While I would never presume to contradict the inimitable Ron Swanson, he left out half the lesson. Sure, the guv’mint takes a percentage of your money in taxes. But it’s not all doom and gloom and stolen lunches! For as they say, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” and those dastardly G-men actually give us a useful thing or two in exchange for our taxes.
So listen up, kids! Your days of hating taxes are about to come to… a middle!
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I don’t know who started the rumor that carrying a balance on credit cards is good for your credit score, but I hope they step on a lego in bare feet every day for the rest of their lives.
You shut your pie hole, Poppins. This is serious.
Of all the damaging misconceptions about personal finance we’ve had to correct over the course of running Bitches Get Riches, this is by far my least favorite. And it keeps popping up again and again in questions from our followers! Why? How? Who is teaching all of our darling kangaroo babies such a terrible way of handling their credit cards?
Until I can find the culprit and give them their just desserts (hot oil? The rack?), I have made it my mission to set the record straight.
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I have always been accident prone. Like a real-life heroine in a YA novel featuring vampires and forbidden romance, my most benign character flaw is that I’m clumsy as fuck.
I guess I just never grew out of that stage of puberty where you walk smack into walls that have been there for your whole life and end up with bruises of mysterious origin all over your legs. I just don’t know where my ends are! I’m missing whatever survival instinct informs the human body not to grievously injure itself on a regular basis.
So I guess it was just a matter of time before I ended up in the emergency room, writhing and blinded by the worst pain I have ever experienced in my life.
You guys. I hurt myself really, really badly. And I’m going to be paying for it for a long time.
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It’s happened. That thing countless rom coms and heteronormative popcorn flicks from the 90s warned me about. The thing I swore at the tender age of sixteen would never, ever happen to me.
Dear readers, I have become… my mother.
My fate is sealed and I’ve got proof! At the grocery store, I haughtily wave my cloth bags at the bagger and proclaim, “I prefer to bag for myself.”
It’s not that I hate baggers and seek to force their entire profession out of employment. It’s just that they don’t do it right, with “right” defined as “according to my very particular and neurotic specifications.”
The one time I was in a hurry and neglected to bag for myself, I lost a bag to the straining weight of all the most heavy items on my grocery list. It burst right there on my front stoop, ripped apart by the carelessness of a bagger who clearly had not trained for extreme grocery bagging at the feet of the expert: my mother.
All of which is to say: I take every step of the grocery-shopping process extremely seriously. And if it is also your goal to save money, eat well, and become my mother, then settle in.
When you wake up from the capitalist, consumerist nightmare that is our socioeconomic system (#SJW #eattherich), the thought of getting your financial shit together can be daunting. Where do you begin? What can you do right away to make an improvement in your financial prospects? How do you avoid fucking everything up even further?
It can all be a bit overwhelming.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Here are five easy, lightning-fast things you can do right fucking now to help your financial situation. Do them.
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Here’s a horrifying fact. 46% of Americans can’t come up with $400 to pay for an emergency. Instead of an emergency fund, those people have to use credit cards, borrow from friends and family, or just… not pay for the emergency.
Scary, right? That means almost half of my countrymen are one fender bender, one slip on the ice, one infant with pneumonia away from—at best—massive debt. And at worst, massive bankruptcy. Homelessness. Abject poverty and desperation.
Think I’m being dramatic? I’m not.
My purpose in bringing up the nightmare that is living just above the poverty line is not to nag those who can’t afford an emergency. What kind of monster would belittle people so poor they have no way of saving themselves from one minor stumble on the road to making ends meet?
I’m also not here to advocate filing for bankruptcy multiple times (let’s say six) as a legitimate means of making emergencies go away.
Instead, we’re here to plumb the depths of one of personal finance’s most enigmatic puzzles:
How much money should you have in your emergency fund?
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Loyal citizens of Bitch Nation, I have a confession to make.
I fucking hate driving.
It’s tedious and boring. It takes up time I could spend in other ways. It raises my blood pressure because everyone else is a really fucking bad driver but definitely not me I’m perfect. Cars are noisy, dirty, and expensive. And I’m expected to follow the rules of the road when I just wanna be all
So yeah. Me and cars? We don’t get a long.
And I’m not alone. Haunt the halls of lifestyle blogs and personal finance advice long enough and you’ll run into people who have gone to great lengths to go without driving.
Living a carless lifestyle is entirely possible for a lot of us, and the joys and benefits are many. Getting around without a car saves you a trunkload of cash (see what I did there?), it’s better for your health, and it’s better for the environment. It can even save you time, in certain circumstances.
Below I examine the joys and practicalities of carless modes of transportation. It’s by no means a complete list, so I encourage class participation! Tell me all about your car-free mobility in a comment.
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It’s hard out there for a broke-ass bitch. You try so hard to be frugal and disciplined, to make sound financial decisions and never waste a dime.
Yet still, financial guilt happens to the best of us. It can sneak up to bite you in the ass like some kind of slippery, perfidious garden snake in the Eden of your good monetary habits, leaving one trembling and sweaty with remorse and second thoughts.
Regretting a purchase or agonizing over a financial decision builds anxiety and stress migraines and is just generally no fun.
Recently loyal citizen of Bitch Nation Bettedavissighs (one of our darling Tumblr babies) asked a question about financial guilt. Her concerns are near and dear to my anxious little gazelle heart:
Hey Bitches, I just bought myself a PS4. It’s a big splurge on something non essential (I am fairly responsible w money, esp. now that I’m getting into FI stuff). How do I stop feeling guilty about it? I’ve wanted it for months (newbie gamer), but I keep having moments of extreme anxiety (how much I spent on it!). I had the money, so don’t get why I’m feeling like this now. Maybe it’s just a result of growing up poor? Love your blog! (ps any game suggestions, prefer w good female characters?)
Honey, I feel you.
LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLLLLLLLLE!
It’s time for another thrilling episode of Investing Deathmatch, in which two forms of investing enter the ring, and only one leaves victorious. Or, more accurately, we decide that investing is a far more complicated affair than wrestling and the outcome of the fight depends on a number of nuanced factors.
But I digress.
TO THE BLOOD SPORT!
This fight has a long and sordid history. We’ll be uncovering old wounds, dredging up arguments long held in stalemate. We’ll be discussing a topic about which every damn personal finance blogger on the Internet has a very firm opinion. And we’ll be demystifying an age-old enigma of financial independence.
Brawlers, take your corners.
When I was a little kid, my dad explained the power of prayer to me. He said, “When you ask God for something you really, really want, He’ll give you one of three answers: yes, no, or wait.”
And kids? That’s when I became an atheist.
Just kidding. I didn’t apostatize until I was about nineteen, and the decision to leave religion forever had nothing to do with my dad’s words of wisdom.
But at the time my dad told me this story, I was pretty fucking disgruntled. “Wait”? Dafuq kind of answer was “wait” from an all-knowing, benevolent, magical guidance counselor in the sky? “Wait” was not in my eight-year-old vocabulary and I was damned if I was going to be patient for anything.
But with the perspective and wisdom of years, I now have good reason to embrace this concept of waiting, of being patient for the things I want.
My dad thought he was teaching me about faith and adult-level patience and serenity and shit. But what he really taught me about was far more interesting:
Money.
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