The IRS places limits on how much you can defer into a qualified retirement plan each year. Employees are encouraged to save via pre-tax and/or Roth contributions, but they cannot go over the limits set by the IRS. If you do exceed the contribution limits, your employer plan (401k or 403b) should return the funds to you, otherwise your account may be penalized. It’s also good to note that your company match or employer contributions do not count towards the... Read more
Generating wealth over a period of time normally takes diligent saving and hard work. To generate an income to give yourself the opportunity to save and invest a lot of money takes active employment. You go to work and are paid for every hour you work or a flat salary. But what if you don’t want to have to work to build wealth? Do you always have to trade your time for money? Is there a way to passively generate... Read more
If you’re a regular here at Faith and Finance, please take a moment to check out the guest article we published on Free Money Finance. If you’re visiting from Free Money Finance, we just want to say THANKS for stopping by the blog! Have a Look Around Here’s a few of the most popular articles that you might enjoy reading: Should Christians Work on Sundays? How We Keep Our Grocery Budget Under $250 per Month! Is Gold a Good Investment?... Read more
The Richest Man in Babylon opens with a brief story of a man named Bansir, who never seemed able to get ahead in life. He owed people money and didn’t really feel motivated to work hard because it felt like his money would just leave as soon as it came in. I’m sure we can relate with Bansir in some way or another, which is probably why the story opens that way. After this brief introduction, Bansir and his friends... Read more
Betterment just announced the addition of IRAs to the mix of investing tools available for you to use. Opening a Betterment IRA Betterment has just announced (as of December 21, 2011) that IRAs are now up and running. If you’ve been putting of opening an IRA, now’s the time to start. Betterment makes it really easy to visualize your savings and gives you the tools to automate your IRA contributions. Why You Should Have an IRA I’m a firm believer... Read more
My wife and I have a few payments taken directly out of our savings account. Her paychecks would go directly into the savings and there would always be enough to cover it. Since she’s stopped working, I’ve been transferring money from our checking account to cover the payments. Unfortunately, I forgot to transfer some money this month and the payment caused an overdraft fee to hit my savings account. I can’t stand fees and getting knocked with a $35 overdraft... Read more
The Misery Index is a statistic about the economy that takes two factors into consideration: the unemployment rate and inflation rate. With simple math, you add these two rates together to come up with the misery index. As the name suggests, a high rate of unemployment and inflation brings misery to an economy and the higher these two statistics, the greater the misery the country will be in. The new media absolutely loves when they can use headlines like “Misery... Read more
We’re giving away a $40 Amazon gift card this month! A big THANKS to all you great readers out there :) We want everyone to have a chance to enter, so here’s how you can: If you’re new…. Become a fan on facebook (1 entry) If you’re already a facebook fan… Hit the ‘like’ button on this article and tell us in the comments (1 entry) If you’re on twitter… Hit this tweet button: Tweet (1 entry) Don’t forget to... Read more
I don’t know what it’s like to herd sheep, and I certainly don’t fully understand what it means to lose one. But for the crowd around Jesus that day in Capernaum, they understood exactly what it meant to lose something so significant as a sheep. I wonder if Jesus were to revise his parables for today’s crowd if he would say something like “If a person goes to Walmart and buys 10 bags of groceries, would he not leave the... Read more
After getting married three years ago, my wife and I thought [briefly] about buying a home. We decided that renting was our best option at the time, and I’m really glad we did. Mobility was our biggest factor since she was applying to medical school; and this summer we ended up moving to a new city since she was accepted to a med program. “But you’re throwing your money away if you rent!” I don’t know if people say it... Read more
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