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After toying with learning  Spanish for a few years, I got serious about it in 2007. I was motivated by a scheduled trip to South America – really a late honeymoon. My husband and I hired a tutor to come to the house two hours a week. With consistency, practice, and a few trips to Latin America thrown in, I’m now quite proficient in Spanish, especially understanding speech.
As an American, it’s easy to be lazy about languages. You can travel almost anywhere in the world and find someone who knows a little English.
However, I think the world is changing rapidly. Language skills are more and more important. You may well lose out on a job or business opportunity to someone who is bilingual. I will probably live to see Mandarin Chinese supplant English as the most used language on the planet, so I plan to pick that up next. Continue reading 5 Surprising Benefits of Learning Spanish
 Sometimes the universe tells me what I’m going to write about, no matter what I think. I’ve been planning to post about the surprising benefits of learning Spanish, and I even wrote part of it. However, my subconscious has overruled me, and it’s cars today instead.
I read two articles about cars this week, High Cost Cars Cost Even More Than We Think at Kevin’s Out of Your Rut blog, and Buying a Car With Cash, No Loan by Elle at Couple Money. That’s not too unusual. Cars are a major purchase and so personal finance bloggers tend to cover them. Continue reading Cars and Debt: What Do You Value?
This is an excerpt from  the October 2010 issue of Global Asset Strategist.
I continue my interview with Adrian S., a married man with a family who sold most of his possessions in search of a better life. Links to earlier parts of the interview can be found at the end of this post.
Jennifer Barry: I know that you’ve been farther head of the curve than your wife Karen has been on a lot of things. Was she really as gung-ho as you to sell the house and travel around, or was she a little bit more skeptical than you were?
Adrian S.: No, I was the driver initially. I was the one who was always promoting the idea of making a break and she kind of went along with it, at some point she said that she agreed that we needed to sell our house. And then things just kind of fell in place after that. Continue reading Stranger in His Own Land, Part 8
 The Boomers are guinea pigs in a giant stock experiment.
When it comes to investing, I’m not like most people. This fact was brought into sharp focus when I started reading some guest posts by Rob Bennett of Passion Saving, and found out that his stance on buying when stocks are cheap and not when they are expensive is a controversial one. To me, this just seems like common sense, but apparently many advocates of buy-and-hold won’t even let Rob give his point of view.
One article in particular struck me, Stock Investing for the Long Run–But How Long is the Long Run? a guest post at Out of Your Rut blog. Rob looks at long term averages, and correctly states that your US stock purchases made in 2000 should pay off in the long run – in the year 2030. He asserts that stocks have performed as expected by students of history, but that most investors thought that the market would turn around much faster.
The scary thing is that Rob is an optimist. Continue reading Will You Retire on Your Stocks?
I read a lot of blog posts about productivity. They give me tips on how to write faster, how to automate processes, how to improve my SEO, and how to make more efficient use of my time. I enjoy these posts – I link to them, retweet them, leave comments about them, and try some of the suggestions.
However, I realize I can’t do it all. No matter how clever, or helpful, or insightful, I don’t have enough hours in the day to attempt all this self-improvement.
In fact, working too hard causes its own problems. Here are 6 reasons why you shouldn’t: Continue reading 6 Reasons Not to Work So Hard
 This is an excerpt from the October 2010 issue of Global Asset Strategist.
I continue my interview with Adrian S., a married man with a family who sold most of his possessions in search of a better life. Links to earlier parts of the interview can be found at the end of this post.
Jennifer Barry: How long have you been home schooling your kids?
Adrian S.: It’s been a progression, so we started home schooling about 3 years before we left in 2007. So, once, it’s been a steady series of steps of getting further and further outside the box really, because once we started home schooling, that opened up whole new questions to ask. It’s a healthy thing, we should all be trying to question why we do what we do. Continue reading Stranger in His Own Land, Part 7
This is an excerpt from the August 2010 issue of Global Asset Strategist.
In Canada and the US, they are commonly known as boomerang kids. They are adult children, usually in their twenties, who move back in with their parents after living independently for a while. Unlike past generations, living with parents after age 21 is not stigmatized, but rather applauded as a sensible measure to avoid racking up debt. By 2006, 43.5% of Canadians under 30 were sleeping in their old bedrooms, while in the US, 10% of Americans under age 35 have returned to their parents’ home.
For some young people, the decision is not whether to move back home, but whether to leave at all. Increasingly, the global trend is for adults to stay in their childhood bedroom well into their thirties. In Germany, dependent adult children are known as nesthockers or nest squatters. In France, pundits refer to “Tanguy syndrome,” named after a film about a 28 year old who refused to leave the family home. In New Zealand, the 20% of young men between the ages of 20 and 34 who live with parents are called “mummy’s boys.” Austria has its “Mama hotels” that are a comfortable refuge for Generation Y, while the UK has KIPPERS, or Kids In Parents’ Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings. Continue reading Boomerang Kids
 If you read this blog regularly, you know I haven’t done much to “monetize” it. I don’t have a lot of ads or affiliate links because I only promote things that I believe in and have tried out for myself.
However, when I read that Wandering Earl was coming out with a guide to cruise ship jobs, I had to check it out. I knew he had years of experience on ships, so I was sure he had a lot of information to share. Earl was kind enough to send me a draft copy to read, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Earl (aka Derek Baron) teamed up with another cruise veteran, Liz Aceves, to write How to Work on a Cruise, a comprehensive guide to getting a job in this field. In 173 pages, they answer questions you didn’t know you had. They discuss every aspect of getting work on a ship, from choosing your job and picking the best cruise line for you, to designing a resume that will get attention and how to ace the interview. Earl and Liz even tell you how to pack for your first cruise ship contract! Continue reading Insider Secrets: Get a Job on a Cruise Ship
This is an excerpt from the  May 2010 issue of Global Asset Strategist.
As part of my effort to help readers “live richly,” I’ve tried to steer you away from financial disasters. I warned you of debt pitfalls in 7 Debt Survival Tips, and talked about real estate dangers in Home Sweet Home or Debt Trap?
However, there is one area I haven’t mentioned where people borrow huge sums of money, often without any logical thought – educational loans. Americans have been conditioned to urge everyone to get a college degree, regardless of the fit between this path and the potential student. The US media sounds a constant drumbeat that college graduates earn higher salaries than workers with a high school diploma, and the highest prestige professions – like doctors and professors – require years of advanced schooling. Continue reading Is College Worth It?
 Traveling used to be a lot more dangerous. While there have always been explorers, wanderers, and people who wanted to see what was over the next hill, this group used to be dominated by single men. After all, the world was dangerous, and travel was very slow and arduous. Your ship could sink, you could be felled by an exotic disease, or you could be fatally attacked by a wild animal at any time. Even if you survived, you would not see your loved ones for many years. Mail service was nonexistent in many locations, so contact was infrequent at best.
Fast forward to today, and technology has made exploring a whole lot easier. Now single women, couples and even families can jump on a plane and go. Tours and guidebooks are readily available to make your trip go smoother, with hotels and restaurants serving all but the most remote locations. Modern medical care can treat you if you are ill, and vaccines can even prevent diseases. Animals are rarely a danger outside rural areas. Contact is cheap and frequent with the internet, and you can post pictures of your travels to Facebook or your blog before you even return home! Continue reading Mobile Lifestyle
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