Money Tips Network

If you've got a dose of wanderlust but are battling a restrictive budget and maybe a few travel fears, this list is for you. These 10 international cities are easy to get to with lots of flights, buses, and trains arriving regularly, they're easy to get around in and enjoy, and it's easy to save money with lots of frugal options.

Don't just take it from me; I've polled the frequent traveling community to get their votes on the best international cities to travel and be frugal in. You may even be surprised by some of the cities on this list! (See also: 25 Secrets From the World's Most Frugal Frequent Travelers)

Have you ever noticed how focused we are on winners? Most of our time and attention is devoted to people who have already succeeded — entertainers who now fill the stadiums or walk the red carpet, influential politicians, famous CEOs. But that's merely the end of the story. So much more can be learned from the failures that got them there. Failure provides some of life's most enduring lessons.

You don’t need to have 1,000 employees and a mahogany-walled board room to reap the rewards from business credit cards this year. Small businesses with few employees, sole proprietors, and independent contractors can all use business credit cards to manage cash flow and earn rewards on their spending.

In fact, even if you don’t have a business set up, you can reap the benefits of the best business credit cards. Yes, that means freelancers, financial advisers, and any other person can potentially qualify for a business card if they are established as a business.

I have been self-employed the majority of my working career consulting and freelancing, and I always use a credit card to keep track of my expenses. I started with a personal credit card, but recently upgraded to the Chase Ink Bold® for my LLC.

What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to five word summaries. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. Auto refinancing
2. New direction
3. Supporting local businesses
4. “Driving into the ground” perspective
5. Bad neighborhood, cheap rent
6. Ups and downs
7. Credit card debt first steps
8. How is a 401(k) bad?
9. Frozen sandwiches?

As you might imagine, I get lots of requests from publishers who want to send me a book to review on Free Money Finance. Of all the requests I get, I probably only bite on 25% of them (the ones I think I might be interested in.) And of those I request, I only end up writing about one in five (many have GREAT titles but their content is lacking).

Sarah and I argue about politics sometimes. We have different perspectives on a lot of political issues and sometimes that will cause us to have rather vigorous debates on things. I tend to be more concerned about civil liberties than Sarah is, for example, and our different feelings on civil liberties and privacy caused us to have more than a few disagreements about Edward Snowden and Wikileaks, for example.

At the end of the day, though, we still care for each other deeply. Our political disagreements – or my disdain for Sarah’s taste in movies or her eye-rolling at my constant suggestion to play more board games – aren’t what makes up the basics of our relationship.

Our relationship is based on other things. We agree fundamentally on how to treat other people. We agree on how to parent our children and how important it is to communicate with each other. We also agree on how to use the resources we share – our money being a major part of that.

Kristin Wong

The topic of maximizing credit-card rewards seems to be a popular one lately, especially in the world of personal finance blogging. Many of us use our credit cards to pay our bills and monthly expenses. We earn cash back and rake in the rewards. Some of us have even mastered the envious ability to churn [...]

How I earn credit card rewards responsibly from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

This blog was posted by Kristin Wong

Living life "with no regrets" is often said in the context of looking back, as if it were purely about a way of viewing things you've done in the past. But what about taking a more active role in living with no regrets?

Living well is an art, and there's no playbook on how to do it. But just like there are certain Decisions You'll Never Regret Making, there are some that many people almost always do. "Not reading this list" might just be one of them…

While traveling recently I picked up a copy of USA Today at my hotel. Reading through the financial section, I saw an interesting question. A reader was asking how much he would have to invest per day to retire in 30 years.

I found the response online and here's what they had to say:

Investors might be surprised to hear that for the average, typical person making a number of back-of-the-envelope assumptions, $82.28 a day may be what you should be shooting for, based on an analysis done for USA TODAY by investment management firm T. Rowe Price. If you save $82 a day and invest it in a fairly aggressive but not crazy portfolio, in 30 years you could amass enough wealth to generate the U.S. average household income for 30 years, even after adjusted for inflation.