photo credit: millicent bystander

There are many theories on what the best way to pay off your debts is, but before you should even start talking about paying off your debts, you’ll first need to stop the bleeding (accumulating more debts). In order to do that, let’s first discuss good debt, bad debt, secured debt, unsecured debt, and Effective Annual Rates (EAR).

Good debt: This is the stuff that generally results from an investment in yourself (student loans) or something that appreciates in value (house) that will ideally leave you in better economic standing over the long-term. Typically, these debts will carry a lower rate of interest (unless you took out an ARM mortgage).

Bad debt: Any debt that will not benefit you in the least bit, in any way. Most typically, credit card debt, which carries a very high interest rate.  Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: Laurel Fan

Earlier this week, we discussed who may or may not need to be covered by a life insurance policy, and how much you might need to be covered by. For those of you looking to purchase life insurance, you’ll quickly realize that there are many options available to you - term, whole, universal, variable, and so on.

The Two Categories of Life Insurance

Forget all the fancy names out there to confuse you, there are really only two types of life insurance policies:  Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: Arkansas Shutterbug

Life insurance isn’t one of those warm and fuzzy topics that everyone loves to address. Making and investing money can be incredibly exciting. Creating a plan to protect your loved one’s finances in the event that you pass away - not so thrilling, yet it is extremely important. The good news is that you may already have it for free through your employer, and even if you don’t, you may not even need it at all. Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: 416style

OK, maybe not massive changes, but there will be some noticeable site improvements. 20Somethingfinance is still in its relative infancy, but activity on the site has increased dramatically recently with exponential growth in subscriptions and organic traffic. As such, I want to be able to provide the most value and best usability for you, the reader. In the coming months you can expect to see some major changes with the site interface, including:

• Experimentation with different themes and sidebar layouts (if you know of any great inexpensive or free themes, let me know - frugality is a major theme of this site, after all). If you design themes, shoot me an email.
• New plug-ins to increase reader interaction (polls, recent comments, top commentators, and others).

Don’t be surprised to see the look of the site change often until I can settle on something that will allow me to reach my vision for the site. Hang in there friends, then end result will be much more to your liking.

Some things won’t change. You can continue to expect about 2-3 well researched, content-rich posts per week. There are always exceptions, but my posts generally come from reader interactions. I am not fond of blogs that shoot off a large quantity of link-heavy, value-deficient posts, and I will continue to stay away from that. I usually put in a good 3-4 hours of brainstorming, research, writing, editing, and crafting everything into an easily digestible format for the reader. You will also continue to see interactions through commenting.

Reader Feedback:

I want to open it up to you, and would like your opinion on the following things:

1. What are your current thoughts on the site?
2. What is it’s strong points?
3. What is it lacking?
4. Are there any plug-ins or features that you’d love to see?
5. What type of content would you like to see more of?
6. Any other comments?

Thank you for the feedback!

photo credit: Crossing Sparks

A welcome goes out to all visitors from J.D. Roth’s Get Rich Slowly blog. J.D. was one of the pioneers in the personal finance blog niche. The guest post I wrote is titled ‘The Compound Return Marathon: Which Retirement Strategy will Win?”. Please slide over to J.D.’s site to give it a read.

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