From the category archives:

Savings

The Single Most Important Financial Step

March 8, 2010
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Here it is the secret to untold success with your personal finances and it involves only one step: starting. Frankly this is the secret applies to so much more than you finances such as your job, your weight loss plan, your spiritual health and your education. It’s so easy to focus on the the things [...]

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Use Online Tools for Fund Raising

November 25, 2009
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This is a guest post by Craig Kessler, marketing director of BudgetPulse who also manages the BudgetPulse blog and can be reached on Twitter.  If you haven’t already checked out BudgetPulse take a look it’s a great free service for managing your money online. Johnny plays for the Wichita Tigers, a little league team in [...]

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10 Things Your Baby Doesn’t Need that Can Fund Their College Education.

November 9, 2009
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I want to share my sage parenting advice to you would be or soon to be parents. The amount of products the corporate juggernauts are advocating for the health and well being of your baby is staggering. Here’s a secret: You don’t need most of them. I’ll never forget the day I walked into a [...]

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24 Ways to Help you Buy Cheap Used Books

October 29, 2009
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Books are a guilty pleasure of mine.  Frankly I don’t feel that guilty about it, most everything I’ve ever learned has come from a book or augering in spectacularly in a heap of flames and rubble.  The book route is much less painful.  To that end I love a good book that I can refer [...]

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Layaway: a Formal Delayed Gratification Program?

October 7, 2009
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More and more layaway plans from retailers like Sears and Kmart are making a comeback largely because of the recent economic downturn and credit worries.  So that begs the question is layaway a good alternative to just putting the purchase on your credit card?  Let’s dig into the details of the layaway program (we’ll use [...]

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Sinking Funds: taking Budgeting to the Next Level

September 20, 2009
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Boring!!! Okay it might be but it’s a really important tool for your personal finance arsenal.  In the business world a sinking fund is the act of setting aside funds over a time period to pay off debts or acquire assets.  That models well to personal finance so we’ll assume you’ve got your basic monthly  [...]

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Emergencies are Assured So build your Own Emergency Money Fund

September 16, 2009
Emergency Fund

If you are considering any steps at all for getting your personal finances in order your first step should be to establish an emergency money fund. It’s a guarantee that life goes wrong or unexpected. Appliances fail, cars break down, kids get sick, Uncles get incarcerated. You get the drift. So what do you do when life throws you [...]

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Cash for Clunkers Taxable? No not for Federal but Maybe for State.

August 28, 2009

There is a misinformation war afoot with regards to the CARS program or Cash for Clunkers as it’s known commonly. The question centers around whether the program is a taxable event for your income tax. The offical CARS website available at http://www.cars.gov expressly calls out: Is the credit subject to being taxed as income to the [...]

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How to Run Your Personal Finances Like a Fortune 500 Company

August 27, 2009

I’ve spent over half of my professional career working for a Fortune 100 company and have had the dubious role of managing budgets north of 100 Million dollars. While I would be careful to apply anything to do with big business to my personal life there are certainly lessons you can learn for dealing with [...]

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