All tagged economics

How to Prepare Your Family Finances for a Recession

The best time to plant a tree was yesterday. The second best time is today.

The talking heads on TV are putting fear into our heads and hearts with the word “recession”. While I think we always have to be weary of the talking heads, it’s important that we start planning for an uncertain future and the best time to plan for an uncertain future is when the going is good. The thing with fear is that it paralyzes most of us from taking any action. Fear never goes away. We are wired to fear because it keeps us safe. While we sometimes think humans are complex creatures, our inner core and need is to ensure we survive from whatever could hurt us. The challenge is that wherever we turn, we are made to fear anything and everything because fear is used to sell us things. Instead of letting fear get to us, let’s put a plan in place that we know we can easily execute to get our finances in order before the slowdown happens for the sake of our future selves and our families.

The Cost of Living: How to Combat the Expense of Healthcare, Childcare & College

The cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down.

A few weeks I came across this chart on Marketwatch. The original creator is Mark Perry, economics professor at the University of Michigan using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Perry's original blog post can be found here. It’s a startling graph and there’s a lot that we can interpret from it (I recommend you read the comments on the blog post), but of course, since I write from the perspective of Financial Independence, I want to put the FI spin on it.