New lease contract alienates residents

A new, lengthy set of lease guidelines for properties in Rocky Ridge Estates in Middle Smithfield Township have caused a rift between a group of residents and the relatively new owners.While the owners insist the new 44-paged lease contract distributed to the residents of the mobile home park are being misinterpreted by residents, about 70 percent of residents in the 90-home private community did not return a signed agreement to the new rules and regulations by the June 1 deadline. [...]

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East Stroudsburg basketball league player went pro

Robin Smith couldn’t be more proud of one of her prized basketball players at the Turning the Hearts Basketball League which meets at Dansbury Park in East Stroudsburg.She said the program has proven to change the hearts with one of its own, former Effort resident Xavier Munford who just signed a multi-year contract with the Memphis Grizzlies of the NBA. Although he lived in Effort, Munford attended St. Benedict's prep school in Newark, N.J. “We’re [...]

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For millennials, splitting the bill with the Venmo app

(TNS)—Q: What is Venmo? College kids seem to use the word as a verb, as in "Can you Venmo me?"A: Venmo is an app. When users download it, they can then link a bank account and/or credit card and use it to send money to other Venmo users through their smartphone or computer at venmo.com. Sending money from a linked bank account is free; sending money from a linked credit card triggers a 3 percent charge.Millennials use the app as a [...]

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Clean energy research pursued at Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Representatives of nine universities and the National Energy Technology Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy met at Penn State to kick off the University Coalition for Fossil Energy Research (UCFER), a six-year program funded by NETL for $20 million that will explore a broad range of research in coal, natural gas and oil including carbon dioxide capture, storage and use."This is a great time for Penn State," said Neil Sharkey, vice president [...]

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Seven Big Investment Mistakes You’re Probably Making

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.

-Charlie Munger

You don’t have to be incredibly smart to be a good investor. The steps you need to take to invest well are actually fairly simple.

In fact, one of the most powerful things you can do to get ahead is simply avoid making big mistakes. Good investing is less about making great investments and more about not doing the things that trip up most people.

Here are seven of the biggest, most common investment mistakes people make, and what you can do to avoid them.

Mistake No. 1: Not Saving Enough

While the sexier aspects of investing get most of the press, there’s no part of your investment plan that’s even remotely as important as your savings rate.

Jumping from a 5% savings rate to 10% can cut 15 years off your working life. Bump it up to 20% and that’s another 14 years sooner you’ll be free.

There’s no other investment decision that has that kind of impact.

Unfortunately, most people aren’t saving enough. The average U.S. citizen saves about 5.4% of his or her monthly income, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Even assuming all of that money is going toward retirement (unlikely), that translates to a 66-year working career.

So before you even think about anything else, make sure you’re either already saving enough or you have a plan to get there over time.

Mistake No. 2: Not Automating Your Savings

If your savings aren’t happening automatically, you likely aren’t saving enough, and you probably feel more stressed about it than you should.

Automating your savings does two huge things for you:

1. It ensures that you’re consistently meeting your savings goals, month after month.
2. It allows you to stop stressing about how you spend the rest of your money, since you know your savings goals are already handled.

You can automate savings to your 401(k) or other company plan through payroll deductions. And you can automate savings to an IRA or other investment account by linking it to your checking account.

Either way, that automation will ensure that you stick to your plan every single month.

Mistake No. 3: Leaving Free Money on the Table

You’ve undoubtedly heard this one before, so I’ll keep it short: If you’re not taking full advantage of your 401(k) employer match, you’re giving away free money that you’ll never have the chance to get back.

If your workplace matches the first 6% of your 401(k) contributions, make sure you’re contributing at least 6%. If they’ll match up to 10%? Find a way to hit that 10%, and congratulate yourself on the raise you just earned.

• Related: How to Choose Investments in Your 401(k)

Mistake No. 4: Paying Too Much

There’s an easy way to predict how well an investment will perform going forward, and you don’t need a Ph.D in finance to do it.

All you have to do is look at the price.

Research has shown that cost is the single best predictor of future investment performance. The less an investment costs, the more likely it is to produce positive returns.

