend no more than your net income—income after taxes and other withholdings.

I’ll go further and suggest that your true means are your income net of monthly savings for retirement and financial emergencies.

SOME FRIENDS WERE recently discussing their investment performance. I couldn’t contribute to the conversation—because I have no idea what our investment returns have been.
The fact is, I don’t find performance information all that valuable, plus it’s relatively hard to calculate since you have to account for both price changes and dividend or interest payments. To be sure, investment returns are useful if you’re looking to determine whether a mutual fund manager is adding returns in excess of a benchmark index,

I’VE BEEN SAVING almost my entire adult life. Early on, three books put me on the path to financial success, helping me to reevaluate how I was living.
The first was The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach. This introduced me to the concept that small, automated savings could lead to big results, thanks to compounding over long periods. Albert Einstein reportedly said, “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it,

COMMENTARY ABOUT America’s wealth inequality seems to be everywhere. According to Wikipedia, as of 2021’s fourth quarter, Federal Reserve data indicate that the top 1% of households hold 32.3% of the country’s wealth.
Meanwhile, Pew Research Center reports that the median wealth of the richest 20% of American families increased by an inflation-adjusted 45% between 1998 and 2007, while the median wealth of middle-income families rose just 16%.
And then there’s the Federal Reserve Bank of St.

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG engineer, I supervised a charismatic worker named Neil, who was a sort of pied piper to the younger engineers and technicians in our group. He was about 20 years older than us and loved to dispense advice like a guru.
His quirky advice usually had a financial component. For example, he recommended that we single guys marry women with curly hair, as that would save tens of thousands of dollars over the course of the marriage,

THIS SIMPLE EQUATION is arguably the most important in personal finance: income – expenses = savings.
Think back to your early paychecks. Most of your after-tax salary likely went toward housing, food and maybe a few debt payments. For many of us, little was available to save each month for the first year or two of our working lives.
Then one day, on the last day of the month, there was money left over.

I GREW UP IN A SMALL three-bedroom home, the youngest of 14 children. I was always sharing a bed with one older brother or another. My father drove a garbage truck for the county and my mom washed dishes in the school cafeteria.
Money was hard to come by and, when it was in hand, it needed to be spent wisely. My parents engrained in me the importance of education, although neither had a high school diploma.