Feed items

If your credit is less than perfect, you’ll have a more difficult time obtaining and using a credit card. The flip side is that responsible use of a credit card is a fantastic way to rebuild your credit score.

Even with bad credit, you have some great options to start rebuilding your financial future. The best credit cards for bad credit come in two different varieties: secured and unsecured (low credit cards).

If you can, I highly recommend getting an unsecured card, like the Credit One Bank® Gas Rewards Credit Card.

Highlights:

There are three main reasons why I recommend this card for people with subpar credit:

Unexpected twists and turns happen all of the time in our professional lives.

A child is born, causing a parent to start staying at home. A side business takes off. A spectacular job offer appears out of the blue. A severe illness occurs. A person is burnt out on their current career and needs a change. A company downsizes, leaving you without a job.

Those are just a few of the things that can happen during a career, completely changing the direction of your professional life.

It’s professional common sense to avoid burning those bridges. There’s no need to destroy all of your professional relationships on your way out the door, regardless of your feelings on the situation that led to your career shift. Make things as tidy as you can when you leave with as many positive feelings as you can possibly generate.

This article first appeared at US News and World Report Money.

Drinking soda (or pop or coke, depending on the region of the United States you reside in) can add up surprisingly quickly, particularly if you have several children. Even worse than that, soda is a way to add a bunch of extra calories to your diet, making it easy to gain weight if you’re not careful and contribute to a number of medical conditions from dental damage to diabetes.

It makes sense to break a soda habit. Breaking that habit can be quite tricky, however, and not every solution works for everyone. Different people drink soda for different reasons, from the fizziness on the tongue to the sweetness to the caffeine to the pure routine of it.

Here are five low-cost options for breaking the soda habit that address the different reasons that people drink soda.

Last summer, my two oldest children embarked on a summer-long project that they ended up taking a ton of pride in. In fact, we expanded that summer project and are repeating it again this summer to their great enthusiasm. (What project was it? It’s the first one on this list.)

We learned a few lessons from the project, though.

Kids won’t latch onto any project you suggest. We tried launching a bunch of larger summer project with them. Only one really took off – and another one somewhat took off. The rest floundered.

Thus, inexpensive projects work best. You don’t want to dump a lot of money into a project only to find that it didn’t click with your kids.

Share your ideas of what worked with your children. The ideas here start off with what worked best with our children, then is followed with ideas that worked for the children of friends of ours.