Favorite Things - Shift Upwards

Below are some things that I read, listen to, use, and love. Whether they teach me something new, help manage my money, or help manage my day – they make my life better.

Full disclosure: I’m not currently (or for the foreseeable future) making a penny from this blog…nor am I attempting to.

While it’d be easy for me to stuff this page full of affiliate links, I currently have zero affiliate relationships. And I’m not making a cent by telling you about anything below.

Podcasts

The Indicator from Planet Money

I’ve been listening to this podcast from NPR since the day it launched in 2018. It’s style is unique, taking a traditionally dry and wonky topic (economics) and distilling it into bite-size chunks in an incredibly entertaining fashion. The Indicator has provided me with a broad perspective. It has helped me better understand the forces at play in economics, and how those forces apply to my life and the lives of those around me.

New episodes every weekday, each about 10 minutes long. You can easily binge on an entire week’s worth of episodes in under an hour.

Check out the podcast

Books, Blogs, and Articles

Chain of Wealth - How to Set Up Multiple Streams of Income

This article from Denis & Katie over at Chain of Wealth is truly an epic piece of content. Distilling lessons from some of the best personal finance and personal development books, you can expect to learn all about passive income while finding actionable tips to help build your own streams of passive income.

Read Article

Personal Finance

Mint

I’ve been using Mint to track my spending and net worth for eight years. It provides a consolidated snapshot of your entire money life, including balances for checking/savings accounts, credit cards, loans, and investment accounts. The historical information that Mint maintains helps to measure progress and identify areas you can improve with your spending. It isn’t perfect, but its strength lies in the ability to customize spending categories. This helps to ensure your spending (and historical data) is tracked in a way that makes sense to you.

Website: Mint

Personal Capital

Personal Capital offers many of the same features as Mint, plus a bunch of awesome tools in addition. Everything is wrapped up into a beautifully sleek and modern interface. The tools Personal Capital offers include a robust retirement planning tool, which allows you to project if you are on track and compare varied scenarios. It also offers a tool to analyze the fees you are paying to invest, as well as a tool to analyze your portfolio. I don’t use Personal Capital to track spending, because it isn’t as customizable as Mint (but it’s getting better). However, the other tools make this a no-brainer keep around.

Website: Personal Capital

Credit Sesame

Credit Sesame is a service that provides the following:

Free monthly credit score updates.
Free monitoring and alerts on your credit report, including the ability to receive automated notifications for important credit monitoring events.
Free identity theft protection – including $50,000 in identity theft insurance.

With all the recent high-profile instances of personal data hacks and security breaches, it is now more important than ever to stay on top of your credit report. Credit Sesame offers a no-brainer, free way to do that.

Website: Credit Sesame

Everyday Life

Coming soon.

WordPress & Blog Management

Coming soon.