Planning

Road map to financial dreams – Part 2

This is part 2 of a 4 part series on creating and achieving our financial dreams. I outline 9 simple steps for doing this. This post details step 4. Read the part 1 of the series here. “Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.” – Thomas Alva Edison In part one of [...]

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Are you too big to fail? – Create your personal bailout fund

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ May data there are more than 6.7 billion workers who are unemployed for more than 27 weeks. Emergency room visits are on the rise. Do you have the money to float you on a rainy day? Even if your job and health are perfectly fine, a small car [...]

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Checking accounts – What are my options?

What is the costliest piece of clothing you have? May be its a wedding gown, or an expensive suit… mine is a t-shirt. It cost me $492. No it is not lined with diamond stones, it just a low quality cotton t-shirt with a bank logo printed on it. Everyone has a checking account. For [...]

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What is in your credit report & Why should you care?

Because the wealth of information it contains can decide how much loan you can get, how much you pay for a certain service, if you will be able to rent your favorite apartment or even if you can get a particular job! Starting from a small car loan to a major house purchase, creditors check [...]

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Road map to financial dreams – Part 1

This is part 1 of a 4 part series on creating and achieving our financial dreams. I outline 9 simple steps for doing this. This post details the first 3 steps. “What is now proved, was once only imagined.” – William Blake Why do we need money? What do we want to do with money? [...]

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Commission-free Vanguard ETF trades for Vanguard Brokerage clients

Vanguard, a long term leader in providing low-cost index and actively managed funds, announced today that they will be offering commission-free Vanguard ETF (Exchange Traded Funds) trades for their brokerage clients.  This is probably coming as a response to the competition from Schwab who introduced their commission-free Exchange Traded Funds late last year and Fidelity [...]

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The Big list of Personal Finance Management Software

Yesterday, I wrote about my experiences on trying out Mint, Yodlee, Wesabe and Thrive. Those are not the only personal finance software applications available. I have compiled a comprehensive list of resources that are available for various platforms, free or otherwise. I plan to review most of them (mainly the free ones). As I review [...]

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Reviews: Mint, Yodlee, Wesabe & Thrive

Financial Aggregation is a technology that consolidates information from different accounts, including credit cards, checking accounts, savings accounts, investments and loans, in one single place. This gives a comprehensive overview of your account balances and transactions. With just one login you can see all the transactions you made, using different credit/debit cards, balances in each [...]

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Know where your money goes

Don’t tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what they are. – James W. Frick I had created “The Perfect Budget”; categories where I wanted to spend my money and dollar amounts for each category.  No matter how much I tried though I always, always [...]

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