Thinking vs. Action

This weekend over at The Simple Dollar, there was a post by Trent Hamm called “Don’t Just Know, Do.” The idea of this post is that it really doesn’t matter how much knowledge you have unless you take action. Gathering great ideas will never help you unless you do something about those ideas.

If you’ve been reading Ironclad Finances, you know our goal is to provide ideas to readers about personal finance. Sometimes we write about our own knowledge, coming from our experience working in financial planning. Other times we pass on knowledge from others. Have you found any ideas that you think useful? We hope so. Have you implemented any of those ideas in your own life?

As our disclaimer says, you have to use your own judgment as to whether any idea you find here is right for your own life. But we hope that if you have found something useful, you don’t just think about it, you act on that idea. Even if it doesn’t end up helping you in the long run, at least you tried and you can stop thinking about it.

From The Simple Dollar:

Changing your life comes from action, not from just thinking about it. You might know exactly what you need to do. You might even think of those actions as common sense. Still, if you’re not actually doing those things, nothing is ever going to really change in your life.

 

One Year Anniversary

It’s hard to believe, but our first post on Ironclad Finances was one year ago tomorrow. When we first decided to start this blog, we couldn’t predict what would happen. After kicking around the idea for months, we finally decided it was what we wanted to do. We set a goal of making our first post in July 2010 and then at least once a week. Though we have taken a few vacations, we’ve met our goal, and we’re proud of creating Ironclad Finances and keeping up with it.

 

For the most part, we’ve enjoyed the work, Dawn as writer, Keith as editor. Though, as anyone out there who writes for a blog (or anything else) likely knows, sometimes you would rather be doing anything else! We feel like we’ve made progress in the writing as far as personality; we know our early posts were rather dry! While we still have a long way to go, we look forward to continuing what we’ve started.

 

We wanted to thank all of our readers! We hope you’ve found something useful in our posts that you’ve been able to apply to your life. A special thanks to our clients who have been following us. We appreciate the support!

 

Also, thanks to all the other blogs writers that have shown interest in Ironclad Finances, especially Len at Len Penzo dot Com. We appreciate the support and the readers you’ve sent our way!

 

So, to wrap up our one year anniversary post, we wanted to share with you our favorite series. It also appears to be our readers’ favorite series, since we have the most views on the following pages! It’s our All Your Worth series that we began posting in January 2011.

 

Book Recommendation: All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan by Elizabeth Warren & Amelia Warren Tyagi

 

All Your Worth: The Balanced Money Formula

All Your Worth: Making Adjustments

All Your Worth: Making Adjustments to “Savings”

If you haven’t read this series yet, please check it out. We had a great time writing it, and can’t recommend that book enough!

 

We’d love to hear from you! Let us know what you thought of Ironclad Finances in the past year, and if you have anything you’d like to read about this upcoming year!

 

The Holidays

We just wanted to say that we would be taking the next couple of weeks off for a holiday break. We hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Expect our next post on January 3, 2011!

 

Hello!

Hey, welcome to Ironclad Finances! We just wanted to introduce ourselves on our very first blog post.

Ironclad Finances is made up of two (amateur) bloggers who have many years of experience working in the financial services industry. We’re a father/daughter team, and while still inexperienced at blogging, it was a mutual decision to enter this new world (to us) where we hope to be able to share our knowledge to help as many people as we can better themselves financially.

Keith is the one with the most experience. He has several certifications in the industry, including a CFP™, and has the technical knowledge we hope to share with readers. Dawn has a degree in economics and has learned a lot in her years in the business, and she’s still learning (from the best!). She is the writing half of the team.

We’re located in Michigan in a small city called Northville where we own a personal financial planning firm.

We’ll be posting to Ironclad Finance every Monday, and next week we’ll start with some financial basics.

Please contact us with any comments, questions, or suggestions to make our blog better. Also, let us know if there is a specific financial topic you’d like to see us write about. We’d love to hear from you!