Best Savings and Investment Apps for Your 2018 Financial Resolutions

It’s that time of year again! As we jump into the new year and everyone makes their finance-related resolutions, I like to share some of my own favorite tools and apps for saving and investing. I’ve added (and subtracted) several over the past year, but here are my current recommendations:

Read More

Money, New Year’s Resolutions, and Financial Freedom

I know a lot of people are making finance-related new year’s resolutions this week, so I thought I would share some of the savings/investment tools that have really made a difference for me in the past year. And if you’re reading this after the new year–well hey, it’s never too late to make moves toward financial freedom!
My newest favorite (as of April 2017) is Wealthsimple, which is where I hold my Roth IRA. They let you invest in socially responsible companies and they manage your first $5,000 free. In addition, if you sign up through someone else’s referral, you each get an additional $10,000 managed free for another year. My  link is here: Wealthsimple-Smart Investing.

Update: since Digit is going to start charging $2.99/month for their services starting in July, I’ve decided to stop using them by that time. That may be okay for some people…but I’m cheap enough that that was a deal-breaker for me. =) Just leaving this here for the sake of information.

Read More

Woes of Work (or Lack Thereof)

Perhaps it’s the head cold that has me a bit down; maybe it’s the breakup aftermath. Either way, I’m having trouble avoiding a fixation on my job woes today.

I know that breaking into a new field is hard, especially with a master’s degree in a different field (and simultaneous graduate assistantship experience *in* the relevant field, which doesn’t always count because it occurred while I was in school. ugh). Despite that, I’m pretty irritated about how the process has gone so far. Especially when the interviews go so well, even to the point of my receiving detailed employee benefits information (costs and everything, I mean)…only to receive an email a couple days later that they are “moving forward” with other candidates–except that it looks like it just went to a guy already in the company. Internal politics, I suppose.

Read More

Money Blues

Just thinking about my finances today, I am overwhelmed. From loans for graduate school to the car note (my car was totaled last November when I got rear-ended) to surgery bills to regular old “life” bills, it feels like I don’t even know where to start. After graduate school, I moved back home to help my parents with a lot of much-needed, much-overdue work on their house and yard. I felt they more than deserved that help, and after how miserable I was during my time in Missouri, I just needed to be able to work with my hands and be near people who love me. We’ve made wonderful progress on that on renovations and organization, but it has been a real challenge to my identity. I hadn’t lived at home since high school, and my tendency toward financial independence at a young age and working ridiculous hours had been big parts of who I was.

Read More