When it comes to saving money and protecting your finances, it’s often the preventative steps that you take which have a huge effect on how your finances ultimately turn out. This is especially true when it comes to potential and unexpected disasters.
While most financial experts give good advice on how to prepare a basic emergency […]

“Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.” - Frank Lloyd Wright

I received an email that asked what it takes to get out of debt. I don’t think there is an easy cookie cutter answer to this. Yes, it means spending less than you’re making and making payments toward the debt. That’s the simple answer, but what I’ve found is that for the majority of those […]

Welcome to the second installment of Funny Money Friday - true money related stories. If you come across more funny money stories, be sure to leave a comment or trackback to share with others.
$68 Million Scammed From IRS By Inmates - What are they going to do? Put them in jail?
$175 A Pound Coffee […]

“One of the reasons the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the middle class struggles in debt is because the subject of money is taught at home, not at school.” - Robert Kiyosaki

I did a challenge in 2005 where I tried to turn $20 into $5,000 in 6 months in my spare time. Since this generated quite a bit of interest and a number of others joined in with their own challenges, we’re doing it again this year.
For me, it’s a wonderful way for me not […]

I was thinking the other day that while people often talk about the best investments out there, rarely do they talk about the worst investments you can make. It’s as if there is an assumption that everyone will magically know a bad investment when it appears. While common sense can go a long way in […]

If you are into second hand store shopping (if you aren’t because you don’t think anything decent would be there and you haven’t been to one in awhile, you may want to take a trip again. The local one by my house in the US is quite nice - nothing like the image I has […]

For those who do their own stock trading, there is a new low cost trader in town that might be worth checking out: TradeKing.com:
We don’t have a pricing structure, we have a price.
For stock trades, we charge $4.95 per trade. For option trades, we charge $4.95 per trade, plus 65 cents per contract. That’s it.
At […]

I got about 40 fixed price listings up and we’ll see how they do over the next week. Three have already sold, so let’s hope that trend continues. I’m not completely done with them, however. I listed an bunch without description’s so I need to go back and fill that information in. For the true […]

I hate it when eBay does this - they announce their discounts for listing items a few hours before the day they take place. Of course they do it for an obvious reason - if they announced it any farther ahead, people would just wait until that day to list all their items. So I […]

“You have to think outside of conventional wisdom to break through your debt.” - Dave Hoffman

I wrote back on the 20th about our Internet connection finally being fixed after getting the run around for months. I’m happy to report we haven’t had any problems since then with the connection and my wife had a little chat with a representative from the phone company. It resulted in 3 free months (about […]

It’s another Monday which means carnival time:
The Carnival of Debt Reduction is being held at Savvy Saver this week.
The Carnival of Personal Finance is being held at Mighty Bargain Hunter.
Multiple Mentality is hosting this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists
The Festival of Frugality has been put together by Free Money Finance this week.
The second […]

It’s not often that I get to review books these days - most of the time when publicists find out I’m in Japan it’s no longer worth it for them to send me a book to review, but today I received an advance copy of Jane Bryant Quinn’s book Smart and Simple Financial Strategies for […]

The problem that most people have with saving money is that the go about it all wrong and because they do so, their attempts are bound to fail. This in turn places the image that saving money is not fun and the circle continues without any progress being made.
While I’ve stated that saving money is […]

I was strolling about the other day (I like strolling about - helps clear my head and refresh me from spending too much time in front of the computer) and there were a lot of people out walking their dogs. For some reason I started to pay attention to the way that people walked their […]

I like it when I can dream a bit like this. While the numbers are taken completely out of context with our site being as small as it is compared to the biggies, I read the following at Money.com
Based on recent high-profile Web content deals, the value of a unique monthly Web site visitor currently […]

I came across and interesting article about the dark side of gift cards and how they are being used by criminal elements to launder money. These aren’t the store brand gift cards, bur the credit card bank affiliated gift cards that can be reloaded with money at any ATM. The problem is that there is […]

I think it’s important to bring the lighter side of money out whenever possible so I’m going to begin a weekly “funny money” section. Basically, it’ll be random strange news items I find each week that have a money theme. Hopefully they will bring you all some laughs:
Polite Bank Robber Waits To Get Arrested
School Receives […]