I have a good handle on my personal finances, and have no problem using credit cards and paying them off each month. In fact, it can be beneficial to do so. Those who are carrying a balance on their cards or are prone to overspending shouldn’t follow my lead, but here are two [...]

Here’s a sarcastically hilarious article on the mortgage “crisis” via Free Money Finance.
On the heels of his plan to freeze interest rates on subprime mortgages for responsible homeowners who simply needed a helping hand, President Bush announced today he is ready to shift his attention to assisting the “stupid, irresponsible homeowners who knowingly bought houses [...]

One of the advantages of being a homeowner is that certain home improvement projects are sales tax free, if they fit the New York State’s guidelines of being a “Capital Improvement”. The tricky part can be determining what exactly qualifies as a capital improvement. The NYS Department of Taxation lays it out like [...]

Tomorrow marks a momentous day in my personal financial life - the day my college loans will be paid off. I believe in the philosophy that a person can live a debt-free lifestyle if they make it a priority, and since we have no credit card debt, the next highest interest rate loan we [...]

It’s been quite awhile since I’ve done a personal finance post, but having sold a house and bought another this year, it’s certainly a topic that’s been at the top of my mind. I’ve also been following a few personal finance blogs and ran across a great article on The Simple Dollar entitled “Everything [...]

I keep hearing these commercials on WBEN for John Cummuta’s Transforming Debt Into Wealth System, and as someone who takes a great deal of interest in personal finance, I wanted to learn more. I tend to be a skeptic, so I set out googling “John Cummuta scam.” To my surprise, it doesn’t actually [...]

Last year was the first year that I really started paying attention to the stock market. While I’ve had a portfolio for several years, I was unsuccessfully following the old “Buy and Hold” mantra. I decided that 2006 was going to be the year I learned more about how the system actually worked [...]

Good news from the pages of USA Today… fourteen states now require high school grads to have some basic personal finance training.
States are recognizing that financial literacy is an important “skill for the 21st century,” says Joseph Peri of NCEE. “We don’t wait until college to teach students how to read. Why would we [...]

I just completed my annual review of our 2006 spending and setting up our budget for 2007. Starting back in 2000, after I graduated from college and got a “real job”, I set up a simple spreadsheet that let me keep track of how much money I was spending and on what. I [...]

I rail on Governor-elect Spitzer a lot for only doing half his job as Attorney General. But even I have to give him props for cleaning up some of the bad stuff that went on in Wall Street. The New York Stock Exchange was a management mess for a long time. Recently, [...]