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Posted
Jul 15 2008, 04:03 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. If you've ever tried to buy a car or a house, you've probably faced the monthly payment math trick. It's a psychological trick salespeople use to get you to buy something you couldn't afford or to pay an amount you weren't originally comfortable with. A salesperson will try to convince you to purchase something based on the monthly payment you'll have to make. It frames the purchase in a way that lets you begin integrating the purchase into your life, before you've actually made it, and may even make it more likely you'll make the purchase.
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Posted
Jun 10 2008, 05:41 AM
by
Karen Datko
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. Some of my friends put a rubber band around one wrist if they're supposed to remember something, like getting milk on the way home. Some of my friends send themselves e-mail or schedule events in Outlook. Some of my friends draw treasure maps and hide them behind paintings in their attics. (OK. No, they don't. That was from "The Goonies.") The point is, we all have little hacks we use to remind ourselves about things we are supposed or not supposed to do.
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Posted
May 13 2008, 06:52 AM
by
Karen Datko
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This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. When I was young, I used to write a fake company name on all sorts of papers to make it look like my company stationery, as if I were a big-swinging successful entrepreneur like Andrew Carnegie. We'd play football in the streets and pretend to be Joe Montana throwing yet another touchdown pass to Jerry Rice. We'd tackle each other in the field and pretend we were LT (no, not Ladainian Tomlinson -- the real LT, Mr. Lawrence Taylor) getting Joe Theisman, minus the snapping leg.
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Posted
Apr 29 2008, 05:33 AM
by
Karen Datko
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. Back in the days of personal checks and monthly bills, "doing the bills" was an arduous task that took hours and hours. Back in the days of check registers and balancing a checkbook, doing the bills was like accounting lite. With the advent of online checking and electronic bill-payment systems, there isn't any logical reason why you should be spending an hour or two each month dealing with bills. By setting up your bill-payment details and conducting your transactions entirely online, you can add months to your life.
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Posted
Apr 15 2008, 05:12 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. I had lunch with my beautiful wife the other day at a local Baja Fresh. It's something we don't do often because her office is 45 minutes away, but we were able to because she had an appointment in the morning. After we parted ways she discovered that she had left her purse behind. Fortunately, a customer turned in the purse or one of the workers picked it up. Baja Fresh had it securely behind the counter. Whew! Disaster averted. The first thing my wife said to me, after she explained that it was missing, was that this never happens to her -- she didn't bring up the fact that she had misplaced her license for about a week -- to which I thought to myself, "Of course not, this isn't supposed to happen ever." That made me think about the importance of capturing a snapshot of your wallet or purse, on a monthly basis, in the event that you lose it.
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Posted
Mar 12 2008, 05:54 PM
by
Karen Datko
March Madness is upon us (thank goodness, because we need something to do after football season ends), and it's really heating up. We're talking about the annual contest in the personal-finance blogosphere. Every March, Free Money Finance hosts head-to-head battles between posts submitted by PF bloggers. In this March Madness, readers determine the winners with their votes. (For an explanation of the competition, click here.) You'll find some gems among these posts. The second round includes one by "Penny Nickel" of Money and Values about a credit card sleeve you can print out -- or make yourself -- listing questions you should ask yourself before you use the card. Penny calls it "a wallet-sized reminder of your priorities."
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Posted
Feb 26 2008, 08:13 AM
by
Karen Datko
This devil's advocate post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. It's widely believed that your credit score can be improved if you keep your unused credit cards, rather than cancel them. By keeping those cards, you are increasing the average age of your lines of credit, increasing the total amount of credit, and decreasing your credit utilization -- all good things when it comes to computing your score. So why do I always advocate canceling unused cards? I believe it is the safest thing for you to do and is better than keeping unused cards for the credit-score benefit. Security breaches. GE Money, a branch of General Electric Capital Corp. that manages the in-store credit card programs of many retailers, recently reported that a backup tape put into storage at Iron Mountain Inc. had gone missing. What was on it? It contained personal information on about 650,000 people, including the Social Security numbers of about 150,000 people.
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