Below Your Means: Living well by living within and growing your means

Investing – My Thoughts on the New T. Rowe Price Emerging Markets Local Currency Bond Fund

I am always looking for funds and investments that are both relatively conservative and align with my basic economic outlook. Since I generally believe stocks are overvalued and are being held up entirely by government stimulus and central bank money printing, I am inclined to keep my modest investments “safe” in CDs, money markets and [...]

Below Your Means Basics: Understanding Savings and Wealth Creation

Our Below Your Means Basics series this week deals has been focused on looking at your finances from a perspective of your Net Worth. We started the series discussing Income vs. Net Worth, and then took a look at debt. Today, we’ll be taking about different mechanisms of savings and ways to examine your savings [...]

Frugal Tip: Top 4 Free PC Tools

Utilities and tools that promise to make your PC faster and virus free are a very big business. You will see countless infomercials and popup ads trying to sell you some product to rid your machine of slowness and nasty viruses. Unfortunately, most of these tools are not worth their cost, and are effectively somebody’s [...]

7 + 1 Life Lessons from the Very (and Not So Very) Wealthy

Over the weekend Barry Ritholtz published an excellent column in the Washington Post listing 7 lessons he’s learned through his interactions with high net-worth clients. The lessons reflected a number of the values we have at Below Your Means. Under #3 – Memories are better than material objects, he writes: The rule of diminishing returns [...]

Below Your Means Basics: Understanding Your Debt

Before we get started, if you are months away from foreclosure or other serious financial consequences, this is not the article for you. We do not cover issues like bankruptcy, credit repair, or debt settlement agencies. Consider consulting the assistance of your financial adviser and/or attorney. Our favorite online legal resource is Nolo.com. Nolo’s Bankruptcy [...]

Below Your Means Favorites of the Week (Grease Fire Edition) – June 17

While the world of personal finance is interesting, I think what is going on in Greece and the rest of the Eurozone will have a far bigger impact on everyday American’s lives than they may realize. This weekend, along with Monday and Tuesday are going to be extremely telling for how bad things could get [...]

SEC May Charge Ratings Agencies with Fraud

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that the SEC is considering fraud charges against the ratings agencies that were responsible for evaluating the CDOs, or collection of loans, that ultimately led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. For those of you who may not be familiar with the issue, part of the strategy of selling [...]

Apparently We Don’t Have Enough Fraud at Home; We Import It Too

Clare Baldwin of Reuters ran an interesting article yesterday describing the swagger of two investors attending DealFlow Media’s annual conference, who say they are making a fortune shorting the stocks of fraudulent Chinese companies. The conference dealt with so-called “reverse mergers” in which a (usually larger) private company is able to become public without going [...]

Below Your Means Zen: It Takes Hard Work

And now a Below Your Means moment of Zen: While helping the tradesmen working on my house this week, I learned that they are having trouble hiring. A lot of trouble. “The economy is so bad, but nobody wants to work anymore. They just want to make a quick buck.” I heard this from more [...]

Pandora’s Stock Is Not Looking So Hot

Cue the shareholder lawsuits in 3, 2, 1 … Yesterday we posted about Pandora’s IPO and how the price action looked very similar to LinkedIn (LNKD). Unfortunately, things just went from bad to worse. The stock is down again hard today, with shares plunging almost 25% just today! I think the “Investing Wisely” lessons learned [...]