One of the major costs that inevitably creeps into the budget for me is medical and dental expenses. This is because the expenses are often hard to plan for and vary widely, depending on the services required. Despite the fact that I know these expenses are coming each year, I still often find myself surprised [...]

As the US sends even more troops to Iraq, as a pf blogger I would be shirking my fiscal responsibility if I didn’t at least ask the question: “where is all this money coming from?”
The answer, is fairly simple: debt. A little bit of digging on one of our government websites offers some staggering statistics. [...]

When it comes to investing, you want your dollars working hard for you. Money that is sitting around on the couch, watching your T.V. and drinking your beer is not going to help you retire early, buy that beach house, or take a nice long sabbatical in Europe. So, once I had this realization [...]

One of the major issues with doing personal finance is that all of your personal information is stored on your pc and is constantly whizzing around the internet as you access and change information in your bank accounts, brokerage accounts, etc. These five steps are a great basic checklist for security of your financial information [...]

A new study released about Massachusetts high-school graduates indicates that the real value of college is being wasted by many. The article describes the landscape for many college grads. It is a landscape of high expectations, sats and act standardized tests (similar to other schools nationwide) and also a requirement of statewide assessment tests in [...]

There are two billionaires that I talk about in this column, but truthfully, you’ve probably only really heard of one of them. The first, Donald Trump is, in many ways the complete opposite of our second billionaire. He is rich and famous. He seems to enjoy his significant wealth and is focused on cash—building it, [...]

Debt frequently becomes a major factor in what kind of retirement you plan on having. Lots of people dream of retiring early, taking dazzling vacations to the orient, tropical island destinations, or tours of European castles. Unfortunately, many of these dreams are dashed to bits by people’s unexpected expenses.
For those of you with kids, you [...]

One of the major reasons why cars break down is the lack of preventative maintenance. I recently had to fork over several hundred dollars to get my tires and alignment taken care of. This was no big deal but the disappointment was not long in coming.
Shortly after I had the work done, I found that [...]

It is amazing to me that people would think this way, but not terribly shocking to others who are familiar with statistics. After some quick math this morning, I realized that making money alone was not going to be enough of a strategy for handling retirement for people in this situation.
In terms of conventional wisdom, [...]

Recently when I was online checking the balance in my online ING Savings account, I was interested in an offer they presented. It is called “electric orange”: a high-interest-bearing checking account. The rate I noticed was 3% APY (annual percentage yield). The nice thing is that it bears a fairly high rate when you consider [...]