Getting the Most Out of Your Health Insurance Before 2010
It’s open enrollment time for many health insurance plans. And that means you are finding out that premiums, deductibles and co-pays are probably on the rise. In some cases, benefits are shrinking as well. Many new health insurance plans won’t kick in until the new year, though, so that leaves a little more than a [...]
Open Enrollment Time: A Guide to Your Benefits Package
It’s Open Enrollment time at most employers, the time when you get to choose your benefits coverage for next year. You will review your chosen options, and make changes to them as needed. It’s important to be familiar with last year’s benefits. You may get a summary, but can use your paystub to see what [...]
This was a rather interesting week for me. For the first time ever, I had a life insurance agent cursed at me with an F word. The story started last summer when I tried to purchase a term life insurance policy from this agent. He helped my parents stop the monthly payments on their whole [...]
9 Year-End Money Moves
This article is part of an M-Network group writing project, the 12 Days of Christmas – Personal Finance Style. As the project moves through its days, I will be adding each article at the bottom of this post. We’ll be posting from December 1st to December 12th.
The year is quickly coming to an end, and [...]
Ask The Expert with Larry Swedroe, December 2008 Issue
This is the 11th issue of the Ask The Expert column by Larry Swedroe. You can see Larry’s full biography and important disclaimer below. If you are interested in having your question answered by Larry, please send me an email via the contact page.
Now, let’s get to the questions and answers (please note that the [...]
Financial Risks And Personal Finance Risk Management, Part 1
Risk management is a methodology to mitigate negative consequences resulting from threats and uncertainties. In this article, I’ll be exploring financial risks focused on personal finance and how to minimize these risks. Since risk management is a huge topic, I am going to limit it within the scope of the REAL Wealth Building framework — [...]
Kent Irwin, who recently wrote a guest article: Is Suze Orman Right, Can You Be Your Own Financial Planner?, sent me a free license to use his eFinPLAN online financial planning software. In this post, I am going to provide you with my initial experience, and I will follow up with a second post to [...]
Don’t Buy Credit Card Life and Disability Insurance
You would never take out an insurance policy on behalf of your bank and pay its premiums, would you? But that’s exactly what you’re doing when your credit card company convinces you to buy life and disability insurance. The sales pitch plays upon fears of the unknown:
What if you became ill or disabled and couldn’t [...]
I have a secret desire to be a professional financial planner one day (well, now it’s not so secret anymore). Of course, this would take me in a completely direction from my current career. Because of this desire, I jumped at the chance to interview Ciaran McKeever of Chance Favors who is a Certified Financial [...]
Recently, my friend Patrick from Cash Money Life wrote, “Your Greatest Asset is the Ability to Create Income.” In it, he said:
“What is your greatest asset? Most people think it is their house. They are wrong. Bank account? Wrong again. For the vast majority of people, the greatest asset they have is the ability to [...]
| High Interest Savings Accounts | 1.51% |
| High Yield CDs (1-year) | 1.60% |
| High Yield Checking Accounts | 1.46% |
| Best Credit Card | TrueEarnings® |
| 0% APR Balance Transfer | 12 mo |
| Lowest Interest Rate | 9.75% |
| Best Cash Back Reward | 5% |