CrackedWorld

First of all Congratulations on your New Found Wealth! Now that we have worked on preventing your money from working against you we’ll look at how to make it work for you. When I say work for you I mean lets make your money make more money for you. Your money used to make more debt it can also make you more money. I’m talking about compound interest.

Compound Interest can be your worst enemy or your best friend. If you carry a balance on your credit cards, it’ll be your worst enemy. That 15% interest rate on your Credit Card means that 15% of your card accounts balance will grow by 15% annually. At this rate a $1000 balance with a 15% interest rate will grow to $1150 in a year. That amounts to an additional $12 a month; that doesn’t seem like much but when you consider the amount of debt the average consumer takes on it can be a formidable foe. A $6000

Compound Interest

balance would grow to $6900! A $900 dollar increase, that breaks down to $75 a month. THAT SUCKS! What sucks even more is that growth is added to the balance and the next month the 15% interest rate is figured based on the new higher balance. For instance that $6000 that grew to $6900 now will grow another $1035 to total $7135 the next year. OUCH!

But we have dealt with debt earlier in this series. Now we are going to see the alter ego of compound interest.

When it comes to compound interest the same rules apply to you that apply to the average credit card. meaning that you can be the recipient of that compounding cycle. The way this is done for the average Joe, or Joann, is through investment in mutual funds usually through an IRA or 401(k).

Mutual Funds don’t earn an interest rate. They do however earn a rate of return based on how profitable your mutual fund or funds are. This rate of return is presented in the form of a percentage score. A 15% rate of return produces the same effect as a 15% interest rate. Remember the $6000 dollar credit card balance we just discussed?

Now imagine having $6000 in a mutual fund(we’ll call it Fund X). Fund X earns 15% in one year, you just made $900! Now the idea is that you reinvest your returns right back into Fund X and if it were to make 15% in the following year, it earned $1035 and is now worth $7135 that’s a $1935 profit for doing NOTHING! Nothing but waiting. Keep in mind these rates of return are averages they won’t earn the same amount every year some years Fund X may earn 20% and other years only10%. It takes a lot of years, but in the grand scheme of a lifetime its worth the wait.

TIP! - Time is Money

The sooner you start the better. The more years you spend harnessing the power of compound interest the more money you will finish with. Therefore you have to put it in and leave it in, (don’t pull out all of your money because of one or two down years). This builds momentum like the locomotive in Dumping Debt. The compound rate grows exponentially over time.

I started investing at age 20, I bought stock in a mutual fund and built up my contributions to $1000 by age 22. From there I have never added another nickel to that fund, if this fund continues its historical average return of 12% over the remaining 43 years until retirement it will have grown to $130,729.91. That’s the power of compound interest working for you.

Here’s the great part, what if I start contributing to the fund again? Or I start contributions to a new fund?

On both counts I grow even more wealth over the years. I am now 38 years old. Opening another $1000 fund account now would grow to $21,324.88 in the remaining 27 years until I turn 65. If I never added another penny to it.

Contributing another $1000 to my existing fund now would grow it to $152,054.72 an increase of $21,324.80! For $1000!? That’s impressive. I guess I need to come up with another $1000. If I wait just one more year to make that new contribution, it would grow to $135,763.14, so one year makes a difference of 16,291.58.

There are no guarantees in life, the numbers in these scenarios are not carved in stone. But in the history of mutual funds, no fund has ever lost money over a ten year period of time. That is a pretty good track record since mutual fund became a legal financial entity in 1934 — that’s in the middle of The Great Depression! I’ll cover how to investing more thoroughly in a later installment in the series.

Now you know what to do with your money in a Cracked World.

Any questions?

Tags: Debt, Money
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Now that your living on a budget and training your money, saving for the important things, and keeping ahead of the game its time to learn a key mechanic to winning the game.

Budgeting and saving becomes easier when the debt is gone. Imagine a locomotive, it starts out slowly and gradually gathers speed until its own momentum carries it at great speeds. It possesses the might to smash through barriers, and is virtually unstoppable. This is how your debt reduction should be, like a locomotive.

Be the Locomotive!

