Don't Quit Your Day Job…

When you think of budgeting, money isn’t the only resource that should come to mind. In personal finance, time is every bit as important as money, but only you can place an accurate value on it. The financial equivalent of an hour of your time is determined by how wisely you spend it – the more
you plan your time and allocate it to productive activities, the more it’s worth. So if you’re looking to squeeze more value out of each hour in your day, try some of these tips to keep you aware of the way you spend your time.

I know, this is a topic we here at DQYDJ have covered before… specifically back on July 2nd, 2009 when gas was averaging the incredible price of $2.63.  This specific article was inspired by the recent comeback gas prices have made – gas today average $3.33 a gallon nationwide, according to Fuel Gauge Report from AAA.  However, today we’re going to give you the opportunity to calculate what it would take for you to hedge your gas prices with our nifty gas price hedging calculator!

Maybe it’s better if you haven’t checked it since like, say, 2007… but if you habitually check your 401(k) balance you may notice something – it has come charging back since the doldrums of the last few years. According to this article on CNNMoney, it’s not only your account which is happily recovering – 401(k) balances are at a record high… and the average 401(k) balance now stands at $71,500. Last years average? A mere $64,200, so contributions and returns have raised the average balance 11.5%!

I read an interesting article the other day hosted on Yahoo! Finance. Entitled “Four Radical Strategies to Retire Sooner”, it breaks down three radical strategies, and one not so radical idea for saving enough money to retire earlier. Of course, if any of these strategies could be implemented during retirement, you could also use them to save some money once you’re actively drawing down your funds. So, here’s a summary and some comments on the article!

It’s often mentioned that bringing lunch to work is one way to economize on our normal routines. Simply making a great amount of your food at home, especially when it comes to how you eat during the work day, is worth some huge amount of money annually which if only a person could find the motivation they would be marginally rich. Is that the truth? Probably not, but we here at DQYDJ want to tackle this conundrum for you anyway. Let’s assume you’re in and out of the workplace in a whopping 40 years and play with some numbers!

… or Madam! What exactly did your tax money go to when you paid your taxes last year? How much went to Social Security, Medicare, even Congressional Salaries? The think tank The Third Way came up with an idea of the IRS reporting where taxpayer funds end up as a part of taxpaying. Megan McArdle hosts one such taxpayer “receipt” in one of her articles, and also makes a few poignant comments about income tax withholding. So, how does the receipt look?

The number to keep your eye on, obviously is a $200,000 annual salary if you’re single and a $250,000 combined salary if you’re married. These, as you likely know, are the lines in the sand drawn by the current administration to determine who is ‘rich’ and who isn’t. Does the electorate agree? For the most part. A Marist poll showed that 55% of Americans believe that a household income over $250,000 means you are wealthy, while 45% disagreed.

Is it okay to welch on a financial commitment? Yes, I know that ‘welch’ is a gambling term – and we’re about to talk about mortgages. If an unproportional amount of recent mortgages were actually bets that house prices would continue to increase, maybe ‘welch’ is the right term after all? Anyway, Pew recently polled people to ask their opinion on the practice of ‘walking away’ from mortgages.

… is higher than credit card debt in our country (hat tip: Wall Street Journal). How can this be?, you may ask, when the number of news stories on credit cards seem to vastly outweigh the corresponding reports on student loans. Well, yes, credit card stories seem to outnumber student loan stories by a ratio of about 15 to 1, according to StudentLoanJustice.org. How did this happen?

Here’s something you can really sink your teeth into – a calculator from the Tax Foundation which will let you input your tax data. What does it output? Well, your tax burden under the ‘Bush’ tax cuts (passed in 2003), your tax burden if the plan expires, and your tax burden if the changes in President Obama’s budget are enacted. Now that you have this data, you can cut through the noise and choose which one you like the best by simply figuring out under which plan you owe the least! Joy!