Personal Finance Advice

As the USA seeks to recover from its recession and to add jobs to a contracting economy, many political and civic leaders have invested energy and resources in an effort to develop jobs. Cities offer incentives to businesses to hire and to bring jobs. State and federal agencies offer incentives to preserve and [...]

Last night I met up with a crowd of restaurant reviewers from the local Yelp community. Yelp, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is a community of on-line reviewers who contribute reviews of restaurants and other businesses. Over time, visitors to the site can get an increasingly accurate perception of [...]

The other day, I was headed to our local dog park with my wife and our puppy. We were already in the car and actually backing out of the driveway when I realized that I had forgotten my business cards. I stopped the car and told my wife that I was headed back [...]

One of the things that I hated when I worked in an office was the constant drain on my finances. There were collections for birthdays, coffee supplies, and solicitations for every charity and school fund raiser. It got so bad that I seriously considered putting a, “No Soliciting” sign on my cubicle. It’s not that [...]

My business definitely qualifies as a small business. I hope that it will someday grow into a bigger business but, for now, it is just me doing what I do. That is fine because my clients know that they will get quality service from me even though I am not backed by an army [...]

Over the years, I’ve met a lot of people. If you were to look at my Facebook and Linked-In directories, you would find professionals and artisans, white collar and blue collar, stay at home parents and people who have chosen careers over families. Some have been clients. Others have been service providers. [...]

I love this idea as a way to physical show what it’s like to earn minimum wage in the US today. Blake Fall-Conroy put together a machine that dispenses pennies and allows any person to work for minimum wage.

The concept is simple. An individual cranks a handle on the machine and pennies drop out [...]

I’m always a little surprised at how much everything in our society is measured in terms of money. We measure our worth by our salaries, not by how much we love our work. We measure our remodeling projects by how much we can get back when we sell and not on how much we love [...]

My last “real job” where I worked full-time for someone else was a mess. There was sexual harassment, bullying, unfair hours and demands, and all sorts of other foolishness going on. I was young and hadn’t yet saved up a large emergency fund, so leaving wasn’t possible unless I had another job lined up. Not [...]

I am tired. I have been up for the past two nights until about 1 am trying to finish projects for clients and writing content for my website. I am also a bit under the weather, as I seem to have a sore throat and headache that just won’t go away. I [...]

Now that I have made the decision to start a business, what next? Doing a good job in one’s chosen field usually requires entirely different skill sets and knowledge than running a business. Accounting software? Tracking time? Building a website? Forming a corporation? The list of tasks is lengthy and can be [...]

After close to thirty years of working for other people, I have finally decided to hang out a shingle on my own. For some people, self-employment is a natural extension of who they are. For me, as I insist on the possibility of great success in anything I undertake, the decision to go [...]

When people find out that I’m a professional blogger, they either ask me what the hell that means or how is it possible to make enough money to live on by blogging. Many people seem to think that there must be some hidden secret to easy success that only a few know and that is [...]

It’s no secret that college costs are rising to ridiculous levels. Kids are graduating with huge debt loads. Even if their parents have saved for their schooling since birth, costs are rising so fast they’re still likely to have to take on debt or work during school. In the last twenty years or so we’ve [...]

In financial circles the big push is to get people to save enough money so that they can retire in comfort. That’s a noble goal, but the fact is that more and more people aren’t going to be able to retire, at least not in the way that they dream about. Pensions are a thing [...]

What was former congressman and pro baseball player Wilmer Mizell’s nickname? Who played the part of the piano player at Rick’s Cafe American in Casablanca? How did the ancient Egyptians mourn a dead cat? I love questions like this and have spent countless hours over the past four decades reading the backs [...]

By Retire@50
It’s the dream of many to retire early. This is how I did it:
I had a paradigm shift: It was the early 80s and I was in my early 20s. I was working an entry level job and living paycheck to paycheck. It was difficult to find jobs at the time and I was [...]

By Brad H.
Have you ever seen those guys on the side of the road at freeway off-ramps or busy cross streets holding up a sign that reads something like “No Job. Hungry. Will work for food or money” and wondered who they were? At least some of them are like me because I was there [...]

By Linda D.
I’m able to sock away an average of $700 a month by sitting around. I wish I could say that I was bright enough to have come up with the way to sit and earn money, but the reality is that it kind of fell into my lap. This is what happened.
A friend [...]

Television has given us a lot of relationships with characters who we can never meet. I remember characters from a lot of TV shows better than I am able to recall certain childhood friends and classmates and I am pretty sure that I still know the TV characters better than I have known a [...]