Plenty of people leave shared housing behind forever after college.  I was not one of them.  For several years, I lived in a few places with different roommates:  some good, some not so good.  The last 2 roommates have been people I didn’t know so well before letting them move in, which can obviously cause [...]

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I hate to budget.  Budgets seem restrictive to me.  It’s totally psychological, but for some reason the mere act of making a budget makes me feel like I’m depriving myself, and nobody likes being deprived:  it’s depressing.  Inevitably, I would end up breaking my budget.  I wouldn’t go into debt, of course, but I would [...]

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This post is in response to the personal finance confession project started by Are You Going To Be This Way The Rest Of The Time I Know You (long name).  I ran across it over on Mrs Micah’s blog earlier today and thought it might be fun to share.  Admitting you have a problem is [...]

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Often when speaking of relations with the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan would toss out the phrase “trust, but verify“.  Reagan reportedly repeated this old Russian proverb (Russian:  Доверяй, но проверяй) at the signing of the INF treaty to which his counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev responded “you repeat this phrase every time we meet”.  Not to be outdone, Reagan replied, “I [...]

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My 8th grade sunday school teacher was a billionaire, the 380th richest man in America (and 799th richest man in the world), in fact, according to the Forbes 400 2007 list.  With a net worth of $1.3 billion, Truett Cathy knows what he’s talking about and one of the keys to success is learning from those [...]

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Ever heard the phrase” if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is?”  I hope so because I wrote about it a few weeks ago.  But just in case you missed out on that, here’s another word of warning.  I was reading an informative article the other day at usatoday.com entitled 10 Myths About [...]

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Ok, so we all know variable annuities are usually better deals for the annuity salesman than the customer.  But let’s ignore all that for a moment.  Surely there must be certain circumstances when an annuity makes sense, right?  Indeed, I’ve already written about some of the few (very few) ways you can use a variable [...]

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Morningstar recently laid out a few ways to tell if your fund company is putting you first.  Corporate culture is key when it comes to how you’re treated as a shareholder.  Are the fund boards independent enough of corporate management to really stand up for the rights of shareholders?  Are fund managers compensated in such a [...]

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I would probably already be a multi-millionaire if it weren’t for these huge money-wasters.  I estimate just in the past month, I’ve wasted approximately $152,502.42 on the following vices.  Not that I’m complaining: you only live once, right?  I have no intention of cutting back.  This is for informational purposes only.
 Let’s start from the top:

Women
It’s been said that women [...]

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Stuck in unusually bad traffic on the way home from the office Thursday afternoon, I heard a commercial that really pissed me off.  It was for a company called BlueHippo (hereafter referred to as Evil Greedy Corporation) that sells  laptop computers “no matter how bad your credit.”  I usually just sigh and change the station, [...]

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