This is a guest post about credit card tricks. Laura Edgar is a personal finance specialist at NerdWallet, an unbiased credit card comparison website dedicated to helping you find the best credit cards. In many ways, a rewards credit card is fairly straightforward. You’ll earn cash back, airline miles or points for making your daily [...]
Amortization is a key concept in your financial life. If you don’t have a clear amortization definition, you’ll find it difficult to understand how a mortgage works. And amortization is also critical if you want to budget effectively (much more on that shortly). Can you think of any more important financial concept? There aren’t many. [...]
How does a retired person approach the issue of Roth vs. Traditional IRA? Dave sent an e-mail asking this very question: Why should I assume I will be in a higher tax bracket in retirement? I am planning (with luck!) to have minimal expenses in retirement (hoping to pay off mortgage, etc by then) so [...]
You might think you don’t have to worry about federal estate taxes anymore. Current laws exclude the first $5 million in your estate for estate tax. And to make it an even sweeter deal, a couple (if both are American citizens) can exclude up to $10 million. Does that mean you don’t have to worry [...]
If you want to run a successful business, you have to come up with a strong business name. And if you run your business under a name that’s not your own, you need a “DBA” (“Doing Business As”). The good news is that if you create a DBA, you can use just about any name [...]
Getting a letter from the IRS is almost never a pleasant experience. Even though I run a pretty tight ship when it comes to my tax return, I’ll admit that I get a little nervous when I see that the Treasury department wants to have a word or two with me. I do my best [...]
A good income-to-debt ratio will help you tremendously in just about all aspects of your financial life. You’ll qualify for credit more easily because you’ll have a good credit score, and you’ll pay a lot less when you borrow money. You’ll also be a more desirable job applicant if you apply for a new job [...]
The Occupy Wall Street people have done us all a great service by forcing us to re-examine our relationship with money and ask the question, “Is greed good?” They are sure that the greedy pursuit of wealth is the root of all evil. While in reality, just the opposite is true, we can only understand [...]
Part of the beauty of having your business in the United States is that you have a great deal of leeway when it comes to selecting retirement accounts for self-employed people. And ever since individual 401k plans became available, more and more business owners have taken advantage of this option. Let’s see if an individual [...]
Betterment is a tool that is designed to help do-it-yourself beginner investors. It helps you save a lot of time and you can get started investing even if you have a small amount to invest. This site actually manages your money for you but let’s take a look at my Betterment review to see if [...]
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