Easy Change

In order to take advantage of some of the slowdown at work, I've decided to take tomorrow off. This is something that you might want to consider as well. You don't need to take a week off to be in need of a break. Personally, I've been going on all cylinders for many months now and I am starting to take a hit for it. But I think that I am coming to the end of this long run of work and then there will be a break before the big batch rolls around again. Employers Cash In when you don't use your paid time off that is allocated to you. I'm not telling you to fake sick to get time off. Rather, im telling you to be aware of your company's time off policies and ensure that you don't lose any time as a result of "capping out" on your accruals. For me, this is not the case, but I work with people who for one reason or another feel the need to constantly keep the maximum amount of banked vacation days. Then each month or two they are scambling to find some ...

I just have to share this article I read this afternoon. What would you do if you got run over by a car? Perhaps you would just see if you felt ok and walk home? What if you got a bad cut on the job or at a party? Perhaps you might try to stitch it up yourself, apply some iodine and a bandage and you're all set? In the end there is a crisis of lack of health insurance among young adults. Read more stories and learn more about the problem in this article from New York magazine. http://nymag.com/news/features/29723/

Working toward controlling debt is not easy. But it must be done. For me, getting a handle on debt has meant looking at all of the interest rates that I am paying on my debt. After tackling the real credit card debt, I realized that I would be able to get a credit card that gave me a zero percent interest rate. This was a transfer over to my chase credit card from my student loan. So, I moved all of the debt from one of my student loans onto a credit card at zero percent and paid a 75$ fee for the transfer. Unfortunately, I goofed. I paid my bill online and the payment posted one day late. Interestingly enough, the due date actually moves. I never knew this. So, it was something like the 3rd one month and the 2nd the next month. As a result of this late payment, they incurred a late fee and the 0% rate ended. This was a nasty bit of reality for me but I learned a lesson: always pay the credit card bill at least a week before the due date. The late payment didn' t hurt my credit or ...

I can't believe it, it is only March 23 and the books are closed for the month! It is a great feeling to be paying things online now. I can immediately get things paid as soon as there is available cash. For those of you who have not started paying your bills online, I would encourage you to give it a try. I've been nothing but impressed by the system since I started doing it. I find that I can easily keep track of what is due and make sure that it gets paid on time, every time. Not to mention the amount of money I am saving in stamps. As for the actual numbers, those are good as well. Total expenses for the month are down about 200 bucks from last month.  And debt is continuing to decrease as loans are payed down. There's still a long way to go, but the extra money coming in recently has really helped out a lot. The one negative though is that the average so far for this year seems to indicate that household expenses have gone up way more than the 0.03 percent that I ...

So one big question I have now is about the Freedom Fund. Suddenly, it doesn't feel so free. Not "free" in either sense. Not free as in free beer because I am "spending" money each month on this Freedom Fund. And not free as in liberty because I feel like I often times finding myself foregoing things that I probably could just get and not even have to pay on credit for them. I have been using the idea of a freedom fund for months now in budgetting for big, but predictable expenses. The idea of the freedom fund is that you can set aside a small amount of money for these expenses each month in advance of the cost actually coming up. Then when that big car repair bill comes or that "surprise" of your dishwasher breaking happens, you have money saved for it already and it doesn't blow your budget. Since the money is presumably in a high-yield account, it is also making some interest income. Taking a Vacation from the Freedom Fund I guess the current de...

One of the more interesting developments in the world of personal finance has been Prosper. Prosper has done right by me so far. So I figure that I would talk about my small experiences related to prosper. I'm just your average pf blogger who learned about prosper and thought it would be a good idea. When I went to college, there were tons of places that advertised payday loans and such and I always got a little peeved at the idea of predatory lending. Don't even get me started about this whole sub prime mortgage mess. But now that I've been using it for several months, I thought I'd provide an update: Right now I have about 300 bucks in prosper loans. Each loan is 50 bucks a piece. I slowly am filtering in some of my side income into these loans. And overall these loans are earning an average of 13 percent each. Surely it's not big money, especially when compared with possible long-term returns of the stock market or of the safer returns of a high-interest savings ...

So this weekend I listened to Bob Brinker's Moneytalk radio program and although I was aware of these issues before, I think that there is significant money to be saved and/or made on opportunities for the medium to long term investor when it comes to several major issues that are going to become pressing in the not-too-distant future. Without getting into too much detail in this post, I simply want to list them for you and provide a brief description. Finding opportunities around these issues is, of course, no small task. Additionally, these issues are somewhat speculative. If you are planning for a disaster, you really are just hoping that one doesn't happen. So, I have to say up front that I hope none of these issues really develops into a catastrophe, but I also need to acknowledge that there is a strong likelihood that at least one of them will. Without further ado, I list the issues in my own subjective order: worst to not-so-bad. 1. Medicare - There is a huge, huge pro...