Finance Clever

You get it, financial independence that is. You can’t wait to start building some serious wealth to buy your freedom. You understand that being financially independent will allow you to spend ALL of your time, not just weekends and holidays, doing whatever YOU choose. You are pumped and eager to start working on making your dream a reality. There is just one problem… your partner is not board. I will use the term partner here to refer to a spouse, fiancé, fiancée, or any serious significant other in your life. I’m lucky, my wife was on board with financial independence … Read more…

2016 was a really exiting year for us! We kicked off the year by traveling back to the U.S. after our wedding. A few months later I finished grad school, and attended Camp Mustache to kick off the summer. My dad came to visit us towards the end of the summer and we took him to the U.S. Open. As the fall season kicked in I started my new job, we bought a house, and we welcomed our beautiful baby daughter into the family! Definitely the highlight of the year 🙂 One would think a year like this would cost a fortune, and it certainly could … Read more…

A number of questions have come up from the post I wrote a few weeks ago about buying our new home. One of the most frequent ones goes something like this: “Great job outlining the costs of homeownership, but what about the benefits? I get a tax deduction for the interest and property taxes I pay on my home!” Today, we put the above statement to the test. Are potential tax deductions actually valuable for home owners? Of course we cannot do this without a basic understanding of the U.S. tax system. So here is a quick high level crash course*. Let’s start with the basic income tax formula: As you can see we … Read more…

About a year ago I wrote about how Elisa’s car has saved us $26,200 over 4 years. Today, we’ll explore the numbers behind my own car. As I am writing this sentence, I have not yet run the numbers so I am excited to see how my car’s cost of ownership compares to Elisa’s. I bought this car back in 2011 when I moved to Greensboro, NC for graduate school. I had about $6,000 to my name, and even though I didn’t know about financial independence back then, I knew that borrowing money for a car was a bad idea. I … Read more…

One of the most common misconceptions out there is the notion that buying a home is always a better financial decision than renting one. This is nonsense. “Always” is rarely a good answer in the world of personal finance. There are too many factors at play for one alternative to always trump the other ones. A common argument in favor of buying that clearly overlooks many important factors goes something like this: “my mortgage payment would be roughly the same as my rent payment. Therefore, I should buy because I’m building equity!“. Not unreasonable, but awfully incomplete. With that in mind, let’s take a look at … Read more…