Setting Your Lifestyle Ceiling

As we approach the holidays each year, it becomes a wonderful time to spend with family and friends. It also becomes a time to step back, count our blessings, and reflect on how fortunate we are. You might also find that your budget is tighter this time of year, and a little concerned about how that will impact 2016. Let’s take a moment to quiet those concerns, and talk about lifestyle ceilings.

Imagine yourself as a high school senior (which may be painful, depending on how you styled your hair back then), and consider your options for after graduation. College could’ve been an option, but it wouldn’t necessarily have been a guarantee. Chances are, the likelihood of entering the workforce was much higher. Today, it’s pretty much expected that anyone who wants to attend college can. They might end up with student loans, they might have to work their way through it, they might even live at home to save costs, but it’s very much a given.

Major Purchases and the "Cool Off Period"

Whenever my family goes to the Jersey shore for summer vacation, two things always happen.  First, when we arrive I always say, I wish we had a beach house.  I always say maybe someday we'll get a place at the shore -- maybe once all the kids are off to college.  Second and without fail, after we’re there for a week, as much as I’ve enjoyed it, I can’t wait to go home and my kids all howl with laughter because I say, I don’t need to have a beach house.  It’s become the running joke of our family vacations.

The Handy Adder – A Blast from the Past

In the Kemp household, whenever we have a lively dinner table conversation, inevitably, my work as a financial planner comes into play. Recently, my son asked me about these red mechanisms with buttons he’s been observing at his job at the local grocery store. After some discussion, we determined that it was a Handy Adder - a true blast from the past.

After that, everyone was very interested in what the Handy Adder is and why my son was seeing people use it.  The Handy Adder is a small handheld adding machine.  I explained that it wasn't long ago that people used cash or personal checks at the grocery store instead of credit cards.  They had to make sure they had enough cash in their wallet or money in their checking account to cover the bill, so every dollar and cent mattered.  The Handy Adder is an effective way to track each item you plan on purchasing to keep your budget under control.

Budget Your Life - Build Your Lifestyle Ceiling

I want to take a brief moment to wish a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and yours from all of us at Kemp & Associates!

As we approach the holidays, it’s both a delightful time to spend with family and friends, and a time to step back, count our blessings and reflect on how fortunate we are. It is also a time when your budget may become slightly tighter. This leads into our next topic, which is the lifestyle ceiling¹. 

My family has been busy helping our oldest son get ready to attend college. It has been a great time to instruct and reflect with him, and it has also given me the opportunity to take a step back and remember what it was like for my wife, Shelley, and I when we attended college. If we go back 25 years when I graduated from high school in 1983, college wasn't a guarantee. If we go back 50 years², college was a luxury to some, maybe even akin to winning the lottery or striking it rich.