Are you ready to be successful in your own personal finance journey? Then read along. We have moved across continents, paid our way through graduate degrees, and successfully switched careers. At the same time, we have been working hard toward achieving our financial goals. We want to share some of the things that worked for us in making progress toward our financial goals, and things that didn’t, in the hope that it will help you do the same. Be frugal, save regularly, invest deliberately, and live consciously. Follow this mantra and you will be on the path of financial success in YOUR personal finance journey.
Credit score is a very important number that determines your creditworthiness to lenders if you are seeking a loan or your landlord if you are seeking to rent a real estate property. There are several ways to calculate a credit score. FICO score is one of the well-known numbers. FICO, which stands for Fair Isaac
This free mortgage calculator will help you estimate your monthly mortgage payments. The components of a mortgage include your principal, interest, property taxes, property insurance, and PMI. Change the inputs to the calculator to estimate how it impacts the different components of your mortgage. Mortgage Calculator Enter Estimates Below Purchase Price Down Payment Mortgage Term
A business cycle is a cycle of fluctuations of the economic activity measured by the gross domestic product, or GDP, of a country. From its trough to peak, it is divided into 5 important stages, as defined by Calverley, and shown below. The first stage after the trough is recovery. The economy slowly begins to
A diversified portfolio will minimize your portfolio risk and to do so you will have to invest in different types of assets instead of concentrating your bet in a single asset class. The picture below shows the annual performance of different asset classes from 2008 to 2018, ranked from best to worst. Now try finding
The investment decision process should be very similar to the shopping process you follow for goods and services, such as clothes, or electronics. While shopping for any product, you try to evaluate how much that product is worth to you, is it good value for money, and are there comparable items that sell below that
“The Dow hits an all time high”. “US Market Indexes start the week with gains”. “Nasdaq exits bear market as stocks rally”. You may have read similar headlines in the newspapers and heard them on evening news. But what exactly is a market index? A market index is a collection of securities with characteristics defined
As an investor, you have a variety of vehicles to invest in. Each type of investment comes with its own risk-return profile. What that means is generally higher returns on a type of investment is associated with a higher level of risk. Here are some of the different types of investments that may be available
S&P, Dow Jones, Nikkei, FTSE, Russell have become part of our everyday experience. Television and radio broadcasts over the world have hundreds of reports daily with experts analyzing every move of the stock market. Daily newspapers have reports from analysts linking events across the globe to movements of the stock market indices. Yet most common
When markets get insecure, everyone talks about the yield curve. Its inversion is often seen as a sign of an impending recession. But what exactly is it? To understand a yield curve, you have to understand bonds. A bond is a promise made by a company or the government to an investor that the invested
Target-date funds are designed to provide a simpler investment solution for portfolios with a set investment horizon, for example, a college savings plan or an individual retirement account (IRA). These funds start aggressive, and as the target date approaches, the fund mix becomes more conservative. Target-date funds are named by the year in which the