Money Tips Network

Gift cards work as gifts. But what if you receive gift cards that you know you won't use, or stick one in a drawer and find it months or years later?

Do you have unused or unwanted gift cards? Here's what you do with them …

I happen to think that gift cards are a decent choice for Christmastime giving. They're convenient and flexible. A well-chosen gift card can show that you know what the person really likes.

Once in a while, though, a gift card goes unused for a while. This can happen for a number of reasons:

Holiday debt is easy to rack up, but paying it off can wreak havoc on your budget for years. Still, Americans seem more than willing to pile it on no matter what.

Last night's recipe from HelloFresh was Bulgogi Pork Tenderloin. As always, the instructions were clear and easy to follow. As always, it took me about twice as long to prep things as the recipe card said they would.

I chopped the vegetables, boiled the rice, seared the meat, made the sauce. But when I reached the final step — “finish and serve” — I hit a wall of sorts.

“Ugh,” I said to Kim, who was playing with our three cats and one dog simultaneously. “The recipe calls for a tablespoon of butter in the rice. I hate adding butter to rice. It makes it gummy and gross. But HelloFresh always wants me to do it.”

“I like butter in my rice,” Kim said, throwing a bacon ball for the dog while kicking a catnip toy for the cats. “But if you don't like it, don't add it.”

After spending a decade as a pastor, I realized in May of 2018 that I was ready to make a drastic career change…into personal finance education.

I’ve always loved to write, so I wanted to first see if I could actually make money writing about personal finance. But I made a commitment to myself. In one year's time, I was going to have a day job where I helped people learn how to handle their money wisely. The question was just in what capacity.

So I set a deadline for myself. If I hadn’t figured out a way by May 2019 to make enough money as a freelance writer to pay the bills, I would get certified as a teacher and apply to be an economics teacher at local high schools.

When it’s time to buy a house, would you rather drag yourself to a traditional bank branch and meet with a mortgage officer, or do everything from your phone or computer? You’d probably rather secure a mortgage online, which is one reason online mortgage lenders like Better.com, SoFi and Reali have changed the landscape of mortgage lending. Especially given how many online lenders offer the best mortgage rates, lower fees and easier qualification, more and more homeowners are picking online lenders over traditional banks.

While it may seem like the last topic you'd want to bring up over a nice meal, dinner parties thrown specifically to talk about death are a growing phenomenon.

The following is a guest post from Debt Free Doctor.

Whether you're a Christian or not, the simple act of giving makes you an overall better person and it's a topic that's discussed rather frequently on other personal finance blogs.

My wife and I began teaching this principle to our kids when they were younger. Using one of Dave Ramsey's recommendations, we taught them the three things to do with money:

• Give
• Spend
• Save 

Of the three, we stressed the "giving" part as I believe that everything given to us is on loan from the "Big Guy" upstairs.

One of the hard truths about turning your financial life around, particularly if you don’t have a high income, is that financial progress feels really slow. You do make progress in the right direction, but there’s a lot of “three steps forward, two steps back” mentality and the steps forward are incredibly slow. You can make good financial choices for months and feel as though you’re barely making any forward progress on your goals.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Here are three big ones.

Last year on Black Friday, I made this agreement with myself that I was going to utterly ignore it (aside from a bit of investigating that I felt I needed to do for an article or two that I was writing). I wasn’t going to buy anything. I wasn’t going to go out shopping. Rather, I was going to spend the day playing some games with my kids, working on a homemade gift for the holidays, and getting some reading in.

At three different times during the day, I found myself looking at Black Friday sales. I actually took note of it at the time, thinking it would make for an interesting post someday.

So, how did that happen?

The first time, I was reading social media and I noticed that a person I knew was posting about an item on deep discount, and I clicked through to check it out. I didn’t buy anything.