The Boulevard to Financial Independence

By Mariette

Change is difficult, and the hardest things to change are our habits. This is important to remember when we are trying to change our relationship to money. When we are trying to get out of debt, develop healthy saving and investing habits, or beginning to save for retirement, we must have patience with ourselves as it will not happen overnight. Most of us will slip back into our old habit patterns, particularly in the beginning; we will go over our budget with our spending, blow too much money on that gadget we thought we just had to have and therefore not be able to pay down the debt that month, or not put as much money into our retirement fund as we had intended.
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By Randy

For those of you who may not have noticed, the mortgage market has tightened up and banks that only a few weeks ago were calling you at home during dinner to refinance your mortgage now won’t even return your call. It’s not quite that bad but the mortgage market has changed dramatically and if you are hoping to buy a house or need to refinance your adjustable rate mortgage anytime soon you may have a problem. Let’s take a look at where we really are.
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By Felipe

A few days ago I was talking to a friend who is about my age (31) regarding what we’ve been doing here at Boulevard R, and he told me he simply did not have the time to review all the 401k literature and paperwork his employer sent him. Of course I told him that he just needs 10 minutes to get a personalized plan using Boulevard R’s software (shameless plug, I know), but I do understand his pain.
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By Matt

In thinking about the relationships that many consumers have with their financial provider, particularly around retirement planning, a dysfunctional marriage is what first comes to mind. Being a single guy with no marriage experience, I really have no idea what a dysfunctional marriage feels like, but I have a pretty good idea of that characteristics of a relationship gone south looks like.

As far as I can tell, it’s a downward spiral that continues to get worse as trust is lost, important dates are forgotten, a feeling of dissatisfaction sets in… sometimes leading to “irreconcilable differences” (or “switching” if you’re in the financial services industry).
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By Mariette

It is well established by now that ongoing communication with your partner is the key to happy, healthy relationships. This applies to discussing each other’s views and habits with regards to money as well as what your goals are for the future and your retirement vision. Transparency, while often painful, is healthiest in the long-run, and less painful than the potential fall-out that often occurs when couples find out that not only are they not on the same page with regards to finances, sometimes they aren’t even in the same book.

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By Randy

I hear it from clients all the time, “My house is my best investment for retirement.” Unfortunately your “investment” is also the place you live and therefore is not really an investment. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of smart financial reasons to own a home, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that your home will also provide for your retirement. It’s a great feeling to have equity in your house but unless you have a hankering to live on the street, it will be much harder to utilize that equity in retirement than you think.Borrowing against the equity is not really an option. For example, assume you’re 65, and you live in a house you paid $50,000 for many years ago that is now worth $1 million. Let’s further assume that you only have a $100,000 mortgage so your actual equity in the house is a whopping $900,000. It’s tempting to think of that $900,000 as your retirement nest egg, the problem is you need to get access to that equity in order to be able to spend it. Sure you can borrow but since you’re retired you’ll need to make payments on the loan from the proceeds you borrowed. A $500,000 loan at 6% (if you could even get it) would require payments in excess of $36,000 every year. If you only spent half the $500,000 for retirement and set the other half aside to make your loan payments, your reserve to make loan payments would be gone in less than 7 years, leaving you with another 23 years of payments to make.

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By Mariette

This past year was a real eye opener for me. I never used to be concerned about health insurance; I was healthy, took good care of myself and never bothered with it unless I happened to have a job where it was part of the benefits. I had lived in Europe for many years and was not used to having to worry about it myself, and resented that I had to pay inflated premiums out-of-pocket for care I wasn’t using, particularly as I tended to use complementary or alternative medicine which isn’t usually covered by insurance anyway.

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By Mariette

I don’t have a million dollars, nor will I anytime in the near future. That’s okay, it isn’t one of my goals. Yes, I want to have some money saved for retirement so that at the very least I only have to work part-time in the last part of my life, but I’m not obsessed about it the way many people seem to be. Partly that’s because I never felt that having a lot of money equaled happiness, this belief was reinforced by some of the rich people around me growing up, who seemed to be some of the most miserable people I knew. Certainly we need our basic necessities met in order to be happy: clothing, food, shelter, but beyond that happiness has far more to do with your state of mind and how you approach your life than how much money you have in the bank.

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By Mariette

I’ve been looking at a lot of blogs and websites recently that talk about ways to save money or to be frugal, so I thought I would share some of my suggestions and some good links to add to the mix. One of the first things you realise when you start delving into all the different resources that suggest ways to save money is that there are many different ways to do it, not all of which will work for every person or lifestyle. Trent at The Simple Dollar had a good post on this where he suggested that people try out different tips for one week to see if they work for you, then incorporate the ones that do and then try some more.

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The latest from Randy:

As we watch the stock market zip up and down it’s really hard to bring yourself to invest. When is the right time to invest? Should I invest all at once or a little bit at a time? Will the market go lower? Should I sell what I have in the market now?

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