Category Archives: Debt
It Pays to Pay With Cash
If you wait long enough, all of your favorite old-fashioned habits come back in style. After decades of nothing but dark denim on store shelves, faded jeans are making their first appearance since a time so early in the 90s that no one in Florida had heard grunge rock. Now that the babies who… Read More »
Coping With Unexpected Financial Setbacks in Retirement
Perhaps you heard that, after much media hype, Florida abolished permanent alimony. Pursuant to the new law, all alimony awards have an automatic end date, and alimony obligations cannot last longer than the marriage did. Therefore, if you got married at 25 and divorced at 50, the court can only order you to pay… Read More »
Reverse Mortgages
Loneliness is an essential feature of the American experience and has been such at least since the days of the Beat Generation. One of the most obvious signs of this loneliness is that the only correspondence you get, whether in the form of email or postal mail, is from people who want to make… Read More »
Can Your Debt Problems Prevent You From Opening a Bank Account?
You may have seen personal finance vloggers field questions from consumers who are stressed out about how their low credit score is stopping them from getting car loans and is making their credit cards more expensive. To you, this sounds like high class worries. These people who are worrying about what they can and… Read More »
Credit Mix
Is it better to owe money to just one creditor or many? Should you take on more debt because it is good debt? Paying off your debts is hard enough, but trying to rationalize why certain debts are good or bad is downright confusing. It makes sense to take out a home mortgage, because… Read More »
Is There Such a Thing As Good Debt?
No one likes to be in debt. In fact, there are entire corners of the Internet where people share their journeys toward zero debt with much the same zeal as, in other corners of the Internet, people count their days of sobriety out loud. Imagine, though, that you managed to pay off all of… Read More »
How to Get Through the Summer When Your Credit Card Is Maxed Out
Your credit card balance is already at 90 percent of your credit limit. It is of little consolation to find out that millions of other credit card users are in a similar situation to yours. You still have to worry about how you are going to get through the next three months, when you… Read More »
You Can Help Create Generational Financial Literacy
Knowledge may be power, but it isn’t money. When you read think pieces about how the millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck despite working at least 40 hours per week are struggling financially because they are ignorant, your first instinct is to tell those journalists to tell you to your face that… Read More »
We Are All ALICE
Economists say that the economy is doing fine, but you are flat broke, and so is everyone you know. Finally, there is a name for people in our situation. We are ALICE, which stands for asset-limited, income-constrained, and employed. In other words, we work day and night, but we have little to show for… Read More »
Beware of Doom Spending
Yes, the root cause of our financial problems is that everything is too expensive, especially unavoidable purchases like groceries, gasoline, and rent. It is also true that necessities are so expensive that salaried employees are now starting to feel the precariousness of their financial situation and getting a taste of what freelancers and hourly… Read More »