Personal Finance Advice

One of the most important life lessons that we can all learn is to seriously listen to and consider the advice from those who have more experience than we do. When it comes to the end of our life, most of us are going to have some regrets. A nurse, Bronnie Ware, who spent years tending to patients that were living the last weeks of their lives recently came out with a book titled The Top Five [...]

We called our neighbor’s friend to take a look at our furnace. He pulled the whole thing apart, scattering pieces across my living room floor. I eyed him while making dinner in the kitchen, clutching a glass of cheap Merlot, praying his work wouldn’t exceed the unspoken $200 limit I’d placed on it. Thirty minutes later, he left to purchase parts. Thirty minutes after that, he returned to [...]

I was reading my Cosmopolitan magazine… er, um, I mean, I was reading a respectable magazine, like, Smart Money. Yeah. Smart Money. Anyway, in Cosmo - er, Smart Money - they share money saving tips each month. Most stuff is common sense like keeping your tires inflated to save gas or telling you to shop around for travel deals, but this month they recommended a website called Decide.com. [...]

When I first started embracing frugality, I wasn't thrilled with the process. It all seemed so limiting, somehow. I didn't enjoy combing sales flyers and planting my own gardens. I wasn't thrilled about hanging my clothes out on the line or trying to find yet another way to re-purpose a glass jar. It seemed that I was doomed to failure. But then I started to look at frugality as a challenge [...]

Despite the herculean effort of my husband's cousin, our furnace is still broken. Our neighbor offered his space heaters to help hobble through the cold evenings, but my electric bill will be screaming at the end of the month if this isn't fixed soon. Our neighbor recommended his friend to fix the furnace and we are waiting for a return call. I have a plan of action. If the heater fix is l [...]

Several months ago I wrote a post about what traveling while broke taught me about finance. Now, while I certainly don't travel five-star, first-class all of the time, I've reached a point in my life where I can travel comfortably. I no longer have to sleep in a hostel and wait tables in a bar for a week to get enough cash to move on to my next destination. You wouldn't think that you'd lea [...]

We often think of hobbies as expensive, and some are. If you want to raise horses, collect antique cars, take up drag racing, or own your own plane to indulge your passion for flying, you're going to pay a lot of money. However, there are plenty of hobbies available that are free or inexpensive. With almost any hobby, there are ways to make it less expensive. You can shop the used market, borr [...]

We are crossing our fingers (and counting on) a nice return this year. We didn't make any adjustments to our withholdings last year because we weren't sure about what would change this year and we wanted to finish out the tax year to get an idea of how much we should adjust for 2012. My office distributed our tax forms on Friday and I opened mine to get a cursory look over the numbers. I star [...]

I spent last week in Las Vegas visiting with an old friend. Besides catching up, I also planned to visit a number of timeshare presentations to write a series about what you can expect if you attend the timeshare presentations to get the freebies and the type of manipulation that occurs (and in the process I probably became the first person in history that was actually turned away from a times [...]

You are using far too much of far too many things and you probably don't even realize it. Most of it is simply out of habit although a good portion of it has it's roots in commercials. No matter what the cause, becoming aware that you may be needlessly wasting money by using too much gives you the opportunity to examine the way you currently use things and see if you can get the results you wa [...]