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Showing posts from November, 2023

How to Double Your Savings: The Rule of 72

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     The article posted last week titled “Combating Inflation with Compound interest” describes how inflation impacts the value of the money in our savings accounts and how compound interest can help reduce that. The article explains that investing your money in an account with compound interest would double the amount money made over time because you are taking advantage of the interest you earn along the way and on money you deposited.       Taking advantage of compound interest is a great way to increase the value of your money over time. It allows you to account for changes in inflation rates and potentially double your initial investment. According to the book “How Money Works: Stop being a sucker” by Tom Mathews, Steve Siebold, and Andy Horner a typical savings account is likely to have an interest rate under 1%. The same book provides a mathematical formula to help calculate how much time it would take to double the money you have invested based...

How Inflation Is Impacting Our Money

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 Inflation is a term often mentioned in finance because it impacts how we spend and save our money. According to an article written by Poonkulali Thangavelu, in 2005, a movie ticket cost $6.41; by 2019 the cost was $9.16 and by 2022, the average price was $16.29 (Thangavelu, 2023). Thangavelu provides an example of how inflation impacts a luxury expense, but it can also impact the cost of your groceries and other necessities. An article written by Western & Southern Finance group describes inflation as when the price of goods and services increase due to supply and demand, but when that supply or demand goes down, the prices still rise (Western & Southern Finance Group, 2023). Inflation is happening constantly and directly impacting our spending power. How inflation is impacting your savings Later, the same article explains how inflation can impact money you have in your savings account. As noted above, inflation is ultimately the reduction of the value of your dollar due t...

The Importance of Financial Literacy for Everybody

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  Most people can attest that being taught about money was not considered a huge priority. Despite this, financial literacy is a skill everyone should have a strong understanding of because knowledge of money and how it works impacts every facet of our lives. What is financial literacy? Why is it important for everybody? The book titled “How Money Works-Stop Being a Sucker” by Tom Mathews, Steve Siebold, and Andy Horner provides a definition for financial literacy that is as follows: the understanding of how to earn, spend, save, manage and invest money” (Mathews et al., 2023 p. 6).  On the following page, the book explains that financial illiteracy impacts three-fourths of the world and that governments and corporations use this ignorance to their advantage (Mathews et al., 2023, p.7). Later, the authors break down that statistic, explaining that this would mean that with seven point five billion people in the world, five billion of them would be considered financially illi...