Personal Finance Advice

If you do much shopping, banking, and investing online, then no doubt you are drowning in a sea of passwords. That doesn’t even include the passwords you have to remember for your network, your router, and all the other technological solutions you use. While most sites and devices will help you recover a password or [...]

One of the biggest fallacies with personal finances is that there is a single way to (beyond the basic foundation of spending less than you earn) approach them. There are so many extenuating circumstances for each person that what may make perfect sense for me doesn’t make any sense at all for others. If you [...]

I must admit that I wish I had more artistic talent. When there is an art piece that catches my eye, I can stare at it for hours wondering how the artist was able to visualize the final piece from the raw materials she decided to use. I also must admit that I have a [...]

Birthday parties can be a lot of fun. They can also be a source of great aggravation and angst, both for the party host and the celebrant. Some of this comes from the emotional aspect of birthdays, but some of the angst comes from the financial cost of the party. Sometimes it’s a combination of [...]

Most people that have decided to take control of their finances and reduce their debt have come across at least one of the various debt snowball methods. Basically, creating a debt snowball is a way to arrange one’s debt so as to tackle a single debt at a time (to more efficiently pay off the [...]

Entertainment is a large category in many people’s budgets. We all want to have fun, after all, with what limited downtime we have after work and chores are completed. The problem is that, “entertainment” money is easy to waste on things that have little lasting value. Now, by lasting value I don’t mean that something [...]

I love hitting the after Christmas clearance sales (and the sales after any major holiday), especially as they move into the deeper discounts. There are usually plenty of items left and prices are slashed to 75 – 90 percent off. When I hit the sales I sometimes look for holiday items, but more often than [...]

There are a lot of people collecting pennies these days. Not just any pennies. They are collecting pennies that date before 1982 and plan on making a lot of money on them. These people are penny hoarders and they have a plan. Penny hoarders are only interested in the pre-1982 pennies because these pennies are [...]

For anyone trying to get out of debt, the debt snowball method has become the choice of many to tackle their debt. This shouldn’t be a surprise as it is a straightforward and easy to follow method that works. While the basics are the same, there are a variety of different debt snowball approaches that [...]

I don’t go to the movies that often, but when I do I’m reminded that it’s not only the movies themselves that can teach lessons about money. Sometimes you can learn about money simply by going to the theater and paying attention to the whole experience. Here are some money lessons that you might pick [...]

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 [...]

When most people think about New Year financial resolutions, they think about tackling those difficult issues that they know that they should be doing, but have been avoiding because they know working on them is going to take time, effort and probably a little pain. Get rid of the credit card debt. Reduce costs. Make [...]

For the first time in years, gas here went under three dollars a gallon. It was cause for a minor celebration. There’s just something nice about seeing that $2.98 on the marquee. It’s only psychological, but it was comforting. Of course, after my minor celebration I realized that there was no point in getting overly [...]

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions anymore. I found over time that the pressure to accomplish something ended up defeating any progress. Every time I’d backslide or screw up I’d think, “I’ve blown it.” It was like the very act of making something a resolution made it into a success or failure proposition. Either I [...]

One of my clients (where a friend of mine also works in IT) recently upgraded their office phone system. The phone system they had was perfectly functional but, like so many people and businesses, they wanted something with more bells and whistles (and something that several of their competitors had). After taking bids, forking over [...]

If you’re like many people, you’ll be making a New Year’s resolution to lose weight, save more money, or both. If you’re trying to do both, the good news is that weight loss and saving money often go hand in hand. It’s like accomplishing two resolutions at once. Even if you only choose one, chances [...]

I was in Las Vegas this past week and wandered into the Wynn Hotel and Casino I was just in time for them to open their new “high roller” slot machine section, apparently the week before Christmas is one of the slowest weeks in Las Vegas so a lot of the casinos use this time [...]

I hate waste. I hate that sometimes I have to throw something away without having gotten maximum use out of it. I hate the waste of money and the waste of resources. Unfortunately, I’ve learned that there are instances where I end up wasting things. For example, I cannot use up an entire head of [...]

When I first started on my frugal journey I had to get past quite a few fears and stereotypes that were holding me back, especially after I moved to a new area. You wouldn’t think that frugality would be a scary thing, but sometimes it can be a little frightening, especially if you’ve never had [...]

We’re slam in the middle of the Christmas nuttiness. Spend, spend, spend is the current motto and I don’t know whether it’s the coming full moon or simply the Christmas insanity, but people are acting crazy. I’ve seen far more people this year yelling at other people, pushing and shoving, flipping others off in parking [...]