Personal Finance Calculators for Family Money Management and Basic Financial Planning

The ultimate goal of this online calculator section is to introduce you to the critical personal finance concepts that our K-12 educational system has left you to discover almost completely on your own.

Unfortunately, since there are few profits to be made from helping the average person to understand how to maximize their happiness profits, and since the last thing the corporate world wants is for you to become financially savvy, very few trustworthy resources exist that are geared to helping the average family to increase their financial well-being.

I hope you will find the personal finance calculators in this section to be one of the few trustworthy resources for helping you to plan and manage your finances for the greatest financial and emotional returns.

Only Two Ways to Achieve Wealth

While there are a million ways to make money, there are only two basic ways to achieve wealth.

1. Be born into a wealthy family (pure luck of the draw).
2. Spend less than you earn and invest the difference (requires uncommon sense, self-education and self-discipline).

Seems simple enough, right? If you're not born into wealth, then all you need to do is to spend less than you earn and invest the difference? So why isn't everyone wealthy or on their way to becoming wealthy? Two primary reasons.

First, most of us were never taught the all-important financial and economic concepts of the time value of money, the opportunity costs of actions and inactions, and the law of diminishing returns.

Second, having not been armed with these all-important concepts, we become easy prey for the marketing geniuses employed by the corporate world.

As a result, most of us have allowed ourselves to be brainwashed into believing that we can be happier by not having any money at all (spending everything we earn). Or worse, spending more than we earn (buying on credit).

In other words, we've all been given a desirable destination (financial happiness) but given a map that leads us in the opposite direction (financial unhappiness).

Of course, this has worked out quite well for those who were born into wealth. So are they responsible for keeping personal financial training out of our k-12 education? Probably not. But there has to be some deviate force at work when we are taught to bake cupcakes in "Home Ec" (Economics), but taught nothing about how to manage our personal finances for the greatest emotional returns.

Time to Get Mad

One of the keys to reigning in my own spending was to get mad at myself for allowing the corporate world to dupe me into believing that money could buy happiness. For it was that belief that eventually found me trapped by debt in a work that was demoralizing and unfulfilling.

If you are carrying around the belief that money can buy happiness, there's a good chance you are taking jobs based on what they pay instead of how well they are suited to your talents, abilities, genuine interests, values and personality traits.

There's also a good chance you're not earning "enough" to make you "happy," which in turn will cause you to borrow from your future happiness (create debt) to subsidize your current unsatisfactory level of happiness (the definition of happiness taught to you by the corporate world). This is how the average person becomes trapped in a job(s) they dread going to.

If that's what's happened (or is happening) to you, then it's time to get mad enough at yourself to do something about it. And the first step in stopping to act in the best interests of corporate world, and start acting in the best interests of you and your family, is to educate yourself in the science of personal finance.

I hope the calculators in this section will help you traverse that learning curve.