Money Tips Network

Travel booking is a complex game. You spend hours researching and monitoring various websites to get the best deals on flights, hotel reservations, and rental cars. If the price drops after all your hard work, you can feel like all your effort has been wasted. (See also: Secrets of Last Minute Travel)

Fortunately, there are several tools you can now use to protect yourself from price fluctuations. These tools monitor prices, so you can take advantage of any price drops that happen — even after you've made a booking.

When I was a child, my family saved hundreds of dollars a year by cancelling our residential trash service and hauling our own junk to the dump instead. Once a month my sister and I would load the household garbage into the pickup truck and escort our father to the town dump. We liked going to the dump. The spectacle of sanitation workers racing around the garbage pit on their bulldozers had an entertaining "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome" quality. Also, as a reward for our services, our dad would take us for breakfast at Denny's on the way home.

I often see and hear ads for programs that involve the ideas of “banking on yourself” or “paying yourself first.” They’re pretty prevalent on talk radio and you’ll sometimes see ads for programs like these in the newspaper or in the back of financial magazines.

The claims made in the ads seem extraordinary. Many of them claim to allow you to eventually borrow money from yourself rather than borrowing money from a bank when you need to make a major purchase (like buying a home). Many also claim to provide a road straight to financial independence.

It should be noted that I’m grouping several different systems together into one post. There are a lot of variations on what I’m about to describe. The information below doesn’t describe any one system exactly, but many of these programs follow the same general framework.

Here’s how the system works in general.

This summer, my family along with some additional guests are going on a lengthy road trip that will involve visiting an ocean, hitting multiple national parks, and stopping at Disneyworld along the way.

Given that the group size would virtually require two vehicles, we spent a lot of time trying to find a way to rent a large passenger van so we could all ride together.

I had a chance to check out the perfect vehicle – a Nissan NV Passenger. It just checks off every box for our trip.

The problem? Renting it is prohibitively expensive. It just doesn’t make financial sense, no matter how nice it would be. We sat down and calculated the costs of driving two of our own vehicles on the trip and including all of the depreciation and fuel and maintenance, the two vehicles are just far less expensive than renting one comparable vehicle.

The book The Charles Schwab Guide to Finances After Fifty: Answers to Your Most Important Money Questions addresses the issue of whether or not a person needs life insurance once their kids are grown. It lists five questions people need to consider when making this decision as follows:

• Do you have a financial obligation? (such as a very large debt)
• Do you have a spouse or other dependent with on-going needs?
• Are estate taxes a concern?
• Do you want to leave a large portion of your estate to charity?
• Do you own a business?

If you answer any of these "yes", you may need life insurance well beyond the time when your kids are grown.

Here's my position on each of the above:

J.D. Roth emailed this morning to tell me that Mr. Money Mustache is visiting Portland later this week, and they’re hosting a blog meetup on Thursday, along with Tyler Tervooren of Riskology. If you’re in the Portland area, come meet the three mustachioed men. J.D. posted the details and directions on his site JDRoth.com today. This sounds like a fun event and I wish I could attend. Enjoy!

This article is by staff writer William Cowie.

A while ago, my wife and I did what we do from time to time — ask if there’s another cost-saving opportunity we’ve overlooked. I don’t know about you, but the quest for fiscal prudence is generally at its highest in our household after some indulgent purchase. “Hey, look! We can compensate for this luxo-foobie by slashing costs here!” (Are we the only people who do this?)

The indulgence in question was an iPhone. My trooper wife had been braving modern civilization with a dumb phone. (Someone from the ’80s would have called a slim, foldable phone which sends text messages anything but dumb, but that’s a different subject.) It worked fine and was cheap, but, well, even it began to show signs of age. Cell phones not being fine wine, I decided to surprise her with an iPhone, to heck with the cost. She did not resist.

Naked With Cash is an ongoing series at Consumerism Commentary in which readers share their households’ finances with other readers. These participants benefit from the accountability that comes from tracking their finances publicly and the feedback of the four expert Certified Financial Planners (CFPs).

For more information, read this introduction.

This post is by staff writer Honey Smith.

Well, the last couple of months have been a pretty wild ride in The Honeycomb. We moved out of our old place and concluded our experience with Cash for Keys, we bought a house and moved, and I am experimenting with a new student loan payoff strategy. Let’s explore each of these big changes a bit further, shall we?

Big change 1: The culmination of “Cash for Keys”

After I posted about foreclosure from the tenant’s perspective, the law firm representing the bank served us with papers for an eviction hearing in superior court. The kicker? The hearing and eviction date were set 2 weeks before the move-out date we’d agreed upon in writing with the same law firm!