Personal Finance Advice

When I sold life insurance, I fantasized about shaking the shoulders of women who responded to a financial question with, “Oh, I don’t know any of that stuff. My husband makes the money. I just spend it.” Outwardly, I remained professional and found restrained ways to encourage them to wake up to the danger of [...]

I have noticed something really strange when it comes to dentists. I generally find that I am unwilling to pay $30,000 for a car when I can find a perfectly good one for much and I am not as concerned with brand names as I am about just being clothed and warm. However, lately my [...]

Bad things can happen in an instant. Last year, while everyone else was celebrating and enjoying the 4th of July, an errant firework burned down an elderly man’s house. Like other depression-era folks who long ago lost faith in financial systems, he liked to hide his money in cash around the house and in the [...]

You’ve finally done it — earned that coveted diploma. You’re feeling a bit cocky. Your parents are wondering why they had to pay for your expensive education when you already knew everything. Now it’s time to enter The Real World, the place that you have talked about for years as if it were a planet [...]

You may not know this, but your credit card provides a lot of additional services in addition to letting you postpone payment on purchases and earn cash back or frequent flyer miles. One of these services is rental car collision insurance. Car rental companies will always try to sell you insurance options that can add [...]

If you have extra space in your house, you may have considered renting out a room to bring in some extra cash and share the utility bill costs. One reader is thinking about doing such a thing, but wants to know if there are any hidden costs that he should be aware of: I am [...]

Ever wonder why guys pay more for auto insurance than women? Insurance companies do risk analysis on different groups to determine if they are more likely to have an insurance claim than other groups. This video cuts it down to the basics with a lot of humor thrown in. Warning: There is some adult language [...]

By M Butler, special to pfadvice I don’t own a car. I found myself in a desperate situation where I was not able to meet all of the payment obligations that I had and I was slowly drowning in debt. I needed to do something drastic and my decision was to get rid of my [...]

You probably don’t realize it, but you drive much more than you need to. You get into your car much more often than you should, but there’s a simple way that you can make sure that you only drive when you need to — by paying yourself a small fee every time you get into [...]

Many of us feel like there’s little point in preparing for a disaster because we never know when something might happen and it’s impossible to be perfectly prepared. If you back up your computer every Friday and it gets stolen on a Thursday, you’ve still lost an entire week’s worth of work. Or maybe you [...]

We all hear a lot about protecting our financial futures by staying out of debt, having an emergency fund, and saving for retirement. Disability income insurance, or DII for short, is another important form of protection that many people don’t have and haven’t even heard of. The purpose of this kind of insurance is to [...]

A lot of problems with finances are the direct result of being financially lazy. That is, you know what you should be doing, but you’re just too lazy (or have a convenient excuse) not to do it. And while life is certainly not about making sure every detail of your finances is perfect 24 / [...]

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when getting insurance for their household possessions is not making an inventory of everything they own. That’s because if a claim does have to be made, the insurance companies are going to want proof and not just your word: Without documentation, one of two things will usually [...]

I’ve seen this subject come up on more than one occassion on the best way to get out of a speeding ticket. While I don’t have any direct experience in this area, I know that a speeding ticket can cost a fair amount of money. While most people look only at the actual fine of [...]

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 [...]

This is a first for us and I would be interested in anyone’s opinion on what they would do in this situation. I had a lot of good content on saving money on car insurance and have been looking for a good domain name for it for quite a while. The problem is that the [...]

There is nothing that gives me more pleasure than seeing someone take a new technology and use it to their advantage to save money – especially when it is done creatively and produces painless savings. I came across a woman who has done this brilliantly using Prosper.com to lower the amount she was paying on [...]

If you had any doubt that you could use your instincts to predict virtually any future event and make money, that doubt should quickly be fading. HedgeStreet, an online futures market which is government regulated has launched “hurricane contracts” to speculate on the damage they will cause. There are two types of hurricane speculation in [...]

One simple way that you can receive painless savings is to compare your auto insurance on a yearly basis. This gives you savings due to competition in the market place, but you can also create more savings by understanding how auto insurance companies view risks and what standards they use to make their calculations. If [...]

Give yourself a big old pat on the back if your finished the series of making sure you’re getting the best price on your car insurance. If you went through all the steps and still weren’t able to save any money, don’t feel bad at all about it. You should be happier than the rest [...]