Welcome to the Graduate’s Guide Blog

Hey, welcome to my blog, The Graduate’s Guide to Money!  My goal with this blog is to help readers understand the basics of money so that they can begin to make wise financial decisions for themselves. I expect to post more or less every other week, probably on the weekend but don’t hold it against me if I slip now and then – I have 4 kids and a full-time job so sometimes life gets in the way! (Alright, sometimes I get lazy….)

I would love to hear your comments and questions but keep in mind, what I am sharing is meant to teach you the basics of money and how it functions in the world. That is different from giving you financial advice – financial advice is telling you what I think you should do in a given situation. The problem with trying to do that is that no one can give you appropriate financial advice without knowing everything about your exact situation.

Here is an example:

Question: My sister and I just each inherited $20,000. What should we do with the money?

Answer: It depends.

Sister #1 is 23, single, no children, college graduate, employed full-time, has no debt, a paid off car, has $3,000 of savings and regularly saves for both long-term and short-term financial goals.

Sister #2 is 23, single, a mother of 2, $10,000 of debt, no car, no savings, and a minimum wage job.

See?  They are in really different situations so the answer to the question would be really different for each sister.  Financial planners are trained to give advice, but they are required to find out everything about their client’s financial situation, goals, plans, risk tolerance, fears, issues, everything before they give advice (and it only makes sense that they need to know all of that in order to give appropriate advice).  I just can’t do that via a blog (plus, the client pays me to do all of that….)

Another example:

I just inherited $20,000. I want to invest the money and my mom said mutual funds are great. How does investing in mutual funds work?

That’s one I can answer because I can definitely teach you how investing in mutual funds works.

I cannot tell you which mutual fund to invest in (financial advice, again – depends on your goals, risk tolerance, situation, other investments, blah, blah, blah.)

With all of that said, there are certain universal principles that make sense in every situation. That’s why they are… well, universal.  So, you will see some universal principles sprinkled in, but I’ll be sure to say that.

Oh, BTW, my book goes into topics that are too big and deep and wide for a blog.  And, good news, you can buy it right from site!

To your financial success!