Posted June 8, 2009 - 16:22 by Xin Lu
Personal Finance, Real Estate and Housing
Lately it seems that rent prices have been dropping in many areas of the country. Here in San Mateo some residential apartments are dropping prices as much as 20%. This seemed a bit unbelievable until I looked on Craigslist and found that a specific apartment my husband and I looked at around two years ago actually dropped its price by $300 a month from $1699 to $1399 a month. With our lease expiring soon, I wonder if we should move or try to negotiate a lower rent.
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Posted May 7, 2009 - 15:47 by Andrea Dickson
Personal Finance
Stuff costs a lot. Stuff we buy, stuff we have, stuff we want to get rid of, stuff we don't buy because we can't afford it, stuff we bought that we can't afford, stuff that isn't stuff, but is actually a service of some kind. This week in the Best of Personal Finance, we looka t the cost of stuff, even stuff you don't really think about.
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Posted March 19, 2009 - 12:20 by Philip Brewer
Personal Finance, Frugal Living
Finding deals is a key topic on Wise Bread, and for good reason--finding a great price may make something you want affordable and make it easier to stretch your resources to cover your needs. There's a lot here about the tactics of finding good prices--knowing where to look, knowing how to negotiate, being willing to wait, and so on. This post, though, is about four other tactics for frugality--tactics that, for me, make a much bigger difference than finding deals.
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Posted September 15, 2008 - 19:14 by Philip Brewer
Real Estate and Housing
There are several things you can do with a house that you own. During the housing boom, most of the attention was focused on two of those things: You could sell it, or you could borrow money against it. Now that the bust has arrived, it's easy to see the limitations of that particular model. Happily, there's a more stable, more useful way to value your house.
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Posted February 17, 2008 - 15:27 by Philip Brewer
Personal Finance, Frugal Living
When you think of people ruining their lives with foolish spending, it's easy to focus on the little things that add up--the meals out, the hefty bar tab, the daily Starbucks habit, and the retail therapy (whether for new clothes, new shoes, or the latest must-have electronic gizmo). The fact is, though, that these expenses (although they can make it tough to save for the future) are not the ones that ruin people's lives. It's the fixed expenses that do that.
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Posted September 4, 2007 - 12:38 by Philip Brewer
Frugal Living, Real Estate and Housing
Everybody has seen a rent-versus-buy analysis. On one side you add up the mortgage, taxes, insurance, and maintenance costs (being sure to adjust for the tax write-off of the mortgage interest). On the other side you add up, well, just the rent, really. Then, at the end of 30 years the homeowner has a house and the renter has... nothing. Here's a different way to look at it.
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