How I Will Be Rich

I’ve decided to compile a list of blogs that I like. This is a list of sites that if read and followed may make you wealthier, healthier and happier. I know it seems like a lot but if you have a good blog reader, you can subscribe to them and then once a day browse through the titles and just come back to the posts that grab your interests. Originally I was going to make a list of sites to make you wealthy but due to the fact that we’ve launched a new site about health, I thought it would be appropriate to give you some blogs that I read regarding health and happiness as well.

Wealthy

1. Andy Beard -Search Engine Performance, Wordpress, Niche Marketing and Affiliate Marketing Tips
2. Blogging Away Debt - A great site about making money and reducing debt
3. Blue Hat SEO - Tips for marketing and Search Engine Optimization.
4. Blueprint for Financial Prosperity - Earn More, Save More, Live More
5. Boston Girl’s Open Wallet - A single 30-something Bostonian who is seeking enlightenment and control of her Net Worth.
6. Calvin Warr - Fun marketing ideas
7. Clever Dude - Personal finance advice.
8. Consumerism Commentary - More personal finance advice.
9. Copyblogger - Copywriting tips for online marketing success
10. Daily Blog Tips - Another great site that will help you make money blogging.
11. DoshDosh - Helping You Make Money Online
12. Entrepreneurs Journey - Another great site about building wealth through blogging.
13. Finance is Personal - Finance advice posting about 3 times a day. Always fresh material.
14. FiveCentNickel - More personal finance advice.
15. FreeMoneyFinance - Another great site for personal finance advice.
16. Frugal For Life - A site about frugality and spending wisely.
17. Get Rich Slowly - Some more great business and finance advice from a fellow business owner.
18. Hannes Johnson Dot Com - Make money online marketing on the internet.
19. Home Based Business - Online home based business opportunities. Free home business ideas.
20. I Will Teach You To Be Rich - Follow his advice and he may make you rich. (The first finance blog I started reading)
21. It’s Your Money - A Site about wealth building and personal finance.
22. John Chow - This guy wants to teach you how monetize your blog (By any means necessary).
23. Kyle’s Cove - Technology, blogging, WordPress, SEO, and making money online
24. Lazy Man and Money - Another great site for more personal finance advice.
25. Make Money Online The Quick and Easy Way - Watch the journey of one women going from stay at home mom to internet millionaire.
26. Matt Cuts - Great SEO information
27. Mighty Bargain Hunter - A site about being frugal.
28. Money, Matters and More Musings - Another great site about wealth building and personal finance.
29. MsDanielle - Internet Marketing, PPC, and Online Social Networking
30. My Affiliate Journey - Affiliate marketing
31. My Money Blog - A great site about wealth building and personal finance.
32. My Personal Finance Journey - Another really good site about wealth building and personal finance.
33. My Two Dollars - A place to discuss money for the rest of us.
34. North x East - A site with a lot of blogging tips.
35. Not Made of Money -A Site about saving money and frugality.
36. One Man’s Goal - Watch one man make the journey to become a full time blogger.
37. Online Marketing Blog - A blog about online marketing.
38. Personal Finance Advice - The name says it all.
39. ProBlogger - Want to make money blogging? This site can teach you how.
40. Pronet Advertising - Read about one man’s experiences in online marketing.
41. QuickSprout - Tips for marketing and Search Engine Optimization.
42. Search Engine Land - Learn about Search Engines.
43. ShoeMoney - Another site with ideas on making money on the internet.
44. Simply Thrifty - A site about being frugal.
45. StockTradingToGo - A great resources for investing tips.
46. The Digerati Life - Personal finance advice from a great writer.
47. The Simple Dollar - All sorts of personal finance advice.
48. Young and Broke - More personal finance advice.

Healthy

49. DietHack - A great site for health related articles.
50. FatBlokeThin - Losing weight the Buddhist way.
51. HealthMad - More tips to live healthy by many authors.
52. Healthy, Fast and Cheap - A site about cooking foods that are healthy, fast and cheap.
53. Her Active Life - A great site about eating healthy and excersize (great tips for men and women).
54. He’s Fit - A great site about eating healthy and excersize (great tips for men and women).
55. Live Live… Organics & Your Health - A great site with tips on healthy living.
56. Nurture Your Life - Another great site with tips on healthy living
57. Raising a Healthy Family - The name says it all.
58. Ririan Project - Tons of great tips to live a healthier lifestyle.
59. Sexual Health Buzz - A site about staying healthy while being sexually active.
60. Spine-Health - For those people who suffer from neck and back pain (Like I often do).
61. The Diet Pulpit - Eat healthy.
62. The Final Sprint - A great health site with a major focus on running.
63. Total Wellbeing - Healthy living for the body and mind.

