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Pay yourself first: the golden rule of personal investment. This concept, most commonly used by financial planners, allows clients to automatically distribute their paychecks into their investment and retirement funds. Dollar Investment Club was created around this idea with a concept of set it and forget it. Why then does it become so difficult to actually do what we are trying to promote? It is interesting to think that people feel a need to pay off college loans as fast as they can, yet they have no problem with mortgages that go on and on and car loans that are perpetual. When young professionals get a little bit of extra cash, for example a bonus or a tax refund, they think the best method is to pay off debt they already own. WRONG. You need to always remember to pay yourself first. They come back and ask me but WHY? Here are six simple questions you should ask yourself before you decide to invest in your retirement fund over you student loans. Overall student loan situation: What is your overall situation? Are you able to pay your monthly payments? Do you have income surplus after ALL of your bills are paid including your student loan monthly payments? Do you have enough money saved up in an emergency fund? It’s good to know where you stand with your loans before making any changes. So before you can make any decisions make sure you know where you stand financially. Tax Benefit: Are you getting a tax benefit from your loans? Aka are you getting money back on the interest you paid on your loans during tax season? Any money that you contribute to your 401K or IRA are tax deferred which means you don’t pay taxes on your contributions until you take […]

Have any of you seen the commercials in the past about the keep the change program your banks are offering? Tons of Banks are offering a free program where they round up all the purchases you make to the nearest dollar and put that difference in your savings account. This is an easy way to stash some extra money with no effort at all (minus the 5 minutes it’ll take to setup). You can save $750-$1,000 per year without even trying, not to mention your bank account will move in whole dollar amounts making it easier to keep track of. At DINC, we want you to sign up, keep the change, invest it, and watch it grow. The hardest part of investing is getting started, you think that $50 into your investment account isn’t going to make a difference, and when you get a raise and make more, you’ll just invest more to catch up. Let me tell you that won’t happen, you’ll get the raise and just spend more. If you start with something as simple as the keep the change program, you won’t even know your saving money, you literally don’t have to do a single thing! After a few months you will have your first DINC investment, after a year or two, you will have a good size account. Once you start gaining momentum it will change everything and you will become hooked on growing your account and saving money, and this all started without you even trying. So, you can be Kevin McCallister and “Keep the change, you filthy animal”, or Merv aka Wet Bandit and “Suck Brick Kid!”, your call.

You never know what’s in your garage, basement, and attic. The thing is that you will move more between the ages of 20-30 than you ever will in your life. And moving doesn’t happen overnight. When you “move” into a new apartment or house it will take you about three months to unpack everything. Then there will be the boxes you have in the house that will never be unpacked. They will sit and collect dust over time and be forgotten about. This stuff is clearly not important to you or your new place. This stuff is your trash. This trash, however, could be someone else’s treasure. Garage sales are the best way to get rid of your old crap that you will never use again. If you add a “b” between the “r” and the second “a” in garage sale, you’ll see what a garage sale really is (garbage sale for those of you who are bit slow). Nonetheless there will be someone interested in your old stuff I promise. So this past weekend my roommates and I decided to have our own garbage, oh sorry I mean garage sale. I woke up at 7:00AM on a Saturday to start getting everything ready for the day. By 7:45 I had my first visitor. Clearly I had started too late. Without even having anything set up yet I made my first sale at 8:00AM. I was amazed at what they were buying. Literally our crap that was just going to go into the trash at the end of the day. Not only that but trying to negotiate with us on prices. I offered a lady $2 for an old dress of mine from Forever21 which I probably bought for $20. She was like you think I am going to pay […]

So I have a part time job coaching volleyball for one of our local club teams. The tryouts start in September and it is a highly competitive club. I was grocery shopping the other day and bumped into one of my player’s parent. We got to talking and I told her if her daughter ever needed a little extra help before the season started she should just give me a call and we could set something up. Well next thing I know I am giving her daughter private lessons. Every Tuesday I meet her at their gym; we set up a net and work on things that are specific to her needs. It is a great way for me to teach skills one on one and work on her weaknesses with her. Not to mention the family pays me buy the hour. It has been a great gig and a great extra income coming in. I get to go work out and play volleyball and help out one of my favorite players and get paid. Tuesdays are starting to become one of my favorite nights of the week. On top of coaching some private lessons, I also helped out with a soccer camp last week. For two nights I went to the field from 5:00-8:00pm. Working with the same age group I coach for volleyball, I was able to get back into my soccer grove and teach these kids the fundamentals of soccer, the game I loved playing growing up. These nights were also paid. Altogether I was able to put $480 into my Australia fund from coaching. With the season starting up again for my primary coaching job I will be receiving a small income from that each month. To be able to do what I love and coach and make […]

In the summer I rarely get a free weekend. From weddings to BBQs to vacations it’s rare I ever get a free moment to myself. This weekend was the best weekend of the summer so far. I woke up late, made some amazing meals and just hung out for once. Had no deadlines, no places to be the only thing I had to do was to relax. And that relaxation lasted for about twenty minutes. I needed to do something I couldn’t just lay on the couch for two days straight. I started thinking about Australia and panicking about how I was going to get there and how I needed to find more ways to find money. I have had a coin jar going for my trip and decided this would be the weekend I count and roll the coins. I wasn’t thinking there was a lot in there so I turned on the TV and aimlessly started rolling away. An hour went by and I looked down at my pile. I had $50 just from coins around the house. It might not seem like a lot and it’s definitely not enough to get to my goal of $2,500 but I was enjoying a lazy weekend watching TV and made $50 from it! I was so excited by this little accomplishment that I needed to make more. What else could I do this weekend to make some extra cash? Our house is full of beer drinkers and we don’t usually take our cans out on trash day, we just kinda leave them under the steps until someone decides to return them. So I cleaned out the garage cleaned under the steps and returned seven big bags of recyclables to the store. Spent a lovely Sunday afternoon with a homeless man […]