Tag: savings
-
Women and money: four destructive myths
8 March 2013Among financial bloggers, this has been designated Women’s Money Week. I don’t usually think about finances and economics in a gender-specific ways, but coincidentally, last week I happened to be reading a book called Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry. The author, Helaine Olen, devotes a chapter to the way […]
-
Reader case study: short sales and debt
9 April 2012After I posted What to do — and not do — with your former mortgage dollars, I received a request for advice on a strategic default from a woman I’ll call Tricia. I agreed to give her some (friendly, I-am-not-a-lawyer) suggestions based on my own research, and she gave me permission to share our exchange […]
-
Quick, save now! Easy Roth IRA options
1 April 2012If you live in the United States, you have just seventeen more days to do something very important. No, I’m not talking about filing taxes, although you certainly don’t want to forget that. April 17th is also the deadline for maxing out your tax-advantaged retirement contributions for 2011. The government actually gives you three and […]
-
What to do — and not do — with your former mortgage dollars
21 March 2012With the decision to stop paying our mortgage, our immediate expenses dropped by nearly $3000 per month. That saved us over $32k in 2011 alone. So what did we do with all that ‘extra’ money? Well, first of all, about $6000 went to pay additional income tax, now that we no longer qualified for the […]
-
The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Your Turn
8 February 2012In creating the Conflict-Free Family Budget, I was striving to accomplish two separate but interlinked goals: reduce spending and reduce conflicts. I think these work best in tandem, but that’s not to say that you wouldn’t derive some benefit by implementing just one or the other. I’ll try to tease them apart here for that […]
-
The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Our Plan
19 January 2012Here’s the complete rundown of the new budget agreement I worked out and proposed to Jak last June. This post is part of a series. See the Introduction if you missed it. First, I started with by calculating our net income from a single day job. (At the time it was me working and Jak […]
-
Move your money and bump your interest rate too
1 November 2011A lot of people are moving their money this week, either because of outrage at the imposition of yet another fee, or due to a general realization that customers tend to get better treatment from small not-for-profit credit unions than from gigantic banking corporations. In tangentially related news, interest rates seem to be exploring Zeno’s […]
-
Risk-free high-yield savings option
17 June 2009When is a CD not a CD? When it’s a savings account in disguise. Traditionally, certificates of deposit have offered a trade-off: in return for the bank’s guarantee of a fixed interest rate, you promise to leave your money with the bank for a specific term. If you renege and withdraw your funds early, you […]
-
Should we worry about WaMu? and other disasters
16 September 2008Sorry for the recent silence; I’ve been having a rough couple of weeks on the Life front. No financial crises, though, at least not yet! Thanks for all the recent comments — it cheers me up to see so many people reading. This week got off to an interesting start for us with the early-buzzard […]
-
Customer goodwill worth more than high interest rates
7 August 2008J.D. at Get Rich Slowly recently opened up a discussion about chasing interest rates on savings accounts. The range of comments are pretty interesting, but the one recurring theme is that most people are willing to stay with a slightly lower rate as long as they’re happy with the service and convenience. I guess I […]
-
29 June 2008
No posts for the last couple of days — instead I’ve been spending a lot of time in orthodontist’s offices with the kids. Up until this year, both girls had dental coverage through their mother’s insurance, but it was an HMO situation and the care was pretty poor. Fortunately, the job that Jak got earlier […]