Each Sunday we post interesting articles, videos, podcast episodes, and more that we’ve consumed from across the web. We’ll give our thoughts on what we’ve learned through others in Sunday Sharing.
What We’re Reading
Articles / Blog Posts
If you’re like me, you’re sitting down on weekend mornings amongst piles of receipts, tax forms, and medical billing records trying to make sense of just how tax reform will impact my tax return this year. Why? Because it’s tax time and so far, tax reform in 2018 is doing a doozy to my regular tax preparation.
In years past, I always managed my tax withholding aggressively with a target of receiving either a negligible tax refund or owing little to the greedy Feds. I don’t want to give Uncle Sam an interest free loan nor do I wish to pay any underpayment penalties on the taxes I owe.
This year’s tax return preparation is different, however. I didn’t know how my tax situation would change under the new tax laws which came into force in 2018. Not sure of how I should adjust my withholding levels, I left my W-4 filing situation and withholding allowances alone.
There are dozens upon dozens of credit cards on the market that offer some form of travel rewards. Some earn points, while others earn miles, and still others earn cash-back towards travel purchases. We will cover all of those later. But the biggest reward for your effort typically comes from the sign-up bonus, when the bank might offer you something like 50,000 points for spending $3,000 on the card in the first 90 days as a cardholder. This is called the minimum spending requirement and it is typically a few thousand dollars in about 3 month time period. So what does 50,000 points mean? It can vary by card issuer, but many points/miles (NOT ALL) are worth at least 1 cent per point, so that’s a $500 value. Earning $500 on $3,000 of spending is a whopping 16.6% return on your dollars spent, and better yet, that bonus is often tax-free!
Articles We Posted
Cooking In A Tiny House
We love to cook. Okay, L loves to cook and Tim likes to cook (sometimes). We are firm believers in meal prepping. Despite having a small space to meal prep in, we have found ways to make it possible. Like almost everything in life, there are learning curves. Today, we talk about some of those learning curves of cooking in a tiny house.
Living A Better Life Interview – Jon Brodsky | Finder.com
What advice do you have for others in living a better life?
Keep your hobbies as your hobbies – not everything that you love to do needs to be your life. When my wife and I first started thinking about leaving New York, we looked at buying and running a ski resort, which can be had for the cost of a small apartment (seriously – from $600,000 to about $3.5 million is the going rate for family-run ski areas). The economics of running one of those is terrible, though, and in the end, we decided to get a place with enough land that we could simply ski out our back door when it snowed (which has a lower price point than a ski mountain, by the way). You’ve got to be able to have fun at the thing that you do that makes money without taking away from the other things you like to do that cost money.
Also, keep your fixed costs as low as you can. We bought a house that started as a maintenance headache (it’s a bit better now that almost everything has been replaced), but our mortgage is about half to a third of many of our friends, which gives us a lot more freedom to do other things. In fact, I’d say keeping your fixed costs low is the key to having a better life whether or not you want to leave the city.
A Lesson In Gratefulness
What does it mean to be grateful? It means choosing to focus on what you appreciate in life. It means not taking anything, big or small, for granted.
We had heard of gratitude journals and decided to make a digital version. We will share our gratefulness notes each month with our readers. We want to extend this challenge to you! For the rest of the year, fill out what you are thankful for each day. Set a reminder on your phone to fill it out before bed. Again, this can be done digitally or in a notebook.
Send us your material!
Feel free to send us articles, videos, podcast episodes, etc. that you’ve enjoyed. It can be from your own works of art or from someone else’s. We might even feature your material!
Check out former Sunday Sharing volumes here!
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