Kevin MulliganIf you are lucky enough to have a pension plan at work, your next concern is how much you can actually depend on it when you get to retirement. In other words, is your pension plan just a nice piece of paper that will be useless in retirement or will you be able to count … Read more How Safe is Your Pension and Can You Depend on it for Retirement?
When you purchase a home, you make a mental judgment about how long you plan to live there. If the time frame is relatively short, e.g., less than five years, it usually doesn’t make sense to purchase. But sometimes our mental judgments are wrong, or life circumstances force us to move away unexpectedly. It might be … Read more How to Rent Out Your House When You Move Out of State
A 15 or 30 year mortgage is a long time to be paying on the same bill. Even with interest rates at historic lows, a 30 year mortgage will charge you almost 100% of the home’s cost in interest over the life of the loan. For example, a $175,000 mortgage at 4% for 30 years … Read more 4 Ways to Pay Off Your Mortgage Faster
Imagine you’ve been saving money for the down payment on your first home. You and your significant other have been watching the listings like anxious hawks. Your real estate agent has begrudgingly put up with showing you house after house after house for months on end. Then you find the one. It’s beautiful. It has the … Read more What to do When Your Home Appraisal Comes in Low
In the past the process of getting rid of a used vehicle that you didn’t want to bother selling was pretty simple. Just find a charity to accept the vehicle as a donation and take a tax deduction the fair value of the vehicle. It seemed like a win-win. The charity sells the vehicle and … Read more Should You Ever Donate Your Vehicle to Charity?
Can mortgage rates get any lower? How long will homebuyers and refinancing homeowners be able to enjoy these low rates? And if you’ve got a low rate, how should you treat it? Mortgage rates have been bouncing off of historical lows for quite sometime. You’ve heard about it in the news… low rates, foreclosure crisis, … Read more Using Your Mortgage as an Inflation Hedge or Pay It Off Early
Today marks the beginning of the Roth IRA Movement. There is an astounding lack of knowledge about Roth IRAs in the public; this is especially true of the younger generations that have the most to benefit from the long term tax benefits of saving in a Roth IRA. Table of Content What is a Roth … Read more What is a Roth IRA and Everything You Need to Know About It
Home prices have been in decline since the housing bubble burst several years ago. Yet the tax assessed values of homes hasn’t moved as drastically. The truth is if you’ve been living in your home for a significant amount of time and your neighborhood or city has been hit hard with tanking real estate values, … Read more How to Lower Your Property Taxes
You may have heard about preferred stock (or preferred share) before, but exactly how are they different from common stock (or ordinary share). Preferred stock is a another form of ownership in a company. Preferred stock is treated differently than common stock and has significant differences in the type of relationship the shareholder has with … Read more What is Preferred Stock, Types of Preferred Shares, and Risks?
It takes a lot of work to set up a new investment account, get your budget right, and automate your investments. For those of us that are new to investing or just uncomfortable with making changes, it can be easy to leave all of your hard work and decisions made to initially set everything up … Read more Why Set It and Forget It Investing Doesn’t Work