My wife and I have been making do with a pair of old, do-it-yourself wills that I prepared using an old version of WillMaker (formerly from Nolo Press, now an Intuit product). To give you an idea of just how old this software is, it’s not even Y2K ready — the last time I updated [...]

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I just ran across a report from Montana State University on teaching your kids about finances. It’s a bit over a year old, but it’s short and worth a read. According to the article, only 7% of parents think that their kids understand financial matters (however that’s defined) and 30% of kids report that their [...]

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I previously wrote about how we’ve gone about setting an allowance for our kids. Briefly, starting at age five they get $0.50 per year of age per week, and this (along with all other money coming in from gifts, etc.) gets divided into one of four pots — spending, short term savings, long term savings, [...]

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A recent post over at AllThingsFinancial prompted me to reassess the way we handle our kids’ allowances. Thus far, we’ve been pretty lax/inconsistent about allowances, and our oldest son has recently been agitating for a more reliable stream of income. After mulling it over, we’ve settled on a new system.

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I know that this comes well after tax season, but I somehow neglected to write up something about this sooner. Regardless, it’s never too late to plan for the future… So here’s my advice if you want to minimize your tax liability in the coming years: have kids (or have more kids). That’s right, the [...]

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A few weeks ago I taught my son to ride his bike. After too many episodes of running up and down the street holding onto his seat while trying to teach him how to ride, I finally wised up. We live on a slight incline and I told him that he needed to practice coasting [...]

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Not long ago my seven year old son made an incredibly astute observation about the current state of the US economy. He was reading the label on some sort of a package when he said “Daddy, this thing was made in China.” He went on to say that “They must make really good stuff in [...]

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As a parent, I’ve recently been thinking of all the responsible things that I should be doing to ensure the well being of my family in the (hopefully) unlikely event that I drop dead. Worse yet, perhaps my wife and I will both drop dead, leaving our young kids behind. I’m not overly concerned about [...]

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