This week’s Saturday Stash includes some awesome articles and a big announcement. Are you ready for another blast of awesome articles from around the web? Let’s get this show on the road!
The Saturday Stash is round-up of my favorite finds from the week that I think you might enjoy. The topics will usually be money, minimalism, mini-retirements, and lifestyle design, but anything is fair game.
Check them out, show their authors some love, and keep thrifty!
Post Showdown: Should You Prepay Your Mortgage?
This is one of those battles that will rage on until the end of time. Does prepaying your mortgage make sense?
- Andy from Marriage, Kids, and Money gives 8 Compelling Reasons to Pay Off Your Mortgage Early
- Mr. 1500 had a great guest post on Budgets Are Sexy about why he doesn’t fret about debt. In particular, Mr. 1500 could have purchased his last house in cash but chose a mortgage instead and invested what he would have paid
We can all agree that both prepaying your mortgage and investing are better than blowing your money on scratch-off tickets. In this case, we’re really talking about which is the better of two good options.
I outlined my thoughts on when to prepay your mortgage instead of investing and to me, it all comes down to your risk tolerance. Investing can and has been the better option many times.
But not every time.
There’s always a chance that investing will leave you worse off than prepaying. If that difference is “too rich for your blood”, then prepaying is still a great thing to do.
Where do you stand?
Get Your Employer to OK a Mini-Retirement
I’m not the only one out here broadcasting the awesomeness of mini-retirements - Jillian (AKA Ms. Montana) has been an awesome advocate as well.
This week, Jillian had a great guest post on Millennial Money with advice on how to negotiate a mini-retirement with your employer. I’m 100% on-board with her recommendations. Check it out!
Do You Want to Make Money Online?
No, I’m not about to point you to some get-rich-quick scheme. You know that’s not how I roll. Heck, I’m running this site without ads!
Brent Truitt had a great guest post on Mystery Money Man this week where he talked about the reality of making money online. In Brent’s words:
Here is the list of reasons why I shouldn’t have succeeded, according to the naysayers:
- I was too old…
- I had no experience…
- I’m lazy…
- I’m not very smart…
- I’m not patient…
- It was too late…
If Brent can make a living online with all of these going against him, maybe you (or I) can too.
One Simple Way to Kickstart Your Money-Saving Habits
In the path to financial discipline, the next step after starting to track your spending is to look for areas of your budget you can reduce so you can make room for savings or other priorities.
But that can be intimidating - how can you possibly make a dent in a huge budget?
Des from Half Banked knocked it out of the park with this simple (but powerful method) to kickstart your money-saving habits.
As the saying goes, the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.
Announcement: Our Thrifty Life
Jaime and I had a really fun week this week. In particular, we finally got through stage one of a project we’ve been working on - creating a YouTube video series called Our Thrifty Life
That’s right - we’re going to start vlogging!
We’ll be launching in a couple weeks and will be putting out a new video every Thursday. Episodes will be short - less than 5 minutes each - and we’ll talk about our story and what leading a thrifty life means to us.
Are you excited? We certainly are! Subscribe to my e-mail list below and you’ll be the first to hear when we launch!
We’ve got tons of topics picked for Our Thrifty Life, but we’d love to hear from you. If you could ask us anything, what would you want to know?