Invest money

I saw a commercial recently with two neighbor’s chatting in the front yard.  One had large numbers tucked under his arm representing his savings plan.  The other neighbor, clipping the hedge had the number “gazillion” under his.  The “responsible” neighbor asked him,

“How much money are you going to need to retire comfortably?”

 The hedge clipping neighbor responded

“A gazillion dollars”.   Neighbor one asked him, “How much are you putting away for retirement?”  Neighbor two responded “I dunno, I just throw a bunch of money at it and hope for the best.”

Neighbor two’s situation, surprisingly,  is a lot more common a scenario then one might think.  CBC’s Metro morning ran a feature February 13, on the surprising number of people in the greater Toronto area who have full time jobs, but are still living in the poverty range.

http://www.cbc.ca/metromorning/episodes/2012/02/14/working-poor/

Let’s run some numbers and see where you compare?

How much debt is too much debt? 

Let’s assume you are making 65,000 a year.  Depending on where you live, the government may take approximately half of that in taxes.

Let’s now assume you have a monthly take home of 3000.

Your mortgage (or rent) is 1400.00 per month.

Let’s also allow for high interest debts (credit cards, car loans, personal loans etc.) of 3000.00 in total.

If we run all of this through a debt calculator, we see your estimated monthly loan repayments are $1,490 which equates to 49.7% of your disposable monthly income.  You will find this is a dangerously high ratio.  Most likely, running these numbers, you’ll find you’re also spending about 3% of your disposable income just servicing short-term debt.

What does this all mean?  If you lose your job the amount of time you’ll have to recover before debt catastrophe is only a few months.

Furthermore, you’ll have a difficult time putting anything away for a rainy day, let alone retirement with this high a debt servicing to income ratio.

What’s the solution? 

You’ll either need to increase your monthly after taxes income, or receive a low interest loan from a family member or close friend.

Is Your Mortgage coming due?

With interest rates as low as they are, this can present a huge opportunity.  Merge outstanding high or medium interest debts into your mortgage and pay them off over a longer period of time, at a lower interest rate.

For more money saving tips go to PrudentFinancial.net

Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/finance-articles/how-do-i-know-i-have-too-much-debt-5676598.html

Here are tips for selling your home:

• Before you sell your home, you need to make a good impression for your prospect buyer. You have to satisfy their eyes and nose. You can do this by cleaning the house, freshen up the smells by put scented potpourri, paint the wall, and repair the broken part of your house.
• You could put the “Home for Sale” in your front yard. Don’t forget to put your phone number on it, so a buyer can get contact you.
• You should put a reasonable price, valued by the physical price of your home, environment and location. The better location where your home is placed, the better price you can put. You don’t want to gave high price that might scare the buyer.
• Get familiar with negotiation and it stuffs, such as contract, offer, deal, etc. You should learn to do some offer approaching and all correlated with a legal transaction process.
• Sell your home in a good economic condition and strong demand for houses, which tend to be stronger in June and July. If you sell your home at the right time and a good preparation, you will get the highest price of your home than your prediction.
• You can try selling your home online. Nowadays, about seventy percent of homebuyer starts to search for houses online through the internet. This is absolutely one advantage for sellers to add an advertisement online. To attract buyer put your great home pictures.