Recent common wisdom is that only the foolish or the desperate would buy a house — while the answer a year ago was heck, yes, buy one! Neither answer is very helpful, so it might be worthwhile to lay all the cards on the table and come up with some rational reasons for deciding whether to buy a house or not.
I was talking to a friend who was eligible to enroll in the Thrift Saving Plan (TSP) which is the federal equivalent to a 401(k) retirement savings plans many companies provide. To my shock, he wasn’t enrolled. When I told him he was leaving free money on the table, it got his attention. So if you are one of the roughly 10% of federal employees that don’t contribute or the additional 20% who don’t contribute at least 5% of your salary, read on.
For federal workers, this month is a 3 payday month instead of the normal 2. If you haven’t set aside your “extra” payment yet, what are you going to do with it? I have to admit that whenever I get an extra pay period, I go to Best Buy and look longingly at the flat screen TVs and the laptops. But I (or my wife) usually stops to figure out how much it’s going to cost us in the long run. For example, if I had an extra $1000 and put it in the stock market, I’d have about $30,000 in 30 years if the stock market keeps up its average 12% post World War II return. That makes for a lot of laptops in the future if I can keep myself from buying one in the present!
Planning for retirement is one of the toughest financial tasks anyone can attempt. Nobody has a magic crystal ball that sees 10, 20, 30, or more years in the future. A trusted financial adviser can help for a fee. Fortunately, there are retirement calculators on the web that you can use for free, some very good:
My wife had to sell the house she kept for her mom in one of the toughest real estate markets in the nation. We learned through experience several techniques to sell a house in a buyer’s market:
Or paternity benefits? The answer is no — it’s one of the few places the federal government lags behind industry, at least for white collar professionals. However, you can piece together a maternity leave using a few approaches:
Let’s face it, we love and need our automobiles, but they aren’t cheap to operate. The average family spends over $500,000 over a lifetime to maintain two cars. About $50,000 of this can go into auto insurance. Fortunately, there are a few steps you can take to reduce this cost:
In most workplaces, salaries are a carefully or poorly guarded secret, depending on how Darwinian the management is. In the case of many federal workers, salaries are public knowledge.
Many companies provide discounts on services and goods for government employees that can save you plenty of money, but they often don’t go out of the way to advertise them. Here are some that we use:
