Money Tips Network

One of the great things about good travel credit cards is the travel-related insurance they include for free.

Being invited to a wedding or asked to be a member of a wedding party is an honor, but a costly one. No one knows this better than the serial wedding guest.

There are points when the frequency of weddings and wedding-related obligations in life increases due to factors largely beyond a serial wedding guest’s control. In my 20s, it was simply a matter of timing: Friends had finished school, met people, and opted to get hitched. Some wedding required flights and/or hotels (Las Vegas and West Palm Beach come to mind), some just required hotels and a train or bus ticket (Salem, Mass., and Long Island), and some just fell well beyond my budget (Honolulu, where I sent an off-registry garage door opener instead).

When Kim and I moved last summer from our riverfront condo to this country cottage on the outskirts of Portland, one of my primary aims was to slash our spending on both housing and food.

Although we owned our condo free and clear, living there still cost us roughly $1200 per month. Plus, there were the added costs that came from living so close to bars and restaurants. Sure, we didn’t have to eat out as often as we did — we understand that was a choice — but we enjoyed exploring what the neighborhood had to offer.

Well, I’ve now had time to gather enough data to determine whether we were able to achieve this goal, to cut our monthly costs. I’m pleased to say the answer is “yes”! But for a few years, this gain is going to be completely negated by our massive home remodeling project.

Let’s look at some numbers.

Saving on Housing

To start, here’s how my monthly housing costs have changed:

As you walk through our kitchen, one thing you can’t help but notice is that there are usually a lot of food-related projects that are almost always ongoing.

In just a cursory glance at our kitchen right now, one would find a small batch of homemade peach cider in the process of fermenting, a batch of homemade kombucha that’s also in the middle of fermenting, a jar of homemade preserved lemons, a bunch of home-canned items in the pantry, a ton of little jars of various seasoning mixes in the pantry, several full meals made in advance in the freezer, and some homemade bread dough rising in a bowl. This isn’t an unusual state of affairs.

Why do this? Why not just buy these items at the store? Doesn’t it take a lot of time and energy?

There are several reasons why we spend time and energy on food related projects, actually.

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Shopping online is always a fun way to pass the time, but when your order arrives and it doesn't fit right or isn't how you pictured it, going through the return process can be a headache.

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To avoid becoming a rags-to-riches-to-rags-again statistic, consider these tips on...

I’ve been a homeowner for 24 of the last 25 years. Based on this, you might think I’m an advocate of homeownership over renting. That’s not the case. The older I get, the more I appreciate there’s no correct answer in the perennial “is it better to rent or buy?” debate. Sometimes buying a home makes the most sense. Sometimes renting is the smarter choice.

In an editorial in the June 2007 issue of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Knight Kiplinger wrote, “It often costs less to rent. The annual cost of owning a property, be it a house or a condo, is usually greater than the cost of renting, after taxes.” I agree.

Today, let’s look at a handful of ways to evaluate the rent versus buy decision from a financial perspective.

The world of credit scoring is, by nature, an ever-evolving one. FICO scores were first introduced to lenders in the United States nearly 30 years ago, in 1989. A little over a decade ago, in 2006, the three major credit reporting agencies (CRAs) themselves – Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian – created the VantageScore credit score.

FICO and VantageScore represent the two most common brands of credit scoring systems. Each brand has numerous generations of their credit scoring models (think 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc.). When it comes to FICO, in particular, there are also a number of credit score variants such as mortgage scores, auto scores, and bankcard scores. Between all of the different FICO and VantageScore scoring models, you have several dozen different credit scores commercially available.