Millionaire Dreamer

As I have said many times before, those of us who are not trust fund babies or have won the lottery, there is only one way to accumulate wealth:  by saving .  In other words, you have to live below your means and invest the remaining funds .  Where else will the money come from if not from spending less than you earn? How to shop according to your values? One of the things that I notice among most of my friends and family members who have no wealth (other than a little bit of equity in their homes, in case they have not tapped it to pay for even more home improvement or for a vacation or wedding ) is that they literally spend every penny they earn and they always have the cleverest response if you ask them why they need something.  If it is a bigger home, it is because they are having yet one more kid or the kids want more room, they keep buying bigger cars just to fill it up with their kids and their friends, their phones are upgraded every two years because they are trapped in the

If you ask me what is the best thing about having a lot of money or being a millionaire , it is that I do not have to worry about paying my bills or that I would not have enough to retire .  In other words, what money does is to free you up, it gives you choices, and it allows you to go to be every night without having to worry which bills need to be paid and how I will come up with the money. It was in this context that I was thinking about how some people dislike savers like me by calling us greedy or misers , because they value showing off more than sleeping in peace.  I don't care if you are not impressed with my 5-year old cell phone or a 2015 Toyota RAV4 or that I am barely ever eating in a restaurant .  However, I love the fact that no matter what I always seem to have money to feed my family, my bills are always paid on time, and I have no bad debt . So as you are thinking about building wealth and accumulating savings for your retirement , don't be greedy nor compare

Because my wife and I do, I talked previously about the wonders of having a joint bank and retirement account as a couple .  I also saw recently an article in WSJ on the topic, and Julia Carpenter writes, "Couples who combine bank, credit-card and investing accounts are happier in the long term and find that pooling resources helps clear the path to traditional money milestones such as buying a house and saving for retirement, studies have found." I would agree with her conclusion.  I also read some comments and there are widely different opinions on this, but someone asked if it could be that couples in happy relationships are more likely to combine their finances, rather than combining leading to happiness. In my own family, I have seen all sorts of arrangements.  And it is not about the generation either.  Since my grandma and mom did not work, they did not have separate finances.  My siblings, though, all have separate finances with their spouses.  My wife and I, on t