Goal Seek is a really useful and easy function to use in Excel, but a surprising number of people aren’t aware of it. If you’re a regular spreadsheet user and have ever run into a situation where you wanted to figure out what number to “back into” to get a result you want, or you have a hairy equation that you don’t want to toy with, using Goal Seek is a much easier approach than using trial-and-error. Here’s a simple tutorial on how to use Goal Seek example using the famous CAGR formula.

CAGR, or compound annual growth rate, is one way to measure your annualized return given an initial amount, and ending amount, and a period of time. As regular readers might recall, the formula goes like this:

If you wanted to put this into an Excel spreadsheet, it might look like what’s below (taken from the first part of my CAGR excel spreadsheet) (click to enlarge):

It’s pretty straightforward. Initial amount, ending amount, and # of years are all numbers you input, and CAGR is the equation above written for Excel (e.g. taking the proper cells as inputs).

But what if instead of calculating CAGR, you wanted to calculate the number of years it would take you to get to a certain return, given an initial amount and ending amount?

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I’ve read a few posts over the last few months of people who could really use a helping hand, like this one in which a single mom with three children suddenly found herself losing her mother to cancer, being diagnosed with cancer herself, and unable to make ends meet.

Yesterday, I read about a non-profit charity called Modest Needs that just might be able to help those like her called.

Modest Needs was recently featured in the Today Show and the Oregonian and is a non-profit specifically created to reach out to hard-working individuals and families who suddenly find themselves faced with small, emergency expenses that they have no way to afford on their own.

Modest Needs gives out small donations, not loans, to those who are really in need and for many of whom that small amount means the difference between being able to climb out of their current situation or to fall into “the cascade effect of the cycle of poverty” as the founder, Keith Taylor, describes it. They seem to be rigorous in their selection process as well, requiring documentation and an explanation of why the money’s needed. Think of it like Prosper.com, only for donations instead of loans.

Here are two stories from the article above that Modest Needs has helped:

Recently a woman living in a small Oregon town fell behind on her rent and car payments. She had managed to support two children and graduate from a two-year massage therapy program. Confident that she’d soon have a job, she asked Modest Needs for $595 to catch up on her car payments, pay her rent and make small payments on other debts.

[One request] came from an older couple living near Vancouver, Wash. With only two more mortgage payments left before they would own their own home, the husband fell ill. The couple spent the money designated to pay off their house on medicine instead. Modest Needs donors met the couple’s request for $500.

Obviously, Modest Needs isn’t meant to provide a long-term solution, but it could be of great benefit to some, especially those facing the expenses of a sudden and serious illness. Their average grant size is $380 and 65% of those who benefit from a donation from Modest Needs become contributors.

So, please pass this info to anyone you might know who could use their services and help get the word out on this unique organization. And if you have a few dollars to spare, why not check out what they do?

Today, I sold off my position in ICF. I purchased my shares a more than a month ago at $96.35 and sold them at $102.40 for a gain after fees of 6.26%. Because I have some short-term capital-loss carryovers from way back when, I don’t expect to incur any capital gains taxes on this transaction.

What made me decide to sell now?

I had originally wanted to invest in REITs in order to diversify my investments (as mentioned previosly, we don’t own any property at all) and thought that by investing in commercial real rather than residential estate and dollar-cost averaging into an index, I’d addressed the riskiest aspect of REIT investing. But shortly writing about my investment, I was advised in a comment in the same post by a reader and more experienced value investor that a REIT index might not be the best way to go at this time.

That prompted me to delve much deeper into understanding REITs (due diligence I should have done earlier), because, as I’ve said many times before, I set up this site in large part to learn more about investing.

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I woke up yesterday to discover that my recent purchase of ICF, a real estate ETF, had shot up by 4% due to Blackstone Group’s purchase of Equity Office Properties Trust (EOP) for $36B, including $15B in debt in the largest private-equity deal, ever. Since EOP is a major component of the 31 REITs that comprises ICF, it, along with most other REIT ETFs, went up thanks to the announcement of the deal.

Being relatively new to making my own investment choices, I find it sort of astounding that two of my previous choices have also benefited from ongoing industry consolidation as well. Just a couple of months ago, Smithfield Foods (SFD) announced it was purchasing Premium Standard Farms (PORK), a purchase I’d made last year and had concluded I’d bought at too high a price.

The announcement allowed me to exit my position gracefully and with a profit. Nucor (NUE) has also indirectly benefited from all the M&A activity within the steel sector. I can’t point to a hard figure for how much its stock price increase has been driven by this activity, but certainly it seems anytime there’s speculation, NUE shoots up at least a few percentage points that day.

I don’t have any illusions of being a prescient stock picker. And the general consensus is that there are few if any value purchases to be made in the market these days.

So what gives?

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“Spend less than you earn.” “Watch out for those credit cards.” “Pay down that debt.” “Invest in low-cost index funds.” You’ve heard it all before. Is that all there is to personal finance?

In this week of Thanksgiving, I want to share an eye-opening and humbling experience I had recently. During one of my recent volunteering stints, I chanced to sit in on a conversation between two HIV-positive, gay men, one a personal finance counselor and one a student, which made me realize that the world of “personal finance” is enormous, and that most of us who are blogging are only addressing the needs of a small group of people.

The student (who I’d guess was about my age) had been on Social Security Disability Insuance (SSDI) for a year or two, living off of about $13K a year while he learned to manage his illness. He was trying to move off of SSDI by becoming gainfully employed as an independent repairman. He had made some bad choices earlier in life, as he described it, that had led him to almost hit rock bottom. Not so long ago, he had been homeless, had declared personal bankruptcy, and had been cutoff from his family since he’d come out, all on top of being diagnosed as HIV-positive. That diagnosis itself was mentally crippling because every time he looked “down the road”, he explained that the lingering question of “whether he’d even be here” always paralyzed his decisionmaking abilities.

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