-Everything in personal finance can

be distilled to the three basic principles.

So number one is just spend less than you earn,

which essentially means save money.

Number two is make the money you have work for you.

So once you've saved it, invest it.

Make sure that it grows.

Make sure that you take advantage of compound interest.

And number three is, once you've saved and invested, protect it,

making sure you have an emergency fund.

So there are a lot of people who write in and say that Mint

has helped them get out of debt.

They had 5, 10, 15 thousand dollars worth of debt.

And simply by seeing where they were spending

all of their money and what their interest rates were

and finding potentially lower interest rates,

they were able to pay off that debt,

often within six months or a year.

-My sister-in-law introduced me to mint.com

and basically just told me about this really neat website

and said, hey, you should log onto mint.com.

It'll really help you track your spending.

It's very user friendly, time efficient,

and it'll give you access to your accounts

much faster than any other way that you could possibly

get into your accounts.

The feature I like most about mint.com

is that it will categorize your spending for you

and really detail exactly where your money is going.

And before, I really didn't have a very good idea

of exactly where all of my money was going.

So it was a really eye-opening experience

once I started using mint.com.

And I believe that it identified some areas

that I needed to be a little bit more

efficient in with my money.

-Since the early 19th century, the stock market,

although it's taken a big dive this year,

has returned an average of about 7% return.

And so if you put about $200 a month

in for the next five years and you were 25 or 30

when you started on that, you'd have about a million dollars

by the time you retire.

-I want to make sure we're saving money.

And we can retire when we want to retire.

We've got life plans that we've worked

with financial professionals on.

And this is just a great tool to help us realizie and achieve

those goals.

-It's really opened my eyes to the importance of investments.

And boy, it really showed me that I

need to become a little bit more conscientious about my savings.

-It gives us a GPS of where we are now

and where we want to go in the future.

And it provides us the tools to get there too.

And it provides the tools that we

can customize in our own way.

It doesn't tell us exactly how we need to get there,

but it allows us to decide what we want to do in a fashion

that we like.

That's really big for me.

-You never know when you're going to lose your job

or get into a car accident or need

medical help or some sort of procedure.

So we recommend that people have an emergency fund.

And we recommend if you're in your twenties

and you don't have a house or too

many other financial obligations, about 10 to 15

thousand dollars.

And if you're a little bit older, if you have a family,

if you have a house, if job loss would be an even greater burden

on you financially, you probably want $30,000 or more.

And the last advice on preparing for the unexpected is only 29%

of renters actually have renter's insurance,

even though you can get it for about $150 a year.

And so, even if you're paying that for five or 10 years,

it's going to be less than the cost of replacing

a computer or a couch or your belongings

if they're lost, stolen, or damaged in a fire.

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