Growing Late Bloomers From Inc. Magazine

Growing Late Bloomers From Inc. Magazine

Building a startup at any stage in life is a daunting task, but there are arguably more financial risks when you decide to start a business later in your career. Recent, Inc. Magazine contributor Kathy Kristof profiled our founder and CEO, Ilyce Glink, on the trials and tribulations of starting a business later in your career and how to protect yourself financially.

Head over to Inc. Magazine’s website to read the full article and learn how to protect yourself if you plan to start a business towards the end of your career.

To read the article, click here.

 

Why 50% of Americans Can’t Understand Their Credit Cards

Why 50% of Americans Can’t Understand Their Credit Cards

Remember life before credit cards?

Best Money Moves Founder/CEO Ilyce Glink remembers her grandfather carrying around a wad of fresh $20 bills, peeling them off one by one to pay for dinner.

Credit cards changed the way we pay for everything. Credit card companies made them easy to use – too easy. That’s why so many of us are carrying around so much credit card debt.

To responsibly use a credit card you have to understand its terms. Unfortunately, many credit cards don’t make their terms and conditions easy for customers to read.

According to a recent study by Creditcards.com, the average credit card agreement is written at an 11th grade reading level and would take 20 minutes to decipher. That might seem okay (after all, most people have graduated from the 11th grade), but 50 percent of Americans read at a 9th grade level or lower, making it difficult for most people to fully understand their rights as a cardholder.

This helps explain why employees repeatedly rank paying off debt as a top source of financial stress: if they can’t understand their credit cards, they can’t use them responsibly. This results in issues with debt, late payments and confusion about how they can pay off their debt quickly.

Missed information

If you don’t read your credit card agreement, you might wind up in trouble: You won’t know  the terms and details unique to this card and your usage will be driven by your general credit card knowledge, rather than the habits that work best for this specific card and financial situation.

We learn by observation: If you grow up with parents who regularly carried balances on their cards, you might think this is a perfectly normal way to manage your financial life. It’s not until you read the fine print and see how fast the interest rate charges will rack up and how long it will take you to pay off that debt that you might change how you manage your credit card relationships. This isn’t just about missing out on reward points because of a misunderstanding about how they’re earned, it’s about consumers never learning their rights and responsibilities when it comes to credit card usage, and exposing themselves to unnecessary financial risks.

According to the study, only 26 percent of those surveyed said they regularly read their credit card agreements. If you or your employees or colleagues only read one quarter of the contracts used in your office, your company would pretty quickly find itself in a load of trouble.

Financial stress at work

The study also claims that the less familiar card users are with their credit card’s terms and rules, the more they’ll end up paying to use that card over time in interest charges and fees. The more debt employees carry, the more financial stress they’re going to feel. This stress doesn’t stay confined to their finances – it also spills over into their work and their day-to-day lives. If you want to help, you have to provide your employees with assistance they can use. You can’t change how credit card companies write their contracts, but you can help boost the knowledge your workers have.

Here’s your Best Money Move: The more you know about financial stress and your options when dealing with money, credit cards and debt, the better prepared you’ll be to deal with these issues when they arise.

 

A Big Money Lesson For Only 60p (Less Than $1)

A Big Money Lesson For Only 60p (Less Than $1)

More than 30 years ago, as I was packing for my junior year abroad, my mother handed me a check for around $2,500 and said, “This money has to last all year. You’d better start keeping track of what you’re spending.”

And with that, I went off to Wales to study music and literature. When I got there, I deposited the check in my local Barclay’s branch on High Street. The dollar was strong then (close to where it is now), so while my dollars went pretty far, my funds weren’t unlimited by any stretch of the imagination. I had to watch every pound or penny I spent.

For 60p, I bought a small black notebook and stuck it in my pocket. Of course, this was 1984, before the Internet, before cell phones, and certainly before Venmo, PayPal and apps that helped you “save your change.”

What I got was my first big money lesson, and all for only 60p, or less than $1.

I had to do it all by hand. Dutifully, I recorded the beer and “still orange” (a non-alcoholic orangeade of sorts) I drank at the local pub. I’d record the pounds I spent buying bottles of full-fat milk (delivered fresh every morning to the local shop from the local farm – before any of us understood the meaning of the word “organic”) and hot butter muffins from the local bakery. At night, we’d go out after the pub closed to the local Chinese take-out and ordered a very greasy egg roll stuffed with bean sprouts, what I’d refer today as an Anthony Bourdain late-night special.

No expense was too little to escape the tracking, and my little black book soon became worn around the edges as I recorded train tickets to London and Inverness, Scotland, the cost of a boat ride across the Irish Sea, entry tickets to museums and dances, dinners out with friends, and a flight to the continent.

I managed pretty well, though when running a bit short of funds in the late spring, I took a job at a local Welsh pub pouring drinks and making fish and chips. I was paid a little and got some tips (but if I’m being honest, I’d have paid them to let me do it – that’s how much fun it was). Still, it was enough to augment my dwindling savings and allow me to plan for additional travel during the summer months, when I found myself calculating whether it would be cheaper to buy a EuroRail pass (which provided unlimited rail travel for a month) or individual tickets. After a bunch of calculations (by hand) and a lot of phone calls at the corner phone booth, individual tickets won out.

When I look back, I think that this little black book set me off on a different course in life. I learned that I could stretch even a tiny amount of money a long way (a “dime into a dollar”). I learned that I could be self-sufficient and that I was just fine with what today I’d call “deferred gratification.”

My first big money lesson. I still have that little black book somewhere. Once in awhile, I pull it out to look at where I spent my money – every penny of it – during that year abroad. It reminds me that anything is possible, if you put your mind to it.

Ilyce Glink is the Founder and CEO of Best Money Moves. She is also the author of 13 books on personal finance and real estate and the CEO of Think Glink Media, a digital content agency.