http://www.firevalt.com/blog Personal finance and entrepreneurship Sat, 24 Mar 2007 17:54:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en We believe proper money management in developing countries can be a powerful tool in helping individuals accumulate personal wealth. That's why we're working towards releasing Firevalt in South America and Africa. We lived in Brazil for a few years and Firevalt's programmer grew up in Ghana. ... http://www.firevalt.com/blog/2007/03/24/international-firevalt/ It's been a while since we've posted here on the blog. We're working hard at finishing the Firevalt web app and hope to release the first version within the next few months. We're really excited about Firevalt and believe it will be fun to use and a great ... http://www.firevalt.com/blog/2007/01/23/firevalt-is-on-the-way/ Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the popular Dilbert cartoon, is an excellent manager of his own personal finances. He intended to write a humorous book about personal finance but decided he could never write enough to fill more than a page. According to Adams, everything you need to know about ... http://www.firevalt.com/blog/2006/07/27/the-dilbert-guide-to-personal-finance/ For those of you that are in the habit of paying yourself a portion of your income each month (hopefully for the purpose of investing and growing your wealth), I have a question. What do you do if there is some financial emergency during the month that makes it impossible ... http://www.firevalt.com/blog/2006/06/27/self-debt/ Vanguard has an interview with Eric Tyson, author of Personal Finance for Dummies and a few other books. He says more people are involved in investing than ever before and the Internet is making it very easy, but few people research the stocks they invest in and few people ... http://www.firevalt.com/blog/2006/06/03/timeless-advice-from-a-leading-financial-expert/ Lee Eisenberg has an excellent thought about the value of money. The greatest uncertainty of all may be the uncertainty over what money is good for. We bury this uncertainty under a million cliches. Money can’t buy happiness. Oh, no? Money can buy time and opportunity to ... http://www.firevalt.com/blog/2006/05/30/the-real-value-of-money/ For a humorous look at the difficulties of being frugal, see TrailerParkRave.com: I posit there is no such thing [as frugality], because the universe demands a zero sum by the time all accounts are settled, and money saved will always come at the expense of time or something less tangible but ... http://www.firevalt.com/blog/2006/05/20/the-high-cost-of-being-cheap/ A comment on our last post, Winning on the margins, brought up a very interesting topic. "You still have to balance [frugality] with living a nice life though. Winning for the sake of winning, or being frugal for the sake of being frugal will probably not lead to a better life. ... http://www.firevalt.com/blog/2006/05/17/frugality-and-a-better-life/ Olympic athletes finish races within seconds or milliseconds of each other, but they would be minutes or hours ahead of me. To win an Olympic event, it's not enough to be "pretty" fast. Victory is in the margins. To win you have to perform at least as ... http://www.firevalt.com/blog/2006/05/06/winning-on-the-margins/ What's more important - having a large bank account balance or a healthy positive cash flow each month? I'm sure both are important, but which one should we focus our attention on when budgeting? Should we budget and plan based on money in our bank accounts? If ... http://www.firevalt.com/blog/2006/04/28/cash-flows-vs-account-balances/