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Posted
Mar 17 2008, 09:21 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. Check out the latest super-anti-counterfeit bill to hit the streets: It's none other than the fiver, and it debuted last week with much fanfare over its added security features and that humongous purple "5" on the back.  Many of the added security features -- more watermarks and a security strip -- were already on higher-denomination bills, and I was surprised that they would revamp the $5 bill with them, but what do I know.
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Posted
Mar 24 2009, 04:44 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Jim Wang at partner blog Bargaineering.
If you're out of work or looking to supplement your income, you might want to consider working for the U.S. Census Bureau to help conduct the 2010 census. According to CNNMoney, the 2010 census will put 1.4 million people to work and is projected to cost $14 billion.
If you want to make some extra cash and you have the time, you might want to get the ball rolling on securing a job with the Census Bureau.
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Posted
May 12 2009, 06:02 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Jim Wang at partner blog Bargaineering.
Do you know why credit cards have an expiration date? In the beginning, it was because a credit card had a limited useful lifespan. After a few years, the magnetic stripe on the back would either get demagnetized or damaged so much that it was unreadable.
It wasn't until later that the expiration date was used as a security feature. For many years, you could continue to use expired credit cards because the stripe was fine and the expiration date wasn't used for verification.
So what are you to do with an expired card? You have to destroy it, of course. In our age of identity theft and fraud, only a fool would throw a credit card into the trash without cutting it up first. However, with the economy the way it is and the value of credit card numbers going up, it's important to properly destroy a credit card.
There are two crucial parts of a credit card -- information embossed on the front of the card and the information encoded in the magnetic stripe on the back of the card. Not surprisingly, both locations contain the same information, which is merely displayed differently to the typical "reader." When you want to destroy a card, it's important to destroy both sources of information, and this article will explain how.
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Posted
Mar 03 2008, 03:30 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This shocking bit of news on a radio talk show this morning got the attention of one of our partner bloggers: Nearly half of British men surveyed said they would give up sex for six months to get a 50-inch plasma TV. The survey -- done, incidentally, by an electronics retailer -- found that only a third of women responded in kind. Also, 25% of the 2,000 respondents said they would give up smoking, and about 25% would stop eating chocolate. This talk show blather would seem like a testimony to the power of marketing, but Jim at partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity found a lesson in personal finance in the exchange. (This is also the blogger who detailed the PF lessons contained in Monopoly and Scrabble.)
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Posted
Jan 06 2009, 05:22 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.
Credit unions exist to help their members. Commercial banks exist to enrich their shareholders.
You read that right. That's why credit unions often have better interest rates on both loans and deposits. Commercial banks are businesses. Their sole purpose is to figure out how to make more money from customers (you). Interest rates on accounts are often very low (or nonexistent), and they always try to sell you new products.
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Posted
Jun 17 2009, 08:53 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This devil's advocate post comes from Jim Wang at partner blog Bargaineering.
This devil's advocate post will cover something that's bound to elicit a lot of discussion: Here are four reasons why you shouldn't donate money to charity.
That's right. You read that correctly. I have four reasons why donating your hard-earned money to a charity is a bad idea, and chances are there is at least one reason here that you haven't even considered. If there was ever a devil's advocate post to end all devil's advocate posts (don't worry, it's not the last one), this would probably be it.
Americans are among the most charitable people in the world, donating $314 billion in 2007, according to the Philanthropy Journal. And despite a brutal economy, that dropped only 2% (or 5.7% after adjusting for inflation) to $307 billion in 2008.
In the face of that, I present to you four reasons why you shouldn't donate money to charity.
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Posted
Dec 02 2008, 06:30 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Filed under: banking, credit, Bargaineering, online banking, financial planning, credit cards, credit reports, homeowners insurance, mutual funds, estate planning, wills, executor, emergency fund, income tax, tax software
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. Popular Mechanics created a list called "100 skills every man should know," which naturally gravitated toward DIY/physical skills like jump-starting a car and splitting firewood. The Frisky listed "30 skills every woman should have before turning 30," which actually touched on more than physical skills (though No. 12 is physical), with a handful of financial skills (Nos. 17-20). The following isn't a checklist of things you necessarily need to do in your life. It's a list of things you should know how to do in case the need arises.
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Posted
May 06 2008, 07:06 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. Having grown up on Long Island, I didn't have many opportunities to watch NASCAR on television, so I never truly understood the intricacies of the sport. Since college, I've come to appreciate the difficulty of NASCAR and the skill it requires. Last weekend I was watching a few laps of the Goody's Cool Orange 500 at Martinsville Speedway, and I finally understood why NASCAR fans love the sport.
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Posted
Nov 06 2007, 06:41 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post is from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity . There's a ton of talk that we're moving toward a recession. That's right -- a recession. Isn't that horrible? Well, sort of, but what exactly is a recession? A recession, by definition, is when the gross domestic product declines for two or more consecutive quarters. It's a period of economic slowdown when companies earn less and pay less -- and life is generally a little less prosperous. How does that affect you? What should you do to prepare if a recession, specifically a prolonged recession, hits? It's quite simple: You should prepare for the possibility that you could lose your job. In a recession, companies often scale back operations as sales lag, and jobs are often one of the things to hit the chopping block. To prepare for this: Keep your ear to the ground and make sure the first you hear of your job loss isn’t when your boss calls you to the office to deliver the bad news. Pull back your spending and boost your
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Posted
Feb 05 2008, 07:11 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. Coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, bottled water, manicures, car washes (full detailing), weekday lunches, vending machine snacks, interest charges on credit cards, and unused memberships. Do you know what these items have in common? They are the top 10 money sinkholes, according to Bankrate.com. You could try to commit that list to memory and see if you can cut out any of those items to find a little extra cash. For instance, cut out a pack-a-day smoking habit and gain, on average, $1,660 a year. But what you should be doing is looking at that list and seeing what else those items have in common: They are all wants, not needs, and they can all be reduced without significantly impacting your standard of living.
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