About Finantage

Regardless of what some "gurus" may lead you to think, personal finance is not a subject that can be summed up in a '5 step process' or be discussed in detail with a simple guide. The goal of Finantage is to take complicated personal finance topics and make them easier to understand and more accessible. I do this through posting informative articles and creating tools that help you plan and help you educate yourself. I will never try to sell you on the one true solution for all of your personal finance problems, because there simply isn't a "one size fits all" solution for personal finance issues.

As you've probably noticed by browsing this site, my name is Edwin Ivanauskas. I have nothing to hide because everything provided on this site is meant to give you real value. This isn't some website set up to post a few low quality articles in hopes of getting some search traffic to click on ads. My goal is to not only expand my own knowledge of the subject but also to provoke thoughtful conversations about personal finance to inform and educate people on a topic I find both interesting and essential.

Background and qualifications

I hold a degree in Marketing and one in Economics, both from the University of Utah. This gives me a very solid foundation for exploring personal finance and diverse insights on the topic. Along with that I have the research skills and personal interest to get as in depth into a subject as possible.

If you want to find out why I chose the topic of personal finance, you can find my explanation about why I chose personal finance here.

My views and philosophy

When writing, it's impossible to cover everything about a subject without making an article into a long and boring academic paper. So I'd like to discuss some general thoughts I have which will be relevant to anything I write, but rather than writing them into an article in an attempt to be thorough, I will refer back to this.

Change - I guarantee that what I've said will change at some point. Also, I acknowledge that I don't know everything, or anywhere near everything. So as new information comes forth, times change, or even I change, my views on these subjects will change. If you find a financial "guru" telling you that they give the same advice today as they did 30 years ago, run. If someone has been in a field for that long and tells you they haven't changed their opinion, they may as well be telling you they don't care about new information regardless of how important it is.

These changes won't be anything dramatic but something similar to the growth of scientific knowledge. When a theory is established (like Physics) it does not get disproven overnight, it gets added to. New information changes the theory in more specific ways rather than totally overriding it.

It is naïve to think there is one simple answer to a complicated question and nearly all questions are complicated. Sometimes I may speak in absolute terms like "you should not get a credit card", this is never truly absolute. No one should ever mistake my concise writing with the use of absolute terms as an automatic refusal to look beyond it.

*I want to repeat that I am not a certified financial advisor. Advice I publish on this website is meant as to be all-purpose and may not be relevant to any individual situation. I strive to provide value, but anything published here should not be used as in depth analysis of your own situation. For that please see an independent and certified professional. I am not liable for any actions you take after reading content on this site.