Street Smart Finance

Life’s Like a Football Game

Shilpan — Sun, 19 May 2013 04:19:35 +0000

The biggest diverse, invasive or pervasive culture that human kinds knows is football and I love the fact that at the altar of football human kind can come worship and celebrate. — Former Newcastle player Andy Harper Football is an amazing game. The thrill to see a running back running with a ball — thinking [...]

Don’t Die Like an Idiot: Create a Living Trust

Shilpan — Tue, 14 May 2013 02:23:39 +0000

I confess that the title of this post is bit denigrating, but you will like it once you read this article in New York Times. We avoid thinking about our death and our taxes – both are inevitable! Roman Blum, a holocaust survivor, left $40,000,000 estate for no one. That’s egregious for someone who built [...]

How to Build Wealth: A Do it Yourself Guide

Shilpan — Sat, 04 May 2013 19:30:33 +0000

Investing is intimidating for most of us mere mortal souls. With so many ways to invest — and so many products to choose from — it has become a task as difficult as a task for a kid to decide which candy to buy from a candy store. We often ignore the hidden cost of [...]

The Fetish of Consumerism

Shilpan — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:51:37 +0000

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either. — Mark Twain The assault on saving, by our media, is a common phenomenon. The same media — with fetish of consumerism — takes [...]

The Greatest Irony of Life

Shilpan — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 04:23:33 +0000

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination — Mark Twain Life is full of ironies. Those who cherish their freedom are often enslaved by the ball-and-chain of debt; those who consider their self-worth by the type of car they drive often deprive themselves of self-esteem; those who juxtapose happiness with their outer reality(bigger house, nicer [...]

Is the Stock Market too High?

Shilpan — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 13:54:31 +0000

In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine. — Benjamin Graham The stock market is flirting with new highs in last five years and euphoria is omnipresent: pundits on TV tell us that it’s insane to miss the boat. While battle between bulls [...]

My Plan B for Retirement

Shilpan — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 22:35:06 +0000

The most successful people are those who are good at plan b. — James Yorke I am not a travel fanatic. But I believe that you ought to leave your safe harbor to explore the world. The experience and wisdom you gain in a short journey equates to years of reading. My recent trip to [...]

The Only Key to Your Financial Freedom

Shilpan — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 05:39:43 +0000

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don’t actually improve their lives. — Jeff Bezos Have you ever entertained thoughts to find a single key to your financial freedom? We all have. Surprisingly, there is one key to our freedom and it’s rather simple: Jettison lifestyle of fake [...]

You can Make Six Figure Without A College Degree

Shilpan — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 22:41:53 +0000

Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned. — Mark Twain Our world is going through a major transformation. You can hardly sense this unless you reflect on your life and how this transformation has changed the way you live now vs how you lived just 10 years ago. With that said, I believe that [...]

Happiness is not an Entitlement

Shilpan — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 04:09:05 +0000

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness. — Ralph Waldo Emerson I find it somewhat amusing and ironic that those of us who write about personal finance seldom get credit for why we focus on this very subject. We aren’t writing with the purpose of hoarding a large sum of [...]