Unfortunately, most investors have no idea how much they’re actually paying, because most of the fees are pretty well hidden. Management fees, trading fees, taxes, and the like are all either automatically deducted from your investment account or are only charged long after they’re incurred, meaning that you almost never see a bill for the investment decisions you’re making.

That makes it easy for financial companies to charge more than they should. And every extra dollar they charge is a dollar that can’t be used towards your biggest goals.

Minimize your fees and you’ll be well on your way to investment success.

Mistake No. 5: Investing Too Aggressively

When the stock market is going up, as it has for the last seven-plus years, there’s a strong urge to invest more aggressively than you otherwise would.

In fact, there’s research showing that investors tend to put their money into investments that have performed well recently. Unfortunately, that same research shows that, in most cases, those same investments end up under-performing going forward.

I have no idea what the stock market will do in the near future (no one does), but I do know that being too heavily invested in stocks has some big potential negative consequences:

1. If you will need the money relatively soon, a big loss can be devastating.
2. Even if you don’t need the money for a long time, a big loss can scare you away from investing in the future, which can have a negative impact on your ability to build wealth and eventually retire.

In other words, now is a good time to re-evaluate your investments and decide whether you’re investing too aggressively. A good rule of thumb is to expect that you could lose up to 50% of the money you have in stocks in any given year.

If you’re comfortable with that given your current investment plan, great! If not, it might be worth getting a little more conservative.

Mistake No. 6: Investing Too Conservatively

On the flip side, many people don’t have enough money in the stock market.

A recent study showed that only 55% of adults in the U.S. owned any stocks at all. That number is even lower for younger investors.

While the stock market carries plenty of risk in the short term, it’s also one of the best ways to grow your wealth over the long term. Without the returns it provides, you’ll be hard-pressed to save enough to eventually be financially independent.

And the truth is that over the long term, the stock market has always gone up. While that doesn’t guarantee anything where the future is concerned, it does mean that the odds are in your favor if your time horizon is long enough.

Mistake No. 7: Bailing Out

For indeed, the investor’s chief problem—and even his worst enemy—is likely to be himself.

-Benjamin Graham

Investing is hard. Not because it’s complicated (it’s not), or because you need a financial degree to do it right (you don’t).

It’s hard because it’s emotional and because there’s a lot you can’t control.

No matter what you do, you can’t force the stock market to keep going up. It will fall, sometimes significantly, and your account balance will drop in the process.

That’s not easy to watch. It’s not easy to see the money you’ve worked so hard to save, the money you’re relying on to fund your future goals, disappear so quickly.

In those moments, the urge is to “do something.” You want to protect your savings, so you spring into action. You may not know exactly what to do, but you can’t just sit back and watch your money go away, right?

The hard truth is that you can’t protect your money at all times. But you can protect it over the long term by choosing a plan and sticking to it, even when that’s hard to do.

In almost every single case, the best thing you can do when the stock market is falling is nothing.

Selling out and waiting until it’s “safe” to get back in is one of the great destroyers of wealth. It may feel like the right decision at the time, but it will almost certainly lead to you having much less money in the end.

Pick an investment plan you feel good about and stick with it through thick and thin. If you can do that consistently, you will be happy with the results.

Matt Becker is a fee-only financial planner and the founder of Mom and Dad Money, where he helps new parents take control of their money so they can take care of their families. His free book, The New Family Financial Road Map, guides parents through the all most important financial decisions that come with starting a family.

Related Articles:

• 10 Things You Need to Do Before You Start Investing
• The $15 Retirement Plan
• 20 Common Investment Mistakes and Five Simple Steps to Avoid Them

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6 Companies Where You Can Work Your Way Up To a Six-Figure Job

Many employees stay at their companies less than five years before hopping over to a new job somewhere else. In 2014, the median job tenure was 4.6 years, reported the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But there’s still some truth to that advice your parents gave you growing up: Work hard, put in the time and your company will reward you.

Here are six companies where you can start at the bottom and wind up making six figures. They’re known for promoting from within, providing training and development opportunities for their employees and helping their most dedicated workers rise through the ranks.

1. Whole Foods

Photo Source: Whole Foods

The natural foods grocery store has made it onto Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” every year since the list began in 1998, in large part due to the company culture.

