Personal Finance Advice

Although we are financially secure and tend to make wise decisions regarding our finances, we still screw up sometimes and do things that we later regret. We’re human. However, while we may have regrets I choose to look at them as learning opportunities. Whatever we regret from this past year is something that can be [...]

As the old year draws to a close and a new year is about to dawn, I like to take a few moments to look back on the past year and to reflect on what went right and what went wrong, how things have changed and whether those changes were for the good. I [...]

In my neighborhood, all of the houses have two car garages. What amazes me is how few people use their garages for their intended purpose. When I go out for a run, I see so many garage doors open and the garages are full of stuff, not cars. There is barely room to walk in [...]

Sometimes it seems like a minor miracle if you can make it from the airport doors to your seat on the plane without being searched, patted down, waiting in an exorbitantly long line, having your gate changed, being charged a fee, or a host of other annoyances. There are many things at the airport that [...]

Weekend reading is a round-up of personal finance and money related stories that caught the eye of our forum members this week:

2009: A year of Economic Hell
Truck and SUV sales rising, hybrid sales fall as gas prices drop
The Rise of the Four-Day Work Week?
New Capitalism: Overvalued assets must not be allowed [...]

Eating out used to be one of my favorite things to do. I loved to relax and be served great food with a minimum of effort on my part.
This was before my husband and I implemented a budget, tracked our spending and were shocked at what we spent on restaurants. We didn’t even remember [...]

Before the days of the Internet, I never really enjoyed shopping for the sake of shopping, especially after the open air “shopping centers” of my youth gave way to the enclosed, artificially lit “shopping malls” of my teenage and early adult years. Shopping meant that I had to get into a car and drive [...]

Last week I was out walking my dog on trash day. As I was walking past my neighbor’s trash heap (I say heap because they always have more trash than will fit in the trash can and they just pile it up on the road), I noticed a cute wire basket that was decorated with [...]

In my youth, I liked to live life well and, admittedly, to excess. My friends and I ate out often and we did not limit ourselves to salad and sparkling water. We enjoyed fine meals that we could not afford and the full range of alcoholic beverages that the world’s distilleries, wineries and [...]

Lately I’ve noticed that I have become quite the potty mouth. I wasn’t always this way. In fact, I didn’t even learn any good swear words until I was in college and my roommate taught me all she knew. (Yes, I led a very sheltered life.) Unfortunately, I’ve taken her teachings to a new extreme [...]

You would really love to put aside some savings for a rainy day, but that rainy day is now. It seems like every penny earned is spent before it hits the bank. Saving money is becoming harder for a lot of folks. Some people are so strapped that they have never been able to save [...]

Christmas is a wonderful time of year, but it can be stressful as well. Sometimes, people have expectations so high that they could never be met. Other times, it’s the little things that can pile up and just wear a person down. Here are some of those little things you probably want to avoid [...]

Weekend reading is a round-up of personal finance and money related stories that caught the eye of our forum members this week:

The Obama economic stimulus: Everybody gets to refinance their house at 4.5%
Meet the family who live on $44K a year — debt-free
Bush: “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system”
[...]

I work at home and see a lot of neighborhood moms as I go about my daily errands. The other day, I bumped into a woman I have known for several years because our sons have played on the same teams and for a while they attended the same school. After chatting for [...]

One side effect of a down economy is that many retailers end up going bankrupt or closing unprofitable locations. They are then forced to liquidate their assets and have sales in order to clean out the stores. Very often, even the fixtures end up for sale. With more and more retailers going out of business, [...]

My father and I own a duplex. As the landlords for our small piece of property, we have seen plenty of tenants come and go in our college town. Most have been great. A few were not. In our experience, we’ve found that some behaviors can almost guarantee that your deposit will be history.
For [...]

My wife and I have a fair distribution of labor in our home. Among other things, I wash and fold the laundry, and my wife puts it all away. Part of the reason that we arrived at this model for the laundry lies in our fundamental disagreement with respect to what needs to [...]

I recently finished reading Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Empower America. It’s a very good book if you’re interested in the environment, but it’s also a good read if you ever wonder what a “green economy” might look like. He covers a lot of [...]

Conventional wisdom has long held that the best deals come close to the holidays. Another bit of conventional wisdom is that the best time to buy is when the economy is in recession and retailers need the money. These age old rules of shopping may not be as rigid as they once were. They still [...]

My son had a basketball game yesterday. We had to arrive early because it was picture day, the most dreaded day of all youth sports seasons. Chaos reigned, as always, with teams delaying the photographers so that they could locate players who had wandered away. As a result, all of the games started [...]