In December we commented on completing the full funding of our emergency fund, and that the next step in the process would be to begin funding our retirement (following Dave Ramsey Baby Step #4 from The Total Money Makeover). Both of us have pre-tax accounts through our employers (Julie has a 401K through John Hancock, I have a 403b with Fidelity), but an even more essential part of this is to also begin funding a Roth IRA*. Julie had already started a Roth IRA; a gift she had received after graduating from Hope.   I did not yet have one in place, so I had been looking for a couple weeks to...

The weekend is here once more, and our Saturday morning is off to a great start!  Our typical routine on these days is to get up, have some breakfast (with coffee, of course), and get as many chores done as possible.  We really like to make Sunday our sabbath, and although that may include a little bit of final laundry for the week, it’s often the day where we get to catch up on reading or just general resting (or Super Bowl watching) for the week ahead. With that, here are the personal finance articles that caught our eye this week: L.J. Priest shares a nice story on Christian PF...

Clearly we love to budget. It’d be pretty tough to write a blog about responsible personal finance if we weren’t passionate about purposefully spending our money.  However, with every good plan, there are always going to be situations where the black and white of the rules get grayed out a bit.  We mentioned before when we bought our snowblower that sometimes additional expenses arise that aren’t necessarily emergencies, but are nice to be able to purchase when needed (i.e. when 10 inches of snow have fallen on the ground).  In that case we drew from savings/Christmas...

We hope you won’t mind if we digress from our normal personal finance topics and stories to comment on other timely and important items of interest.  Such is the case this week as Andrew takes some time to share his thoughts on Apple’s recently announced iPad. Okay, so here’s my confession (if you didn’t know it already): I would consider myself to be pretty much your run-of-the-mill technology nut/geek.  I’m always interested in the latest products in the world of technology.  That being said, I’m reticent to jump on the bandwagon without giving some...

We want to give major props to the sponsors that help to keep EGS running each and every week.  All of the sidebar ads are items that we use and believe in!  They are: SmartyPig — One of the best ways we’ve seen to plan and save for major purchases.  We’re currently using it to save for our Christmas giving in 2010, and the automation of it, plus bonus interest from companies like Amazon, iTunes, and Macy’s make it a great service. Elegant Themes — An excellent collection of themes for WordPress sites, and provider of the great design for EGS.  Elegant Themes...