Personal Finance Advice

One of the subjects I’ve written about in the past is what a waste of money bottle water is. I came across this video that highlights how many of us have accepted what the advertisers say about bottled water so that many now assume that bottled water is better than tap water when in reality [...]

Most people don’t like to think about death and for that reason many more people don’t take the necessary legal steps that they should to ensure their wishes are carried out when they die. Furthermore, not taking the proper legal steps will mean that you pass along a lot more headaches to the ones that [...]

People do get creative when it comes to figuring out how they are going to survive during retirement, including this jail before Social Security kicks in plan. Placing yourself in jail for 3 years until your Social Security checks begin to get distributed is certainly not a financial plan that I would recommend [...]

When it comes to personal finance, there is usually a great deal of discussion on the high rates of interest charged by credit card companies. What credit card companies charge, however, does not come close to what the payday loan companies charge (this is in no way to excuse credit card companies for charging outrageous [...]

I received this email yesterday asking me the following question:
I would like to start blogging to create passive income. How do you go about doing that?
I think there is a big misconception about passive income and blogging (or creating a websites). There seems to be the assumption that since anything written on the Internet can [...]

If you are planning on making a big purchase at Best Buy, you can get a significant discount on that purchase by playing the McDonald’s Monopoly game and getting Best Buy Bucks. There is no need to buy McDonald’s food to do so. There is a good article on how to do this and what [...]

I was fooling around looking at photos at local live when I came across this quite interesting photo which actually caught a small plane flying over Bill Gate’s house (click on the photo to enlarge):

1. Points to Bill Gates house
2. Points out the plane caught in the photo
What are the chances? Catching a plane for [...]

For those that have an interest in why we make the financial decisions that we do, an interesting article on neuro-economics was recently published in the TimesOnline that is definitely worth a read:
Imagine that you are sitting next to a complete stranger who has been given £10 to share between the two of you. He [...]

If you’re one of the 9.6 million people that filed an extension for filing your taxes and have been procrastinating, you have a week before they absolutely have to be turned in. Monday October 16 is the deadline for all those that filed an extension to submit their Federal taxes. It is still possible to [...]

One of the difficult decisions when trying to save money is whether or not to buy organic since organic foods still tend to be more expensive than non organic foods. One way to balance the need to save money and place healthy food on your table is to know which non organic foods have the [...]

A bit of humor for the weekend in a clever Thai bank commercial of what horrors can happen if you forget to pay your bills…

There is a new study out of Stanford University that has basically turned the assumption of compulsive shopping disorder (also called compulsive buying disorder and Oniomania) on its head. It was assumed that this was a disorder mainly afflicting women, but the new study throws that assumption out the window with it being a problem [...]

For those looking for the easiest way to fold a t-shirt perfectly every time, here it is. If I can do this, absolutely anyone can. My wife taught me this (she’s from Japan) when she got tired of my folded t-shirts of all shapes and sizes. Enjoy and pass along!

I mentioned in the previous article that I am always on the search for hidden fees since these are the ones that come back to bite people’s budget because the true cost usually was never considered. There are a surprising number of these hidden costs and a lot of the products we purchase have hidden [...]

I’ve mentioned on several ocassions that I’m always on the outlook for hidden costs because these are expenses that most people never realize are costing them money. USAToday has a new one that makes perfect sense, but which I hadn’t really thought about before seeing it - bad roads cost you money:
Crumbling roads and highways [...]

It certainly was an interesting month with both good and bad news. The bad news was that our adsense revenue fell dramatically this month to a tune of over $15 a day. Ouch! I think this is the first time that adsense daily average revenue has fallen for us and I’m not exactly sure what [...]

Most people know that if you sign up through a friend’s referral you can receive a $25 bonus when making an initial deposit of $250 when opening a new ING account. Both Nate and I used our invites up long ago, as well as going through all our family member’s invites, so when I received [...]