By: Laura Walton AFC® The headline: “A 308-pound NFL player explains why he drives a comically small used car that cost him $9000”. We’ve heard the stories of pro-players who, despite huge signing bonuses and salaries, go broke in short order once their career ends…this photo tells the anti-story. John Urschel is an unusual guy…
By: Laura Walton AFC® to arrest you. You owe back taxes. You can avoid arrest by paying what you owe immediately. How soon can you get to a bank?” This is the gist of phone calls received recently by several Tucsonans. We all know that scam artists exist and even thrive but when you get…
By: Laura Walton AFC® That’s a disconnect! The headline, “Shoppers buy more junk food when they bring their own bags,” drew me in but the last sentence really got my attention: “If food waste were a country, it’d be the third-largest greenhouse-gas emitter on the planet, after China and the U.S.” This article appeared in The…
By: Laura Walton AFC® When offered a good job in a tough job market, your first reaction is probably to say “Yes, I accept!” In my first couple of jobs, benefits were the last thing on my mind. But today, in hindsight, I can see that benefits might have been nearly as important as my…
The more classes we teach, the more questions we get on when and how to best use Roth IRAs. Questions also include the recently instituted Roth 401(k) that many businesses have started offering in the last two years. The purpose of this week’s blog will be to try and simplify not only what these Roth…
By: Laura Walton AFC® I’m price sensitive. I know that I can’t save what I spend and I can’t invest what I don’t save. Every dollar that passes through my hands is important…or has the potential to be important. A by-product of being a careful spender is that you can be strategic with the dollars…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Fair warning. I’ve been listening to Freakonomics podcasts. This morning, on my way to work, Steven Levitt, University of Chicago economist, and Stephen Dubner, New York Times journalist, talked with a guest about conducting pre-mortems – discussing what might go wrong before it does rather than what went wrong after the…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Have you heard of them? Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus?? They’re in Tucson tonight on their WordTasting Tour 2015 promoting their recent book, “Everything that Remains”. They each gave up six-figure careers and all the trappings to see if life was more meaningful with less stuff. Their finding? A resounding…
By: Robert Swift I just got back from a week in western New York/Ontario where I got to see two beautiful sights…..my daughter, Jessica, who married a hockey playing Canadian and now lives about an hour south of Toronto……and Niagara Falls. Those two sights make the flight to Buffalo very much worth it. But, as…
By: Laura Walton AFC® How long does it take to re-program your brain? To change a way of thinking?? Destin Sandin of Smarter Every Day re-built his bike to test himself. Instead of turning the handle bars to the right to go right, he has to turn them to the left to go right. Any…