Every Friday, Gary North answers readers’ questions in his free e-newsletter, Reality Check. His answers are very blunt — so blunt that he suspected it as a reason for only getting about one in 500 of his readers to submit a question in the first place! He’s a straight shooter. (I haven’t submitted a question … Read more
No, not destroying your credit card statements by scrunching them with all of your weight on one foot. But seriously, a very good friend of mine recently worked his way completely out of credit card debt. That’s good, but I didn’t realize the extent. Close to $40,000! It took years to get out of this … Read more
I saw a heartening post over in the SavingAdvice.com forums this week. A couple has extra money that they want either to put toward debt (nearly $4000/month in two mortgages for their Los Angeles home) or put in savings. This kind of thinking seems very uncommon. The skinny on their loans: Mortgage one – 30 … Read more
With point-of-sale terminals just about everywhere and one-click ordering, it seems strange not paying for things with plastic. Debit cards (usually doubling as ATM cards) aren’t quite as bad as credit cards, but “it’s still plastic,” as Liz Pulliam Weston writes: Leave your ATM card at home Debit cards don’t let you spend beyond what … Read more
Few things lend themselves better to goal-setting than debt reduction. The goal is very clear: Get the amount you owe down to zero! This doesn’t only apply to people with credit card debt, but also to anyone who has a mortgage (this includes myself). Even though fixed-rate mortgage debt is among the better kinds of … Read more
This article rose to the personal finance page on Money.com: Top things to know about controlling your debt The folks at Money have a Money 101 course online with a good series of articles covering many areas of personal finance. Five of the suggestions specifically relate to debt reduction in this article. Here they are, … Read more
All Things Financial got hold of an MSNBC article entitled What if we all paid off our credit cards? The scenario is that everyone pays off their outstanding credit card balances all at once, and doesn’t take on new credit card debt. A saving tsunami, if you will. OK, now that you’ve stopped laughing, what … Read more
The most visited posts on this blog are the ones about Douglas Andrew’s Missed Fortune 101. The main one is here. I still get comments every once in a while on this post. In case you haven’t read the book, the crux of Mr. Andrew’s way to riches (very boiled down) is to borrow from … Read more