A lot of home owners don’t realize that they are responsible for the water and sewer pipes that lead from their home to the utility pipes on the street. This has created an opportunity for a variety of businesses to…
Category: Insurance
Credit Sesame Launches Free Identity Theft Protection Service
Credit Sesame launched a new, free Identity Protection service today which we knew was coming. We now have some more details about this new service. Credit Sesame hopes adding identity theft protection to their suite of other no-cost services will…
Why Would a Billionaire Need a $201 Million Life Insurance Policy?
The largest life insurance policy ever issued has gone to an unnamed California billionaire living in Silicon Valley for an incredible $201 million dollars, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Who exactly the policy covers isn’t known other…
Is LifeLock a Scam and Do You Need It?
With more and more news stories of credit card theft, people begin to look for ways to protect themselves. One company that they will likely come across in their search is Lifelock and many wonder, “Is Lifelock a scam?” The…
Dropping Car Coverage Can Affect Rental Car Costs
Finance gurus will tell you that you should drop the “Comprehensive and Collision” coverage on your auto insurance once the value of your car drops to the point that the insurer would automatically total your car in the event of…
25 Ways to Discover and Reach Your Financial Goals
By Kimberly Foss, CFP, FCWA, and author of Wealthy by Design: A Five Step Plan for Financial Security. A friend of mine recently shared the story of an unsettling trip to the supermarket. Her husband was out of town and…
Money Management from A to Z
By Jamie Englert Managing your finances may seem like a dizzying mass of numbers. But you can also think of personal finance in terms of letters, as in the initials of some important personal finance terms to know. From bonds…
Gender Tax: 10 Things Women Pay More for than Men
Recently, there have been a number of stories in the news about how women pay more for certain items than men. If you’ve ever gone into a store, you might have noticed that similar products for men and women do…
21 Reasons Dave Ramsey Sucks at Giving Credit Score Advice
There are huge disadvantages of having no credit score. I actually know this better than most. After living over ten years in Japan, I came back to the US naively assuming that the credit history I had built over there…
The High Cost of Knowing Better
Here in the South, the common joke is that many disasters, spectacular events, or both begin with the phrase, “Hey, ya’ll, watch this!” Usually after yelling that phrase, the person does something unbelievably stupid like jump off a barn roof…
10 Life Choices That Will Hurt Your Finances
Sometimes people make life choices that end up negatively affecting them in their future. Life doesn’t always make things easy and when things get difficult, it can be difficult to make a good choice. Unfortunately, we live in a society…
Time Flies and It’ll Cost You
Last year there were changes to our health insurance plan. The employer has always used a high deductible plan and they have always been kind enough to contribute $2,000 toward that deductible. The money has always been available at the…
Bye-Bye $485: Day 29
Reality set in today as I received my monthly health insurance bill: a painful $485. That will be nearly $6,000 a year out of the $17,000 budget or about one-third of all the money I have. This makes it very…
Car or Carless: Minimum Wage Challenge
The fact that I really dislike driving would seem to make the choice here rather easy. If I had my choice, I would not drive at all (and quite frankly, it’s ironic the amount that I do drive with this…
When The Manufacturer Won’t Honor The Warranty: How to Get Service
You’d think that if a manufacturer offers a warranty, getting service or a replacement under that warranty would be easy. You’d think that al you’d have to do is call the manufacturer, provide proof of purchase, and get your problem…
Preserve Your Independence
We all tend to take our independence for granted. We take for granted our ability to make decisions just for us, to spend our money how we want, to go where we want, and do what we want. We take…
Do You Need Long Term Disability Insurance?
Long-term disability insurance is one of those financial instruments that most people should have, yet few people do. It’s designed to pay you in the event that you become so injured or ill that you can no longer work. How…
Prepare for Disaster
This week I’m giving you a quick PSA about the value of making sure your essential information and items are fully protected. My in-laws’ house burned down last weekend. To the ground. The good news is that no one was…
The Financial Cost of Texting and Driving
I don’t consider myself a soapbox preacher, but the issue of texting and driving is one of those that gets me going. It frustrates me to no end that people think those little messages are so important that they are…
Your Emergency Fund Needs to Be Bigger Than You Think
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the “Emergency Fund” should really be called something else, since so few financial events are really emergencies. Regardless of what you call it, you need to be setting money aside to…