Personal Finance Advice

This is a guest post from Little Miss Moneybags If you’re house-hunting, a mortgage pre-approval is a great thing to have in your back pocket. It shows real estate agents and sellers that you’re serious, and can help move the final home-buying process along much more quickly. Here’s an overview of how to get pre-approved, [...]

I read an article on MSNBC.com this week about how people are not paying on their homes and voluntarily entering foreclosure so that they can save money. The gist of the piece is that these people have simply decided to stop paying on the home and use the money for doing more fun things in [...]

Many times I hear people say, “It’s great that you’re debt free, but I’ll never be able to do that. I’ll always have a some kind of debt,” and then they elaborate on why they can never be without a car payment, mortgage, credit card balance, etc. “It’s just the way things, are,” they’ll finally [...]

By Maggie Ellis It is widely taught in financial education that there are only two kinds of debt that can be considered “good debt”: A mortgage and student loans (as long as they aren’t beyond your ability to repay comfortably). We’re always taught that it’s okay to go into debt to buy a house or [...]

The only debt we’ve ever incurred was to buy our house. At the time we bought, we just didn’t have a spare $150K lying around so we had to get a mortgage. We knew going in that we didn’t want to be stuck with it for thirty years so we set out to buy a [...]

It’s become quite fashionable to attack credit card companies or banks who hold our mortgages, especially with the recent turmoil in the financial market. While talk of increased regulation and pointing the finger of blame may each have their place in how we deal with such situations, both psychologically and fiscally, they can quickly overwhelm [...]

If you’re shopping for a house, one of the biggest favors you can do yourself is getting educated about the complicated process of applying for a mortgage. A mortgage is probably the most expensive obligation you’ll ever have, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s easy to get taken advantage of. Despite attempts [...]