It’s occurred to me on several occasions that not everyone reads money magazines or CNN Money as much as I do. For some people knowing where to start is practically half the battle when it comes to getting a grip on your finances. What they need or would love to see is a financial plan sample that just gives them the hard numbers! They need something that could act as an example for how you should be saving and spending your money.
That’s exactly what I wanted to do in this post. For one second, let’s put aside the whole, touchy-feely, fluffy notion that every plan is unique. It is (don’t get me wrong)! But there are some figures that you could go by that may not be so bad. If anything, consider them a good starting point.
So I’ve been thinking …
As part of my love affair over the last year with 
The following post was provided by guest contributor. If you are interested in being a guest contributor for My Money Design, please feel free to 
What a wild ride the last 4 months have been! It’s been a while since I’ve done a dividend stock portfolio update, and I thought this would be a great time to report (i.e. celebrate) my earnings.
Every now and again when I read through the headlines on my favorite money news sites, I see the same desperate-for-attention headlines proclaiming that “retirement is dead” and that we basically have no hope of ever saving enough money. How do they draw those conclusions? The usual suspects cited are the decline of pensions, the deflating of Social Security and the rise in costs as reasons why none of us can save and why we’ll all need to work until we are 80.
If you think that having $1,000 or so in your emergency fund is going to cut it, think again! I’m normally not a huge promoter of this topic, but over the last 2 weeks, I’ve had to dip into my stash more than I’d like. And if I didn’t have access to emergency money, I’d be up a creek either paralyzing one of my investments or taking on unnecessary debt.
The following is a guest post by fellow personal finance blogger William Cowie from the site 
When it comes to planning for retirement, people both young and old always ask the same simple question: When can I retire? It’s a seemingly harmless question, but it is also one that can be ambiguous to find a direct answer for. The reason is because retirement isn’t something that simply comes with age. You could retire today or even ten years from now if you really wanted (with the proper plan in place). Unfortunately, I hate to answer a question with a question, but the response to “when can you retire” is simply “how badly do you want to”?
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