It makes a huge difference how big the company is, and how easy it is to sell shares. (I am also making the fundamental assumption the company is public, if it is not then there is no guarantee at all you can ever sell the shares). If your company is traded on a major exchange, and there are lots of shares traded per day, the it is likely you will be able to sell them when you need to at a competitive price (subject to any restrictions they place on you as an employee to sell).
Large publically traded companies in the US call this an “Employee Stock Purchase Plan” and if this is offered as part of an ESPP, then the company is likely large enough to count.
Then, there is a separate matter of whether the company is a good investment at all. And even if it is, you may not want to invest in your employer at all, because your salary is already tied into their performance, and you may not want to tie your investment strategy in to the same company. However, there is nothing preventing you from selling ESPP shares as soon as your company lets you do it after purchase, and if you do that you can get an immediate guaranteed return, with very little risk. You will have to pay taxes on your profit, but not the money you put in to buy shares.
It makes your taxes a little more complicated, but not overly so, and you may clear enough to pay an accountant to do your taxes anyway.
I have my entire paycheck hit my checking, without parceling out some money here and other money there. I avoid auto-pay (and electronic statements for anything that might vary), and instead pay all bills from my bank’s payment portal.
Paper copies of bills go into an in-box, which I process every week or two. I look at all the bills before paying them. There is also a physical piece of paper in the in-box, which is a printout of a spreadsheet I made with all of my monthly and yearly bills. When I pay a bill, I check off the box. Not very hi tech, but it gets the job done.
If I see “extra” money building up in checking, I check the paper, and if it is not needed in the next few months, I shuffle it off to a HYSA. Periodically, I move money from the HYSA to an investment account, which is shoving money into index funds on a set schedule.
Yeah, there’s a lot of manual stuff going on, and if I have a busy month I only get to the bills and not the other stuff. But I feel in better control of all of it, and less likely that I will miss a fraudulent thing happening.
One thing I would add about due dates is that since they tend to fall on the same day of the month, they will sometimes fall on weekends or holidays. In the bad old days, it was up to you to make sure the payment got there on the last business day before the holidays. If you were unfortunate enough to have a due date on a Monday holiday, it would have had to get there the Friday beforehand.
When the CFPB was formed, it was able to institute a rule that said that when the due date fell on a day when the bank wasn’t open for processing payments (or a mail holiday), then the payment would still be considered on time if it came in by 5 PM of the next business day.
Still, you do not want to rely on banks getting regulations right, so if you send payments to them, be aware of getting the payment to them at a time they are open, before the due date.
If you set up an auto-pay on the credit card bank’s website, they will generally consider the payment on time, even if it’s scheduled for the weekend. But if you do that, please make sure you look at your statement monthly. If someone makes a fraudulent charge, you only get so long to contest it, and “my bill was on auto pay so I didn’t look at the statement” is not a valid excuse.
American here. Not only do I use credit cards for all of my purchases (and pay them off every month, so no debt builds up), but I am finding it increasingly hard to use cash on a daily basis. I used to prefer cash, especially on trips, as a way to control spending when needing to stick to a budget. But now so many places here have stopped taking cash altogether, or shuffle cash purchases off to a separate process which takes longer. I still carry cash, but find I rarely use it,
But all the different types of electronic payments now are confusing. I recall getting stuck at an airport once, and sitting near a place that had food for a few hours. They took cash, credit, and Google Pay, but not Apple Pay. I was amazed by the number of people who end up walking away when they realized that, and who didn’t have an alternate way to pay.
A community like this will get people coming for answers to basic questions like “How do credit cards work” and “should I get a loan or a lease on my car”. Having a wiki provides a set place we can point to that has consistent answers to those basic questions, so they’re not answered differently every time they’re asked.
I think what’s important is to have content that helps people become financially literate, no matter where they are starting from. In the US at least, high schools are in the midst of curriculum battles over social issues, so that the basic concepts of financial literacy rarely get covered.
So, some people here might need help figuring out the optimal investment balance in their after-tax portfolios, while others may need help making a basic budget and figuring out how to pay down their student loans. We need to make room for all of those.
If we have the capability to start a Wiki, it should have some basic topics there that most people encounter at one point or another. How loans work, how insurance works, what’s the process to buy a car or a house, how to budget to pay off high interest debt. A lot of this advice is region-specific.
It’s because when you first buy the thing, you don’t want to get rid of the box right away, in case you need to RMA it. So it gets put in the pile along with the rest of the boxes. Then you’re in the same place for years and the pile gets bigger.
I do a decent job with culling the boxes, and even toss obsolete tech now and then, but I have been hoarding hard drives for 30 years. It seems more trouble to securely dispose of them than to just let them pile up. I even still have IDE drives and am not quite sure whether I have an adaptor that can read them. But I can’t throw them out, because I don’t know if I have sensitive info on them.
That’s basically a lease. Although it might not be a bad idea to lease an EV. It’s basically a battery with wheels. The battery will die someday, and when it does you may be better off getting a newer car with newer tech vs. replacing the battery in your older one.