When it comes time to purchase a vehicle for you and your family, there are many things to consider. You have to think about gas mileage, practicality, maintenance costs, styling, and financing, just to name a few. You also must choose if you are going to buy or lease the vehicle, which with just a little bit of math– ends up being an easy question (you should buy!). You find yourself with a much tougher question when you ask the question should I buy a new or used car?
New cars lose a significant chunk of their value (as much as 20%) as soon as you drive off of the lot, which is rather staggering. However, even with that, there are certain factors that make purchasing a new car the more desirable option. This post will examine the main reasons why people opt for both new and used cars, and will present a third option that we here at See Debt Run have used for both of our family cars. ..
It’s hard for me to admit that there was a time, not all that long ago, that I didn’t make life insurance a priority. My employer provided one-year salary as a standard benefit, but in the grand scheme of things- that was nothing. It wasn’t enough for to pay off the mortgage, it wasn’t enough to pay for my kids to go to college, and perhaps even more importantly– it wasn’t enough to buy my wife (who stays at home with our young daughter) some time to figure out a plan to provide for our children in the event that I was unable to do so.
Even before we started this website and started climbing out of debt,ips with the fact that death can come any where, any time, to anyone. I was in my early thirties and didn’t have a ton of risk factors, but that didn’t mean that the risk wasn’t there. As such, I took on an extra $37/month payment for a life insurance policy on myself, to make sure that my family would be covered. Adding an extra monthly expense to the top of the pile when you are trying to get out of debt certainly doesn’t make your life any easier, but frankly– it is just careless not to go this route. If you don’t have kids, then certainly the same urgency is not there. But if you have people depending on you, getting a life insurance policy should be your number one priority. This is true even if you are carrying debt, and even if you haven’t even taken the first step towards getting rid of that debt (creating an emergency fund). ..
If you have worked for a large corporation in the 21st century, chances are good that you have been, or will one day be a part of a merger or acquisition. With the volatile nature of the public stock market, companies are buying each other left and right like they are figurines at an estate sale. These multi-billion dollar transactions can have far-reaching consequences if you are an employee at either the company being purchased or the one doing the purchasing.
I have worked for two different large corporations that had a flare for acquisitions, and have been through the process multiple times. At the time that an acquisition is announced, there is typically a large amount of “synergies” between the two companies that will help offset the purchase cost. Translated, this means that the two companies will have a large number of people who will be doing the same job, and that half of those jobs will be redundant after the merger. To put it bluntly, people will be laid off. Knowing this, there are steps that you should take to position yourself well in the months leading up to closing date, to ensure that you are not one of those who become “synergized.” ..