Happy

64. 43 Folders - Personal productivity and ways to make your life better.
65. Brip Blap - A blog about life, family, career, personal finance, career, productivity, health and the environment.
66. Dumb Little Man - A group blog of people giving tips for anything and everything.
67. Genius Types - Creative Life and Money.
68. LifeHack - Another Site about pretty litterally, everything.
69. LifeHacker - Literally, A site about everything.
70. Pick the Brain - A great site about self improvement.
71. Scott H. Young - Another great site about self improvement.
72. Steve Pavlina - Personal development for smart people.
73. The Blog of Author Tim Ferris - A great site with tons of advice about everything.
74. The Consumerist - A Site about everything to make life better.
75. The Happiness Project - The name says it all.
76. The Positivity Blog - Be happy and be positive. Great Advice.
77. The Thinking Blog - Expand Your Mind.
78. ZenHabits - A site about organizing your life and becoming a happier person.

That’s my long, comprehensive reading list. As you can see, I read a lot of blogs. Feel free to comment on who else deserves to be on the list and what not. Check out these blogs and enjoy!

-M

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This is part of my ongoing theme “The 8 Step Process to Being Rich“.

There is so much to say about being frugal and so many tips that I could give. Being frugal basically means to spend wisely. Don’t waste money on things that you don’t need but don’t be cheap and skimp on the things that you do need. Being frugal means that when you do have to go out and buy things, you don’t really need the best of the best most expensive things. When you are grocery shopping, buy the generic equivalent of what you want. When buying cars, buy used and hold on to it for as long as you can. There are so many tips I can give that have already been given. Instead of making a comprehensive list of all the frugal ways of doing things, I will make a list of great sites and great posts by others about their frugality. Give these links a try:

• Top Ten Frugal Cars from Young and Broke
• 25 Gadgets That Actually Save Money from The Simple Dollar
• Borrow, Barter, Buy Used: Espousing the Frugal Lifestyle from The Digerati Life
• Simply Thrifty has tons of great posts. I can’t give just one. Visit the entire site.
• Cheap Vs. Frugal at I Will Teach You To Be Rich
• 15 Ways to Eat Healthy While Keeping it Cheap from Get Rich Slowly
• How to live on $600 a month from Finance is Personal
• How to get money for your old clothes and buy quality clothing at a fraction of retail from Generation X Finance
• Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for a Discount from FiveCentNickel
• Thrifty Vs. Frugal Vs. Cheap from Ask Dong
• Frugal Lunch from Clever Dude

Check Out some of those posts to get a real feel for what frugality means. This site is called “How I Will Be Rich” not “How I am Rich”. I still have a long way to go on this step. I’m trying harder every day. I stopped buying DVDs and Music CDs on a weekly basis. This is a step to no only live more frugal but too also de-clutter my life a little. About 6 months ago, I even took a step that is against what I now preach. I bought a new truck. In retrospect, I probably should have bought used but now that I have it, my goal is to get it paid off as quickly as humanly possible and hold on to it as long as possible.

The next post will be Step 5: Start a blog and take steps to monetize.

-M

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So I have compiled a list of great blog posts that I have read over the last few days. I will probably do this about once a week because I’m constantly out there reading everyone’s blogs. If you have commented on my page, I guarantee, I’ve been to your blog.

Generation X Finance discusses shorting ETFs. The market has not been doing to well lately. If you are interested in gaining off of a falling market check out this post. It slightly safer than shorting individual stocks and may be an option for a diversified portfolio.

Finance is Personal describes a method for obtaining a mortgage without a credit score.

The Digerati Life has an article that helps people shrug off a stock market slide.

Stock Trading to Go posted a hilarious video of Jim Cramer in an interview by Steven Colbert on the Colbert Report.

Lazy Man and Money posted an excellent guest post about DRIPs (Dividend Reinvestment Plans). It is a great way to get started in the stock market with very little funds. Highly Recommended!

DailyApps has a very informative post for all you bloggers about Optimizing Wordpress for Best Performance.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich has an interesting post about how much people spend for their own weddings but declare that everyone else is crazy for spending that much.

One Man’s Goal discusses how he generated over 3,000 backlinks and how you can do it too.

ProBlogger, the one site that most people all ready read and know about, has a great post about Analyzing your blog’s “Competition.”

Young And Broke has some great tips on being Frugal. Check them out.

That’s all I have for today. These are all the blogs that I have been reading a lot lately. Check out some of their other posts. They all write great content.

