Money Tips Network

When making a monthly budget, it is easy to forget certain budget categories.

One of the most often overlooked and underfunded categories is Home Maintenance.

It’s easy to understand.  None of us want to think about stuff breaking – especially in our home – so we tend to ignore this vital category.

Over the years, we have employed two different techniques for including Home Maintenance in our monthly budget.

1.  We simply lumped it into our baby Emergency Fund.  That’s kinda what the baby emergency fund is for, in a way, so that’s what we did.  When something broke, we stopped our accelerated debt reduction, fixed the broken item, and then continued with debt reduction.  This worked well for us, but wasn’t the perfect solution.

I got dinged with a late-payment fee.

It happens.

Last month, it happened to me.  Twice.

I’m usually very thorough when it comes to paying our bills on time.  However, last month, something happened, and not one, but two bills went unpaid.  Once I realized that I had missed the payments, it was too late.  They were past-due and we had been charged late fees.

So, two days ago, I paid both bills, in full.  Then, today, once I checked that both payments had posted to the accounts, I called each company and asked to have the late-payment fees waived.

Both companies were super cool.  In less than 10 minutes, both companies had credited the fees back to my accounts.  That’s $50 in savings.  Not bad.

The moral of the story – We all make mistakes and it never hurts to call.  Both companies recognized that I was a long-time customer, acknowledged that I had a solid track record of paying my bills early, and were cool when handling the situation.

Next to selling your house, selling a car will be one of the larger sales you’ll make in your lifetime, and you’ll probably do it many times over the years. In many cases this also means there are thousands of dollars on the line so it’s crucial you take the steps necessary in order to […]

The post How to Sell Your Car for the Most Money first appeared on Gen X Finance.

The post How to Sell Your Car for the Most Money appeared first on Gen X Finance.

Ever wondered what does ETF stands for? ETF is the abbreviation of exchange traded fund, sometimes people will refer to this as electronic traded fund but the first is more correct. So that is it, that is all you wanted to know, you can click away from the page now. Well I guess I will […]

The post What Does ETF Stand For? first appeared on Gen X Finance.

The post What Does ETF Stand For? appeared first on Gen X Finance.

Conventional wisdom tells us it’s impossible to be saving too much for retirement, but is this really true? We’ve been hearing about the need to save more for retirement, and for good reason.

The Top Ten Freebies You Can Score on Your Birthday This Year Happy Birthday!  Yes, we all hear this on our own special day but how many of us really indulge because of the occasion?

Here are this week’s cool posts from my fellow personal finance writers -

Financial Ramblings has compiled a list of the 17 states that are observing some form of state sales tax holiday in 2013.  School is just around the corner and it’s time to buy school supplies.  We take advantage of our state’s sales tax holiday each year.

Girl Meets Debt had one of those awesome moments of pride that come during the debt repayment process.  It’s always exciting and encouraging to see others reducing debt and having victories along the way.  Rock on!

Four years ago, my wife and I decided that the time was right for our family to purchase a new home.  With a down-payment in our savings, we started our search.  Here’s how we found our home -

We began our search within a 20 mile radius of my wife’s workplace.  We live in a rural part of our state – but there are several small neighborhoods within our desired area.

Once or twice a week, I would check the local online real estate listings.  We found four or five homes that we liked, but all of them were outside of our price-range.  I also checked our local paper, but had no better luck.

Speaking of our price-range – we qualified for a substantial loan amount – but we were only comfortable taking out a loan that we knew we could pay back in 15 years, or less.  We were not simply focused on the payment we could afford.  We were focused on the house we could afford.

How much is that bundle of joy going to cost you? There are lots of online calculators out there, but a quick search will yield this estimator at Babycenter.com. The calculations are based on USDA’s 2010 report, wherein they take account of the region you live in, your annual income, and the type of schooling your child will eventually attend (big factor here). After spitting in my info, the calculator tells me I’ll be spending $13,000 this year.

The thing is, unless you’re an extreme bean counter, most people head into parenting with their eyes half opened. That isn’t to say people decide to have children out of thin-air, but I have yet to met a couple that based their baby decision on numbers.  “Yep honey, we can set aside $10,000 per year, so we can definitely have another baby. Just let me know when you’re ovulating!”