Personal Finance Advice

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 [...]

When it comes to getting life insurance, most of us tend to shy away from really thinking about why we need it. It doesn’t matter whether you fall into the low risk or high risk life insurance category, we’d all rather ignore the reason that it’s purchased in the first place. For this reason, most [...]

I do have a credit card and I use it for a lot of my travel expenses because it provides me with a lot of advantages. I also use cash a lot just because I developed the habit when I lived in Japan and almost all transactions there were done in cash. There are still [...]

I’ve always kept my eyes open and to the ground when I walk and the result is that I usually find at least $100 dollars a year. There’s a lot of money at your feet if you are willing to look, and some people take this looking seriously. In fact, for them the streets are [...]

While money isn’t actually made out of paper (it’s made out of cotton fibers), bills are sometimes referred to as “paper” in slang terms. That may change in the not too distant future. While “plastic” is a term which is usually reserved for credit cards, it may soon become yet another slang term for those [...]

If you are unable to complete and file your federal individual tax return by the April 18, 2001 deadline, you can request an extension of time to file. By filing for this extension, you will automatically be given until October 17, 2011 to submit your tax return to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). By filing [...]

One thing I learned along ago is that personal finance is not rocket science. In fact, it is far from it. The hitch is that simply because I know how to get my personal finances in order doesn’t mean that it’s always easy for me to do so when there are a lot of competing [...]

I’ve long said that Netflix is one of the best entertainment values out there. The ability to watch what you want with no commercials is wonderful. Internet streaming makes it even better. You can just sit at home and find something to watch. Aside from just providing entertainment, you can also learn a little bit [...]

There are a lot of myths when it comes to shopping, and one of the biggest is that women love to shop while men hate shopping. The truth, according to Lee Eisenberg, author of Shoptimism, is that men and women both love and hate to shop in about the same proportional numbers. The same is [...]

Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint.com, thinks that for 20 and 30 year olds, the major savings problem is the cost of socially going out — dinners at restaurants, drinks with friends and the daily coffee at the local coffee shop. As we get older, the savings problem becomes one of trying to impress others [...]

There is a website that is encouraging people to make one of their New Year’s Resolutions be moving their money from the large banks to community banks. They use It’s A Wonderful Life to make their point: Here, one woman explains why she is making the change: Do you think that this is a good [...]

If you know that you are going to have your car for a long time, buying parts with a lifetime warranty can make a lot of sense, even if those parts are more expensive than others that are available. That is a lesson that can be learned from Rachel and her car named Chariot. She [...]

Have you ever wondered why the look of fast food is always so much different in the ads than it is in reality? It’s because they hire professional food make-up artists to make the food look better than it ever could in real life. This is how the commercials and print ads fool you into [...]

There is an image that the US has become an nation of shopaholics driven primarily by consumerism. Lee Eisenberg, the author of Shoptimism, believes that this is not truly the case. He sees that the average person still retains some of the frugality on which the US was founded and believes that most people that [...]

I don’t have an iPhone (I don’t even have a cell phone, but that’s a whole other story), but if I did, I would definitely buy the Opportunity Cost of Money iPhone app. This iPhone app makes the cost of your purchases concrete. Basically, it’s an iPhone app where you list all of the things [...]

Here is an interesting question to ponder. Is the reason that Americans are such lousy savers due to the freedom that parents give to their kids as opposed to how children are raised in other countries? We aren’t told who we should marry, we aren’t told what job we should do, but we are also [...]