The LearnVest Staff Tackles Their Finances

You don’t have to be a vegan or a vegetarian to save you money. It would probably be a great 1-2 days a week or certain meals. Just know how much protein you need on your plate. Or where you can make substitutions like beans. Various cuts of meat can be inexpensive. You just have to learn how to cook them and what to do with them. We bought a pork loin for $5. Had that with some roasted potatoes and some vegetables for under $10 with leftovers for lunch. You don’t need more protein than a deck of cards. Watch out for sales on meats, then freeze them or vacuum seal them with marinade.

You don’t have to be a vegan or a vegetarian to save you money. It would probably be a great 1-2 days a week or certain meals. Just know how much protein you need on your plate. Or where you can make substitutions like beans. Various cuts of meat can be inexpensive. You just have to learn how to cook them and what to do with them. We bought a pork loin for $5. Had that with some roasted potatoes and some vegetables for under $10 with leftovers for lunch. You don’t need more protein than a deck of cards. Watch out for sales on meats, then freeze them or vacuum seal them with marinade.

I have to admit this article actually put me off of Learn Vest a bit, as it illustrates how different my financial priorities are from your 20-something staffers living in Manhattan. As a suburban mom of three, cocktails and taxis aren’t high on my list of expenses (wow, almost every profile talked about drinking less or BYOW!). I can definitely appreciate your budget concerns, but it’s dawned on me that I’m not your target audience.

I find it interesting that so many of your group is very young. It explains the focus of your articles.
This article on 2011 resolutions shows that even people whose jobs makes them focus on fiscal responsiblity are not perfect. I think you need to include more people from other phases in their lives, as the financial issues differ as people age.

I was surprised at how many of you eat out so often. I grew up and started working in Manhattan, but my company had a decent cafeteria. So, I rarely went to restaurants for lunch, and often brought lunch.

I also was struck by how much you all spend on restaurants and drinking. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but that’s not how my friends socialized, at least not as much. We’d get together at somebody’s house instead of hanging out at a bar, have a potluck where everyody brought something, watch a video together or played games.

I’m 59, my husband is 64. We bought our first home in 1980, remodeled it & sold for double the price 5 years later, buying a larger home. We paid off that mortgage in less than 15 years (15-year bi-weekly mortgage), and were able to retire debt-free 5 years ago. We sold that house and bought a smaller, less expensive house in another part of the country, and paid cash for it from the profit of the house we sold. We have 2 new cars that we paid for with cash from savings.

Fiscal responsbility has to start early. We both started contibuting to our 401Ks in the early 1980s as soon as they became available, and maxed out our contributions from the beginning.

We have always lived BENEATH OUR MEANS. We never needed to have the latest and greatest of anything, even if we can afford it. We always pay off the entire balance of our credit cards every month, and haven’t paid interest on any credit card since the mid 1980s.