Bridging The Gaap

mydollarplan.com

What’s it all about?

Essentially, this is a “personal” personal finance blog owned and operated by a woman named Madison DuPaix. Madison “is a freelance writer specializing in personal finance” and has “worked in finance and insurance since 2001″ (source is from her about.com bio page, to which she also contributes; Madison also contributes to sites like MSN money).

While My Dollar Plan is full of great advice about taxes, retirement planning, budgeting and other personal finance topics, the only disadvantage is that she is writing from an American perspective, so unfortunately much of the technical advice will be inapplicable to a Canadian audience (though many principles can still apply).

But that’s not why I chose to include My Dollar Plan as a BTG Useful Website: My Dollar Plan has a grand, overarching lesson, and that lesson is all about the virtues of planning, and sticking to your goals until they are achieved.

What attracted me to the site

When Madison DuPaix beat me in the PF Challenge tournament, I took a closer look at her site, but what keeps me coming back to the site is her literal “dollar plan”, a retirement plan which will see Madison and her husband retiring at the age of 37 and 43, respectively, in 2016.

Madison and her family are doing exactly what we all should be doing. They defined their retirement goals relatively early, and formed a concrete, detailed plan as to how they were going to achieve that goal.

Madison et al. knows exactly how much money she’ll need, and how she’s going to get that money. Fortunately, she’s blogging about the journey, and I find myself learning a great deal from her retirement planning, parts of which I hope to implicate into my own. For example, in this post, Madison details how she has lowered the expense ratio of her investments thereby saving her money.

Lessons to be taken from the site:

1) If you have a plan, stick to the plan!

2) If you don’t have a plan, get a plan! - The plan should be detailed and through. It’s not enough to know where you’re going, you need to know how to get there. Pretend you’re going on a trip and writing out directions for yourself: surely you’d mark down where to turn and in what direction! Otherwise you’d risk getting lost.
3) Random, weird stuff is going to potentially throw off some of your plans; don’t let it. - When Madsion recently wrote about trouble with the water at her home, she made no mention of, nor do I expect her to, let this keep her from acheiving her goals (though I am sure the repairs will be costly!). Weird stuff is going to happen, some of which you may mitigate by preparing (as Madison had done in the past by setting aside 1% of her home’s value for just such an emergency). Don’t let life’s little quandaries discourage you, and try not to let it cause you to deviate from your goals.

The Final Word:

My Dollar Plan has inspired me to try to come up with a preliminary plan for my own retirement, a goal I have put off for far too long. It has also inspired me to get moving on another project, which is to create an excel template that will allow people to estimate how much money they will need in retirement, given a set of variables such as inflation, rate of return, and so on.

If you’d like to take a look at how Madison determined her dollar plan, check out this post.

Madison’s example has shown us the power of sticking to a plan, and for that I’m proud to feature her as one of BTG’s useful websites!

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