-M

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If you have not read Matt’s previous post about Roth IRA’s, I’d suggest scrolling down to read his first and then skipping right back up to here…

With that said, we should all now have a basic idea of how a Roth IRA works and a few simple reasons why they are not as scary as once thought. Holding off on starting a Roth IRA until you “think” you have enough money to afford to invest is simply being in the wrong mindset. From the beginning of your working career at that first job, by saving about $500 would have been enough to start putting money away for the future. At such a young age (teens-20s), time is on your side and the magic of compound interest should be your very best friend. Play around with this snazzy little calculator if you don’t believe me.

I have heard many of my friends say their school loans, car payments, and the monthly rent sucks up all of their salary. As many of us pay these on-going expenses, there is a simple solution to continue our desire to invest for the future: automatic money transfers. This innovation is a wonder that online banking has allowed all of us to utilize. If it wasn’t for the internet, many of us would continue to pay the typical bills and occasionally throw some extra cash into our very low interest paying savings accounts, but only if we’re feeling really loaded! The power of automatic money transfers to a Roth IRA account makes investing and saving absolutely painless. By starting with a measly $20 transfer each week, you’ll never know that money was ever in your checking account. Setting up this automatic flow of money is the most essential step in the beginning to fund your new Roth IRA, especially while feeling a financial pinch from the bills. Sooner than you know it, you’ll want to bump up that weekly amount to $50 or more while noticing you’re inching closer to maxing out your yearly limit; it’s a good thing!

Now the option is to figure out where to sign up for this Roth IRA. There are many online brokerage sites that all offer fairly the same options and perks. The key here is to never get overwhelmed; you’ll always be able to transfer money from one brokerage to another, and you’ll always be able to shift how you want your money invested within your Roth IRA. Compare companies like Vanguard, Fidelity, and T. Rowe Price. Look closely at the amount they require to begin investing, yearly fees, and the required monthly transfer amounts. I would say a good initial investment is $500, hopefully finding a plan with no yearly fee, and $50 or less monthly transfer requirements.

Once that’s figured out, you need to decide how you will invest your money within your Roth IRA. If you are in your 20s, investing the money in the stock market is the way to go. Finding a well diversified mutual fund is much better in this case than diversifying through various stocks. Try to find a no-load mutual fund with a broad-based market index. The key here is to pay the least in fees as you can and diversify enough to cover all bases to ride the market as it shifts up and down. Check out Morningstar’s mutual fund screener to easily evaluate which funds would best suit you.

There’s not much of anything left to do now that you’ve completed all of this. Figuring out where you want to open the account is the most difficult step, but it’s no more challenging than deciding which credit cards you want to sign up with. Now just let that automatic money transfer let it do its thing, and sit back and enjoy watching that Roth IRA balance grow!

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Joe and I were having this long conversation the other night of how great Roth IRAs are. We basically came to the conclusion that there is absolutely no reason anyone should not have an IRA. Basically an IRA is an Individual Retirement Account. It is an account where you can invest money in stocks and mutual funds under a tax shelter. You are basically putting money in the account from your paycheck after income taxes have been taken out of the paycheck. You then invest this money in to mutual funds or stocks and when retirement comes around you are able to take all that principle and all the capital gains, tax free. There is a yearly limit to how much you are allowed to invest.

I just recently set up my Roth IRA because I did not really know much about them until lately… Some common misconceptions, questions and concerns that I had:

1. What if I need to take some of that money out for some reason? Isn’t there a huge penalty?
   You are actually allowed to take any of that principle investment out whenever you want. You only get penalized for drawing the gains on your investments. I wouldn’t recommend it, however, because you want to get that full benefit of that magic word called compound interest.
2. If I want to buy a house in the near future, all my money will be tied up in my Roth IRA. I could have put money in a discretionary investment account, earned interest and used some of that towards a new home…
   You can draw up $10,000 of the gains you have made from capital investments towards the purchase of a new primary residents, not to mention you still can draw that principle the you have been investing.
3. Will I get taxed on the money when I go to draw it once I retire?
   Nope that’s the magic of a Roth IRA. With a traditional IRA pretax dollars are invested in the account and you will have to pay taxes when you go to draw that money at retirement age. With a Roth IRA, you are investing with money that has already been taxed and you won’t have to pay capital gains taxes. It is one of the few loopholes the government gives on paying taxes on earned money.

Another benefit I have learned is that you can use some of your gains towards educational expenses as well.

There are some people that may not be eligible, mainly people in the six figure salary range. But if you are up there, I would probably personally rather be investing in things like real estate and small businesses (But that’s just me).

If anyone can think of more great benefits or any real huge disadvantages of contributing to a Roth IRA, please explain in the comments. From where I stand, I don’t see why everyone doesn’t have one…

-M

Popularity: 9% [?]

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