It’s the holiday season, and a big part of the holidays is giving and receiving gifts. Visit just about any personal finance blog or big financial website and you’ll get plenty of advice on what kinds of gifts to get. You’ll also get lots of advice on what kinds of gifts not to get. I’ve … Read more
The answer to the problem of how to expose children to money doesn’t have one right answer. (There are wrong answers, though, such as “Give the child as much money as she wants.”) One of the points of debate is whether to tie the allowance to chores or not. Tying the allowance to routine chores … Read more
Michael Masterson, author of Automatic Wealth, Seven Years to Seven Figures, and most recently The Pledge, is very rich. (Selling books is only part of why he’s very rich.) In his latest book he writes about reading effectively for maximum return on investment. In each piece of reading, it pays to hunt for one good … Read more
It’s the holiday shopping season. Already. Again. Where does the time go? (Minute by minute, I’m told.) Two thousand eleven will be upon us in only a month. Here are a few tasks that are worth doing to tie a financial bow on 2010: Review your health and dental care choices if you have them … Read more
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, has become a bit of a Roman circus of consumerism. Retailers competing for customers’ wallets with “leaked” ads coming out weeks before the big day, crazy traffic jams, all manners of people fighting tryptophan-induced sloth to get up for bunker-buster deals and full-contact shopping. Retailers aren’t stupid, though. They … Read more
I received a complimentary copy of Kimberly Palmer’s new book Generation Earn. It is subtitled “The Young Professional’s Guide to Spending, Investing, and Giving Back.” I would place my age group (late thirties) above the mean age of the typical person to whom she’s addressing the book, but not outside of it. The book is … Read more
Some of my relatives did a mortgage refinance a little over a year ago. As low as rates were in 2009, they are even lower now. They currently have a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage at 4.625%. Not too shabby. But they told me that they were quoted a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage of 3.5%. Absolutely crazy! We … Read more
A couple of weekends ago, a guy was walking around the subdivision looking for customers. He was painting house numbers on the curbs in front of people’s houses. He was a bit older than I was. Under typical circumstances, painting house numbers on a curb isn’t an unusual job for a teenager. But it isn’t … Read more