Your debt reduction plan, like the locomotive we discussed starts out slowly and gathers momentum. Budget to pay the minimum payments on all of your bills and debts except for the smallest balance of all your debts and put all of your extra funds on that debt.

Here is an example: After paying all of your utilities, and your Rent/House payment and all of your groceries. You use the money you have left over to pay on your debts. So lets say you have a Visa balance of $150, a Master card balance of $225, an auto loan for $5,500, and a student loan for $25,000. They all require minimum payments of $20, $25, $250, and $400 respectively. After you account for all of these payments lets say you have $45 left over.

Take the $45 left over and use it to pay an extra large payment on the Visa balance because its the smallest. So instead of paying $20 to Visa leaving a balance of $130 for them to charge you interest on you’ll pay them $65 (the $20 minimum + the $45 extra) and have a much smaller balance of $85. The following month in our example you would do the same thing again. Paying another $65 on the remainder of the Visa account would leave a balance of around $20 give or take a buck or two from interest. The following month after that you will be able to pay off your Visa account and have extra left over for the new smallest debt.

See how the momentum builds? Once the first smallest debt is gone you now have that much more to put on the nest one. In our example you were paying an extra $45 dollars a month on your smallest debt for a total of $65 a month. Now you will apply that $65 a month you were paying Visa to the Master card balance because it is the next smallest debt. Your payment will be the $25 minimum + the $65 extra for a total of $90 a month. On a $225 balance you will have that one gone in a little more than two months (Don’t forget you have been paying minimums all along on this balance already so that balance is far less than $225).

So the basic concept is to build momentum with your debts by prioritizing them from smallest to largest and taking them out in order one at a time.

!Remember!

You MUST make minimum payments on all other debts!

Imagine the force at which your locomotive will hit your next debt.

Always prioritize  smallest to largest  by the size of the balance. Do not take in to account interest rates. Interest is irrelevant to momentum.

In the days to come we will look at what to do with this new found wealth you had buried under debts. Look for New Found Wealth - Part 6. Its a solid solution for a  Cracked World!

Tags: Debt, Money
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In this installment I want to touch on ways of staying ahead once you start to gain traction in your budget, and build a saftey net. Staying ahead is important once you have some room to move. By staying ahead of the game I mean don’t let debt catch you once you’ve broken free.

Stay out of Debt!

Stay out of debt, don’t spend money that you don’t have! If you want that new Ipod you need to save the money and buy it with cash not credit.

Do not scratch the plastic, budget for it. Use your budget to buy the things you want as well as the things you need. The budget should never go away. Just because your out of debt doesn’t mean you don’t need a budget, you still have to control your money or it will run wild.

• There are some things that you have to barrow money for such as a house. No one has that kind of money on hand to buy a house with. But you should however have a considerable down payment. If you can’t save the down payment than you probably can’t afford the house anyway.
• The same would go for a new car. Have a down Payment and make sure your minimum payment is small enough for you to pay extra principal on each payment. This ensures that you will owe less on your car than it is worth. This is important if you were to need to sell the car for any reason (i.e. you can no longer afford to make payments), maybe you get injured and cannot work for an extended period, or drive. Now wouldn’t that be ironic? Making a car payment on a car you can’t even drive; now that’s cracked.

Keeping ahead of the game is easier once your out of debt, because you have more money to work (and PLAY) with. This phase of the game is really hard with debt because your budget depends on it. If you don’t stay ahead of the game, you’ll fall behind. This is where you can fall deeper in debt.

Keeping ahead of the game is the anti-meltdown.  In the event of one of lifes’ little setbacks, your better suited to handle it without hurting your debt dumping efforts. I have been so far ahead on car payments and-once upon a time-credit card payments that the payee didn’t require a payment for a month or two. When you’re in that situation you can say, “fix the car” and not have to worry about the car payment.  Just remember, you have to go right back to staying ahead on these things once the car is fixed. Stayng ahead of your debts does not stop until your debts are gone.

In the next installment of this series, “Winning the Game” I will cover Dumping Debt which will be Part 5

Tags: Debt, Money
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