It’s graduation time of year again and a great time to ask yourself: What would be the best gift you could you give your children when they graduate from college or head out on their own as a young adult?
How about a nice fat nest egg to get them started? We built a $25,000 stock portfolio for each of our children that we gave them when they each graduated from college-debt free! We are just ordinary people that accomplished this and you can do it too!
Click belowto view my You Tube video showing exactly how we did it and you can do it too:
When our children were born and people wanted to get a gift for the baby, we asked family & friends to give us the gift of money that we would invest for them. We felt this was a much wiser choice than some new toy that would soon be worn out or in which they would lose interest.
We set up a very low cost stock index mutual fund (such as the S&P 500 Index Fund) along with a general stock mutual fund for each child and started investing.
When the children were old enough to start working, we wanted to really encourage their frugal living and investing, so we made them an offer they could not refuse!
For every dollar they contributed to their savings, we would match it–so they would double the amount of money they had to invest!
That gave them extra incentive to work hard & save a large percentage of what they were earning or receiving as gifts!
We knew that compound interest is a powerful force that can reap huge benefits and we wanted them to benefit from it!
We set up a spreadsheet that we reviewed with them periodically to demonstrate how much richer they were getting. They became much more enthusiastic about saving their hard earned money after they started to see how their investments were earning them “free money” they didn’t have to earn by working.
On the day each of our children graduated from college, debt free, we switched the entire portfolio into their name!
They EACH had a nest egg of over $25,000 to begin their adult lives at 22 years of age!
That’s a whole lot better than a bunch of smashed up old toys and NO money!
Wouldn’t that be a fabulous graduation present for your children or grandchildren too?
In honor of Earth Day, it is worthwhile to ask yourself the question: What are the things you can do that will best benefit the planet?
To sum it up into a simple phrase, that would be reduce, reuse and recycle! Perfect–those are the same thing you do when you are being frugal and saving and moving towards your financial independence!
Whether you shop for gently worn clothing for you or your kids at a thrift store, like Goodwill or you buy second hand furniture to save from trees being cut down, or maybe you decorate your house with gently used items. This reusing of perfectly good items saves the Earth’s resources.
Consider how buying a second hand, less expensive car contributes to the health of the Earth by saving all the energy needed to build that vehicle, not to mention all the steel and parts that go into the car.
It is kind to the environment and–best of all for you, it also saves you lots of money!
Everybody wins!
Like the sign says at the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore: Used Saves. It saves the Earth and saves you money!
Would you be interested to learn exactly how to make up to $500,000 TAX FREE doing makeovers on real estate?
I thought so!
Did you know that since 1997, up to $250,000 in profit ($500,000 for a married couple) on the sale of a home, is exempt from taxation if you have lived in the home as your principal residencefor two out of the last five years?
A friend of mine told me several years ago she and her husband have done this exact thing many times and she showed me step by step exactly how they accomplished this. These ideas have been incorporated into my own homes and I will showcase the process I used over the next several weeks.
Basically, the right housemust meet specificcriteria. The property must have great potential as a primary residence, be in a terrific location and need a makeover. Increase the market value of the real estate by adding character & value through improvements, landscaping and decorating. In essence, make it look like a model home.
Live in it for 2 years, market the heck out of it, sell it and repeat the process! You can do this too! Especially in the current real estate market where there are fabulous deals!
Today, we demonstrate great ways to add value to your home with inexpensive & easy to do custom window treatments and blinds.
We purchased these faux wood blinds that fit on the inside of each window segment and are very easy to install. The length of the blind is adjustable by removing slats from the bottom that are not needed . This creates the custom look, since they fit exactly.
The US Post Office sent us a packet of coupons when we moved into our new home that included a 10% coupon good at Home Depot, which Lowe’s will also honor. We purchased all of the blinds with this coupon!
Our front door has a fan shaped window above the door and 2 very thin side windows. Custom blinds would have been required for this configuration and there was NO WAY I was going to pay $1,200, which is the quote I received from a blind company.
Instead, I bought 2 queen sized white bed sheets for $ 9 total, perfect because they are large with no seams, and I made simple pockets in each end.
