A friend of mine, a nuclear engineer, once explained that he doesn’t bother to contribute to forums or message boards when the topic of nuclear energy is brought up anymore because people are irrational about it, interested in their own confirmation bias rather than learning or having an honest discussion. Almost everyone I know working in…
This May will be 10 years since Aaron and I graduated from university. I just looked up the cost for the upcoming academic year, which includes tuition, room, board, fees, and books, and it’s running at a rate of around $53,000 per annum. Assuming even modest annual increases, a 4-year degree would cost just shy of…
My morning was spent reading the New Hampshire Bar Journal, Winter 2010 edition because I was interested in a piece by Joseph F. McDonald, III called Migrating Trusts to New Hampshire: The “Why” and the “How”. New Hampshire, along with a very few other states, allows the existence of something known as a “silent trust” or “quiet trust”. It made me realize: I think a person could use these to drive a truck through the college financial aid process.
When people talk about “borrowing money”, it isn’t entirely accurate. What is really happening is renting someone else’s property. It doesn’t matter if you are talking about credit card debt or student loan debt. Imagine I own a $100,000 lake cabin. You want to take your family on a vacation this summer, so you approach me and…
Yesterday, we took a look at the worst paying college degrees. Today, I want to look at a list of the best paying college degrees. It is clear that, like all things in a free society, supply and demand determine payoff. Engineers rule the day when it comes to making a wise investment in education,…
You know I’m a big proponent of following and monetizing your passion. If you want to be an artist, you should be. If you want to be a social worker, you should be. The key is, you make that decision knowing what it entails. The probabilities are substantial that you are not going to make as…
Over the past few years, I have become more and more convinced that the single biggest challenge most people face when it comes to achieving financial independence is the interest expense they pay on credit card debt, student loan debt, home mortgages, consumer debt, and other liabilities. [mainbodyad]Think about it like this. If all you…
The AP had great news about credit card debt today: Consumer borrowing increased in September for the first time since January even though the category that includes credit cards dropped for a record 25th straight month. The rise in credit came from the category that includes student loans. That means that consumer debt rose a…
Although credit card debt is a relatively new phenomenon, it is the spiritual descendant of consumer debt, which has been around with us forever. Consider the words of the bestselling Napoleon Hill in his book, The Law of Success, which was originally published in 1928 as part of an eight-part series: [mainbodyad] It is a…
There was an article three weeks ago in The New York Times that began with the following paragraph: Nobody likes unpleasant surprises, but when Allison Brooke Eastman’s fiancé found out four months ago just how high her student loan debt was, he had a particularly strong reaction: he broke off the engagement within three days.…
