Personal Finance Advice

I’m not normally a big fan of TV. I find that it takes me away from other things I could/should be doing. However, I recognize that there are plenty of people out there who love TV. If you watch a lot of TV, it’s probably taking you away from other opportunities to earn more money. [...]

There are a lot of jobs that we did as kids that we tend to think we’ve outgrown. If we don’t think we’ve outgrown them, we think that they are now beneath us. However, these kid jobs can be the beginnings of a new full time job. Sure, you’ll be competing against the neighborhood kids [...]

If you’ve ever wanted to travel extensively but aren’t sure how you could afford to be on the road for months at a time, work share arrangements might be the answer you’re looking for. When you work share, you receive either free or discounted lodgings or meals in exchange for your labor. The work you [...]

One of the newer businesses out there is, depending on your tolerance for such things, also one of the most disgusting: Poop scooping. You go from home to home cleaning up pet waste. This is one of those jobs that has to be done but which a lot of people prefer not to do themselves. [...]

On a message board that I routinely hang out on, there was recently a discussion of people’s finances and whether or not they could afford certain items. As with all discussions of this type, there were some people who stated that they would have huge trouble affording these things and other people said that they [...]

It seems that everyone these days wants to work at home. Every message board I frequent has almost daily posts asking, “How can I work from home?” The problem is that many work at home opportunities are scams. There are many legitimate options out there, but you have to sort through the garbage to find [...]

If you want to make a little extra money and you have a talent, you can give busking a try. Busking is performing in streets, train stations, or subways for money. You put on your show and you leave a hat, jar, or some other container out for the public to drop money in if [...]

People often want to know how they can make more money. Beyond the standard answers of sell your stuff, take a part time job, do online surveys, or other ideas, there is one way that a lot of people don’t consider: Become more versatile. While there are some professions that reward specialists with high pay [...]

It’s not news that you can make money by becoming a medical research subject. There are ads in most major papers, on TV and the Internet recruiting people with various conditions to try new drugs and therapies. These can be good ways to make money if you qualify and if you aren’t worried about the [...]

If you want to save or have a lot of money, you may have to choose your mate carefully. While love is fine and even great, there are plenty of people who enter into marriage in the full knowledge of exactly how it will help (or hurt) them financially. While it may sound cold, it’s [...]

When you think of panhandling, you probably think of the homeless and the desperate. It would never be something that a white collar professional would engage in. Would it? If you think the answer is, “No,” here’s a story for you. There is a man who panhandles near my office and I walk past him [...]

If you’ve ever wanted to be paid for the time you spend surfing the Internet for porn, I’ve got good news for you. It is possible to get paid to look at porn on the Internet. We all know that the Internet is a big place and that it is difficult to police. User generated [...]

Contests and sweepstakes can be fun to enter and the prizes can be great. You can win everything from a few bucks in cash all the way up to new cars or houses. Contests are easily found. You can find them on product packaging, advertised on TV or in magazines, and through associations to which [...]

This week’s suggestion is both a way to make money and save money. When you review books for magazines, websites, or newspapers, you are often given free copies of the books. Even if you aren’t paid monetarily, reviewing books can be a great way to fund your reading habit. However, if you are lucky enough [...]

Magazines don’t have to be old and collectible to have some monetary value for you. You can resell whole magazines, or sell useful articles or collectible photos. But everything is online, you say. How can I make money when people can just read stuff online for free? Even in today’s world of online publishing, there [...]

Ah, but this isn’t strange, you say. Of course when I’m done with a book I’ll sell it on Amazon or eBay. But what if you could sell books you got for free, or that you paid only pennies for? Then you would make nothing but profit. If you want to sell used books, you [...]

If you’ve ever read a blog, magazine, or website, you’ve probably seen a stock image. These are photographs that someone has taken and sold on a royalty-free basis to the writer, publisher or designer. The photographer owns the rights to the image, so the buyer is not allowed to resell it. However, the buyer can [...]

I very much enjoyed a recent Saving Advice column that considered the etiquette of having a yard sale. The writer made several excellent points about how a seller should approach a yard sale and what can and should be sold at yard sales. It occurs to me, however, that a yard sale really should only [...]

I went to a yard sale this weekend that was disappointing, to say the least. Everything on sale was either broken, damaged, dirty, or trash (one half-used crayon, a moldy mattress, a shirt so faded and tattered that it would only suffice for rags, and board games missing most of the pieces and with the [...]

You are only young once, and that is a good thing — not only for parents and children, but for everyone else, too. Last year, one of my sons went to Boston for the summer to study creative writing. The program was designed to give him a taste of college life and living away from [...]