Stuff Our Parents Never Taught Us, Part I: Compounding Interest

July 14, 2014 / 15 Comments

In the bi-weekly Stuff Our Parents Never Taught Us series I will introduce and clarify basic financial concepts in an attempt to increase the level of financial literacy among my Millennial peers. For some bizar reason, the majority of our parents didn’t think it necessary to teach us the 101 course of personal finance. If you’re over 18 and have no idea what stocks and bonds are, or how interest rates and dividends work, this is for you!

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Why ETFs Are Great For People Starting Out In The Stock Market

July 13, 2014 / 5 Comments

Unless you plan on becoming a landlord or starting a succesful business to create passive income streams, financial independence will be a near impossible task without the help of the stock market. However, many people are reluctant to put their precious savings in the market for fear of losing them all, especially after the horror stories of 2008. In Belgium, for example, only 14.7% of all households hold stocks in their portfolio for a median value of only €5,100 – we are notorious for keeping massive amounts of money in savings accounts.

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Best Writing of The Week, July 12

July 12, 2014 / 4 Comments

With the weekend just around the corner again, it’s time to look back at the best writing of the past week. With the advent of never ending news feeds and social media we have got all the information we could ever want at our finger tips, but finding in-depth and engaging reading material still is easier said than done. Here’s my top picks for this week!

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How I Outsmarted the Telecom Company and You Can Too

July 11, 2014 / 1 Comment

Telecommunications corporations, don’t we all love them? They provide us the means to connect to anyone we want, anywhere we want, anytime we want. In return they only charge you an arm and leg’s worth of your hard-earned cash each month. But forewarned is forearmed, so I made sure not to fall for their ‘lucrative’ pricing plans and bundle ‘value’ bonanza when I entered the store earlier today to order a broadband connection for my new apartment.

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How RollerCoaster Tycoon Taught Me to Enjoy Budgeting

July 10, 2014 / 2 Comments

Being born at the end of the eighties I was one of the very first children to grow up with a PC in my room. I literally cannot remember there being a time in my childhood that my room was not filled with floppy disks, CD-roms and oversized monitors. When I wasn’t writing awful code for some application I thought was useful but hardly ever was, I played video games on my classic beige PC.

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