Everyone I know will say that you’d be crazy not to own a house, especially in California. In other words, they’re convinced that real estate only goes up, courtesy of what we’ve seen in the last couple of decades.
A particularly vocal colleague who just stretched his budget to accommodate a million dollar home around [...]
Match.com has been running a promotion for a little while now. If you sign up for 6 months and don’t find a match, they’ll give you six additional months free. What they are really saying here is that if their product doesn’t work they’ll give you more of it. Imagine how [...]
What’s the secret to being able to quit your day job? Make your own time worth more to you per hour than your employer is paying. How can you do that, one step at a time : )
Step One – Overcome NaysayersThis is a topic I’ve been giving a lot of thought to recently. Actually [...]
After the recent cut in the Federal Funds Rate, it is anticipated that most high yield savings accounts will follow suit and decrease the interest rates offered on deposits. In fact, a couple of fellow bloggers reported yesterday that ING Direct has already reduced it’s savings account interest rate from 4.50% (yawn) to 4.30% [...]
Looks like Jeremy @ Generation X Finance has had death on this mind lately. Here is a series of informative articles he has published recently on post-death wealth management:
Transferring Assets Upon Death Through a Will
Transferring Assets Upon Death by Operation of Law or Contract
Transferring Assets Upon Death With a Trust
Other interesting articles of [...]
Articles hope you will enjoy:
Wise Bread talks about how dollar-cost averaging can ease your nerve in a choppy market. However, DCA may not be the best investment strategy as you may think.
Personal Finance Advise asks the priority between paying off credit card debt and building an emergency fund. It didn’t go well with me last [...]
Yesterday, there was an article on Money.com by Jason Zweig, editor of the revised book, The Intelligent Investor, that I think is an excellent reading. The article, Are You a Better Investor?, has some good advises on what it means to be a better investor.Mr. Zweig started the article with some examples of what [...]
With all of the discussion this week about estate planning, I wanted to do a poll regarding wills. It is a pretty straightforward question, but I broke it down into two categories: with or without children. As always, feel free to elaborate in the comments, and I’ll chime in after some time has passed [...]
This week I have covered how the disposition of assets is handled by using a will and through contract and the operation of law. Finally, I want to briefly mention trusts. Since there are many different kinds of trusts and can be relatively complex, this is only a brief overview of what they are [...]
One of our favorite affordable leisure activities is to take day trips with the entire family. We went on a family excursion a few weeks ago which was of the “back-to-nature” variety. It wasn’t Walt Disney World, but it was equally fun (if not nicer), with two kids and three adults at the outing. [...]
Like many people, I’m a member of LinkedIn. I think it’s a fabulous tool for keeping in touch with people and very well could help advance my career. Last week I logged into my account to accept a connection from a friend and I had a surprise waiting. My college freshman [...]
Today is a good day to shop. As was yesterday and will be tomorrow. At least that’s what retailers would like you to believe. Having a Sales Event is a favorite weapon in the arsenal of sellers and the fifth in the Sales Tactics Revealed series.
Shop, Shop, ShopWhy is it that every holiday seems to [...]
Most readers who frequent personal finance blogs/websites must have read about a lot of financial advice by now - some of which is almost repeated to the point of boredom. However, I am not sure if everyone processes all the information they get from such resources - even after reading it several times.
Often, we [...]
Investing can seem very complex if you are new to it. There are so many options out there. How is one to choose between stocks, mutual funds, CDs, corporate bonds, treasury bonds, savings accounts, and even more exotic options like lending on Prosper. With all this complexity it may be worth [...]
Yesterday I provided an overview of how you can use a will to assist in transferring assets upon your death, but there are still other methods to consider. When you assign beneficiaries in your will, it is typically for items that don’t have a separate beneficiary on file or are not covered by operation [...]
Got an email from ING Direct this morning with their new interest rates less than 24 hours after the Fed cut its benchmark interest rate. The ING Orange Savings account used to pay 4.50% APY. The new rate, effective September 19, 2007, is 4.30% APY. Meanwhile, yields for their Electric Orange checking accounts are also [...]
One of the best deals I ever got from a credit card was the $200 bonus offered by Chase Freedom card back in March. I not only received $250 free money from the card after a purchase was made, but also took advantage of their 0% APR promotion with a huge balance transfer. Despite these [...]
Time for the money carnivals.
We start off with The Carnival of Personal Finance #118 at Money, Matter and More Musings. Golbguru’s nice and well-organized list of awesome articles yielded great stuff like these:
Savings Jar — An Essay by the Baglady at Age 8 @ The Bag Lady (sweet…)
Getting rich, made simple - [...]
Why did you sign up for health insurance? Was it to help share the risk and cost of potential health issues across a large group of people? What if some of the people in your group are voluntarily behaving in ways that raise their risk and the cost to you and everyone else? Should you [...]
Biggest gain for stocks in more than four years
Highest gold future since 1980
And highest oil price ever
They all came after the larger than expected 50 basis points rate cut by the Fed today, the largest reduction in more than five years!
Looking at my own investments, the gains are huge [...]
Last week, I had mentioned that I planned to post a little more and link to some other great reads that I’ve neglected sharing in the past. My idea is that I’d write about some short story, lyric from a song, or a money quote that made me recently think. It sounds [...]
Where should I put my money?
I was hoping that when the FNBO Direct 6.0% APY promotion ends in 10 days, I could go back to 4-week T-bills for short term investment.
Well, it looks like that’s not going to happen any time soon as the investment rate of 4-week T-bill tumbled to 4.079% APR in last [...]
A will is a relatively simple document, but it can play an important role in assisting the transfer of assets upon death. While it is possible to draft your own will, most people have an attorney draft their will. Of course, using an attorney will usually necessitate a fee, but the benefit of [...]
I first came across this advertisement in the latest issue of TIME magazine - splashed across the inside front cover with the title “The World’s First $10.5M Cell Phone - an exciting limited-time offer for billionaires.“
The ad proceeds to claim this:
“Purchase this BlackBerry 8830 World Edition smartphone for just $10.5 and we’ll throw in [...]
I’m following up on the article I wrote yesterday that covered some facts on inflation. I’d like to preface this post by saying that we’re in a good place right now: inflation is not a threat to us today with it being under control. But it remains noticeable to us in some respects, [...]