I cut a wooden dowel rod to make tiny custom curtain rods and held them in place with 10¢ cup hooks from the hardware store.
The curved fan window treatment was very simple to make, using the same design with a bedsheet and sewing a rod pocket at each end. I measured the distance between the top edge of the window to the bottom edge and simply pieced together one long rectangle that I made pockets at each end and threaded through a $ 3 plastic drainage tube.
I used tubing because it’s pliable and it will curve. Pretty clever huh? I found this tubing in the garden department of the hardware store.
Voila a custom window treatment!
That would cost $500 to have a designer create that for you!
A door that leads to the patio has a long slender window. This time I used an aluminum blind purchased on sale at Wal-Mart, removed the extra slats at the bottom and it looks totally custom!
Home buyers love to be able to walk right into a property that looks like a Model Home and not do a thing!
They don’t know that you used inexpensive techniques to enhance and stage the property, so the value of your improvements goes right into your selling price!
You are making it easy for buyers to LOVE your property and thanks to a little effort, you are on your way to makinggreat tax free money!
There was a great personal finance article in today’s Wall Street Journal called “When I was Your Age“.
The article features prominent people recalling the best—and worst— financial advice they received as new college graduates.
I believe you can learn almost everything you want to know from people that have already done it successfully!
Included in the survey were David Bach, author of the best-selling FinishRich books, Paula Deen, restaurant owner, author and Food Network host, and Robert Kiyosaki, businessman and author of the best-selling “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” books.
David Bach told how he had learned the value of hard work and purchasing a home while in his 20’s. I agree wholeheartedly with what he said regarding how hard work and saving in your 20s and 30s can determine your future! Amen to that!
Ask all the broke 50 and 60 year old people if they regret not saving and investing when they were young, now that they are running out of time to build their wealth!
Paula Deen learned the value of heeding the advice todo what you love–which was cooking! Look at what a fabulous success she has made of that!
Mary L. Schapiro, chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, said her parents warned her about getting into debt. She listened to them on that point, but regrets not getting into the habit of saving right away. Her advice to grads is to fully understand the implications of debt and what it will take to repay the loan.
Probably my favorite is from Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, president of the Charles Schwab Foundation. She said the best advice she heard was to live frugally and save for a rainy day. She suggestsliving off 90% of your income and save the other 10%. I would aim for saving more than that!
Do you want to build wealth and have financial independence? Well, do you?
Then every day, with every financial decision you make, remind yourself that there are 2 main methods to achieving that goal.
It is a simple concept: Make more (revenue) and spend less (costs). The more money you accumulate, the more you have to invest, which increases your wealth and helps you get rich.
We learned a long time ago, that with some effort, we could save 50% of our meager incomes in order to save money for a down payment on an investment property or to add to our investment accounts.
You may ask, what does that have to do with this great bread machine?
As regular readers of this blog know, I LOVE bargains and believe you can get pretty much everything at reduced prices if you search for them.
The less you spend- the more you have to save and invest!
Long ago, I discovered the gold mine of estate sales and garage sales! I have been amazed at what people have sold and the fantastic stuff I have been able to buy for a song.
Recently, I spotted this brand new, never used Williams-Sonoma bread machine at a garage sale.
The woman running the sale said her husband had given it to her as a Christmas gift several years ago and she had never used it! She no longer had the box or the instruction book, and that’s why she had it priced at $10!
I asked her if she would take $5 and she happily said Yes! This terrific Williams-Sonoma item probably sells for $100 or more!
After I paid her, I asked her “If you didn’t want it, why didn’t you take it back, get the money and buy something else?” She said, “Oh I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”
I said “The money he spent belonged to both of you–doesn’t that seem nuts to basically throw away $100?” She said “Yeah, I guess so.”
So, thanks to her and her husband I now have a brand new bread machine! There are bargains like this everywhere!
At another yard sale, all books were priced at 50¢ and I found this terrific Bread Machine book!
So now for the cost of one loaf of gourmet bread--I have a terrific machine that will make me countless loaves of fresh bread!
The money I save will be invested in appreciating assets that will build wealth!