The company says there are “countless” stories of people who started off bagging groceries and stocking shelves and who are now in leadership positions. Store managers can make more than $100,000.

“We believe that (employees’) happiness and health is essential, which is why we invest in their personal and professional growth,” said Whole Foods co-CEO Walter Robb on the company’s website.

“We encourage team members to seek out opportunities that fulfill their deeper purpose and celebrate individual creativity and potential.”

2. Chipotle

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Start as an entry-level crew member at fast-casual restaurant chain Chipotle and you’ll make $28,000 per year.

But stick around long enough and go through the company’s restaurateur program, and you’ll make $125,000 a year, plus get some pretty sweet benefits like a company car, tuition reimbursement and stock privileges.

Plus, each time a restaurateur trains another crew member to become a general manager, they get $10,000.

That’s because co-CEO Monty Moran found the best performing Chipotle locations had a manager who worked his or her way up through the ranks from the very bottom.

Moran hoped to keep quality employees at the restaurant level, so they would focus on making individual stores great and train the people around them.

“The foundation of our people culture, on which everything else stands, is the concept that each person at Chipotle will be rewarded based on their ability to make the people around them better,” Moran told Quartz.

3. Costco

Photo Source: Min-Jung Kim under Creative Commons

Costco is well known for its “promote from within” company culture. The average Costco manager started out pushing shopping carts in the parking lot when they were 19 or 20 years old, according to Jim Sinegal, Costco’s co-founder.

Costco warehouse managers earn between $122,204 and $147,411, according to Glassdoor, which asks current and former employees to share salary information anonymously.

“We would never dream of hiring a manager for one of our Costcos from outside the company,” Sinegal said in an interview with The Motley Fool, a long-term investing website. “It has to be somebody who has worked their way up in our system.”

Plus, the company is super keen on work-life balance and allowing employees to pursue their education while they’re working.

Maybe you don’t want to manage a Costco, but you want to become a pharmacist. The company will keep you on while you go to school, then promote you to pharmacy manager, Sinegal said.

4. Trader Joe’s

Photo Source: Phillip Pessar under Creative Commons

Three-quarters of store leaders, called Mates, started at the bottom of the food chain (no pun intended), according to the grocery store’s website.

A step above Mates are Captains, or Trader Joe’s store managers, who are promoted exclusively from within.

“Promotions are performance based, which means your passion and dedication determines your growth,” according to the Trader Joe’s website.

The average store manager at Trader Joe’s makes between $92,000 and $108,000, according to Glassdoor.

The company also contributes 15.4% of employees’ gross income to tax-deferred retirement accounts.

5. Procter & Gamble

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Procter & Gamble, the manufacturer of a wide array of household and personal care products, is renowned for its internal hiring practices.

The company, which was founded in 1837, is headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, but has locations all over the world and hundreds of careers ranging from engineering to information technology to branding to market analysis.

“Most of our people start at an entry level and then progress and prosper throughout the organization,” according to the P&G website. “This drives a culture of coaching, challenging and shaping our people into P&G leaders of today and tomorrow.”

If you make it to the director level, you can make over $200,000, according to Glassdoor.

The company says it hires the person, not the position, which means you can move around to various roles depending on your interests and talents.

P&G also says it tries to build leaders in every facet of the business and in every region of the country by giving them early, meaningful responsibilities.

6. Startups

Photo Source: Eric Bailey under Creative Commons

Though they’re a bit risky — something like 90% of them fail — if you get in with a successful startup at the beginning, you can wind up making a pretty awesome salary if the company takes off.

Think about it: If you’re one of the first people working 10-12 hour days with the company’s founder in his or her garage, you’ll likely be rewarded handsomely if business starts booming or if another company acquires the business.

Plus, you’ll get intense hands-on experience, likely from nearly every facet of the business. Should you ever decide to leave the startup, that’ll make you more marketable in the corporate world and could land you a bigger paycheck.

An example: When ad tech company MoPub was acquired by Twitter in 2013, 36 of its 100 employees became millionaires.

Your Turn: Have you worked your way up from an entry-level role in your company?

Sarah Kuta is an education reporter in Boulder, Colorado, with a penchant for weekend thrifting, furniture refurbishment and good deals. Find her on Twitter: @sarahkuta.

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