Money Tips Network

When I started Get Rich Slowly in 2006, I had no idea other money blogs existed. I'd been blogging about cats, computers, and comic books since 1997 — before blog was even a word! — and I thought my new venture might be the first blog about personal finance.

I was wrong.

I learned quickly that there were already dozens (dozens!) of people blogging about money on the interwebs. For instance:

What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to summaries of five or fewer words. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. Trusting online banks
2. What are capital gains?
3. Evaluating a hoarder’s shed
4. Auto liability insurance help
5. 401(k) or 403(b)?
6. Turning weekends into vacations
7. Vegetarian and saving money
8. Extra 529 money

Women working to achieve financial independence face an extra hurdle: the hidden cost of being female.

Though it’s cheekily referred to as the “pink tax”, the additional cost women incur for personal-care products, toys, clothing, dry cleaning, health care, mortgages, and vehicle maintenance is no joking matter. It inflates our budgets, limits our ability to save, and sometimes hinders our ability to access affordable and safe sources of credit.

Based on that semi-intense description of the pink tax, you may think it’s already been made illegal to charge someone more on the basis of their gender. But that’s not true. There’s no federal law prohibiting companies from charging different prices for products that are identical (or very similar), but which are marketed by gender. At least not currently.

One of my favorite self-improvement tools, whether it’s for financial improvement or fitness or diet or moral improvement or whatever, is the 30-day challenge. It’s a tool I’ve used for years to nudge myself in a better direction and establish better habits in my life.

For those unaware, a 30-day challenge is simply a challenge to oneself to adopt some sort of lifestyle change for 30 days. It might be something very discrete, like “meditate for 15 minutes each day for 30 days.” It might be something like “eat only 1,800 calories a day for 30 days.” It could be something like “don’t speak negatively about coworkers for 30 days.” I wrote about financial applications for 30-day challenges in the past, and suggested 10 such challenges:

When Sarah and I first launched into our financial turnaround, the changes were painful, especially at first. There were a lot of “treats” we dropped out of our life in order to try to achieve some measure of financial success, and I’ll be the first to admit that it wasn’t easy. We went from eating out most nights to trying to figure out how to cook interesting meals for ourselves that weren’t just “open the package, pop in the microwave or oven.” We stopped indulging in endless buying for some of our hobbies – instead of buying books all the time, we became library patrons, for example.

Capital One is a Fortune 500 company and one of the 10 largest financial institutions in the United States based on deposit amounts. The bank services over 45 million customers across their banking and credit card verticals, and they’re well known for popular financial products like their Capital One 360 checking account.

While Capital One’s banking products and rewards credit cards probably come to mind first, the company also boasts a robust selection of auto loans for consumers who want to purchase a vehicle or refinance a car loan they already have. Capital One even lets you get pre-qualified for an auto loan without an impact to your credit score, and you can use your new auto loan at over 12,000 dealerships around the U.S.

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This week's topic: Having a Frugal Mother's Day! Learn about saving on gifts, activities, dining, and more!

In the United States, some 44 million borrowers currently owe more than $1.5 trillion on loans they took out to finance their education. So, if you’re sitting on a pile of student loan debt, it’s safe to say that you’re not alone.

To cut to the chase, the answer to whether consolidating student loans can improve your credit score is yes – at least for some people. If you’re looking for ways to improve your credit scores, a student loan consolidation could potentially help you out.

Of course, before you can understand how a student loan consolidation may impact your scores, it’s helpful to consider how the loans affected your credit scores in the first place.

When people first start digging into frugality, they often look at the simplest moves, the low hanging fruit that can save a little bit of money with little effort. Simple things like turning off the lights or keeping the thermostat a little higher or lower do save you money, but they don’t really provide a transformative effect to your finances.

Even big one-off moves like selling off a bunch of unused stuff from your closet can be useful, but they don’t make a lasting difference.

What really makes a difference are the changes that permanently and significantly reduce your monthly bills. If you have smaller bills coming in each month, then you have more breathing room to make better financial moves and start building some financial momentum in your life rather than just treading water.