1. Create a new budget. A new year calls for a new budget. Rolling over an existing budget might be easy, but making changes now is easier than dealing with debt in the future. Have you moved, switched insurance, or added a new family member (child or pet) in the last year? Take into account what changed [...]
With only a few days left until Christmas, retailers are rolling out deep discounts to attract last-minute shoppers ready to click “BUY.” The so-called “flash sale” discount sites are particularly enticing. A designer bag or new tech tablet is offered in limited quantities, and a timer runs nearby telling you how much time is left. Thinking [...]
Though the United States government hasn’t been fiscally responsible this year, at least the American people have: For the 9th consecutive quarter, delinquency rates fell for consumer credit cards. It’s exciting news, but it remains to be seen if consumers kept up these good habits on Black Friday. US retail sales hit $11.4 billion to kick off the holiday shopping [...]
This year, the American Farm Bureau Federation is reporting an increase in the cost of a traditional Thanksgiving meal. The retail cost of menu items for a classic Thanksgiving dinner including turkey, stuffing, cranberries, pumpkin pie and all the basic trimmings increased about 13 percent this year…the average cost of this year’s feast for 10 [...]
Welcome to this week’s edition of our Tuesday Top 5, Econ4U’s weekly tips post to help you manage your money in five easy steps. If you’ve read a newspaper in the past 3 years, you may have been alarmed at reports of a volatile stock market, high unemployment, and retirement plans in jeopardy. Ever wonder if [...]
It’s Friday, so here’s a little financial humor to close out the week. In this hilarious ad for Norwegian bank DnB NOR, a woman awakes in a five-star hotel room to discover that she has drunkenly married George Clooney, who adoringly shows her online photos of a vacation home he has picked out as a [...]
Welcome to this week’s edition of our Tuesday Top 5, Econ4U’s weekly tips post to help you manage your money in five easy steps. There are a million articles on how to save more money, but how many of them contain advice you can actually use? We distilled the best advice we’ve ever gotten into five [...]
Spinning off Tuesday’s post, the question remains: If you do manage to cut your spending on discretionary purchases, how much money does that help you save every year? Bills.com has a nifty Ways to Save Money feature that shows you how much your savings can add up if you sock away the money in an [...]
Being a personal-finance aficionado, I always click on those articles that promise to help cut the fat from your budget. Most recently, I was intrigued by the idea of RealSimple.com’s “24 Hours of Savings” article for finding ways to trim your spending throughout the day. However, it’s disappointing that the bulk of the advice seems [...]
You’ve seen those commercials on TV that proclaim, “For just 50 cents per day, you can change someone’s life.” And while some of those charities are no doubt worthy, what if the life you could change were your own? This is not a gimmick. To see how spare change can add up, I was just [...]
