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Posted
May 07 2008, 10:58 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
The husband of reader "Deezy92" graduated in 2000 with an Ivy League law degree and a whopping $140,000 in student loan debt. It's now 2008, folks, and those student loans have been paid off for a couple of years. How did they do it? Deezy92 writes:
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Posted
Apr 08 2008, 02:12 PM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Congratulations to Randall at Credit Withdrawal for winning the dumbest purchase ever contest held by "Debt Kid." Randall won a Nintendo DS Lite for sharing his story about how he bought vinyl siding for his house for $20,000 from a traveling salesman. Here's why this was such a stupid purchase: Randall did no research on the siding -- "They could have put up wallpaper on the outside of the house for all I knew from siding," he says -- did no reference checks on the contractor, and financed the entire job with a 14% loan without reading the fine print. He didn't find out until he tried to refinance his house years later that the loan amounted to a second mortgage on his home. Ouch.
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Posted
Apr 02 2008, 04:24 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
We'll give you the happy ending first: A funny noise in his pickup was the reality check -- he calls it a "gift from heaven" -- that kept blogger "JB" of Get Rich Or Die Trying from buying a house he couldn't afford. The rationalizations he had used up to that point -- spend the emergency fund, the wedding fund and the tax rebate, and stop contributing to the 401(k) -- to make him think he should buy it may seem sickeningly familiar to many struggling to hang on to their homes or facing foreclosure. It also started when JB and his fiancee found the house of their dreams.
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Posted
Feb 06 2008, 05:24 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog The Dough Roller. Many years ago I was a buyer for a large pharmaceutical company. My boss had worked at the company for many years and was a man of great experience. As he taught me to negotiate contracts, he constantly reminded me of this one eternal truth: Read the fine print. As he put it, "The big words giveth, and the small words taketh away." Well, that advice is as true today as it was 20 years ago. Last year I received in the mail an offer for what appeared to be a really low interest rate on a mortgage. The offer was from Countrywide Home Loans, which seemed to me at the time to be a reputable mortgage company. The letter was promoting a "PayOption ARM." Here is what the big print giveth:
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Posted
Jan 22 2008, 05:38 PM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
As if we needed another indication that the U.S. economy is stressed, car-buyer blog KickingTires reports that the average age of people buying new cars has gone up significantly in the last year. It was 43 at the beginning of 2007. It's now 48. "Buyer age rose because young consumers were forced to the sidelines by having to make mortgage and credit card payments at the expense of car installments," KickingTires says. This post also shares some noteworthy statistics about the car preferences of different age groups.
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Posted
Jan 09 2008, 02:33 PM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Plenty of people have paid big bucks to live in gated communities, thinking they've insulated themselves from some of life's problems. Author Barbara Ehrenreich, in a post at Barbara's Blog and AlterNet, said that isn't necessarily so. "There are studies indicating that there are no differences in the crime in gated communities and non-gated communities," she wrote. They also aren't immune to the recent wave of foreclosures. She correctly observes that "there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man."
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Posted
Dec 31 2007, 02:09 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Popular MSN Money and New York Times columnist MP Dunleavey got a heap of criticism after she and her husband bought a house that seemed more than they could readily afford. Dunleavey's recent explanation at MSN Money has not silenced all of her critics. This appears to be the price you pay when you live your financial life out in the open.
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Posted
Dec 19 2007, 06:12 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog The Dough Roller. Are you struggling to spend all of your money each month? Do you get to the end of the month, only to learn that cash is just sitting there in your checking account? Well, if you've got this problem -- and who doesn't? -- here are 10 surefire solutions: Stop tracking your spending. When I see a family with excess cash each month, nine times out of 10, the problem is they're keeping track of what they spend. So turn off that spreadsheet and uninstall Quicken. And while you're at it, go ahead and disable the check- engine light in your car. Buy more house than you need. Buying a monster house and financing 100% of the purchase with a first mortgage and one or two equity lines of credit is a great way to rid your bank account of all that excess cash. Oh, and make sure the loan comes with a variable interest rate and interest-only payments. You may spend less at first, but don't worry, in a few years money will by flying out of your checking account like chili out of a drunken sailor.
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Posted
Dec 18 2007, 12:38 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
In case you missed the news, the Federal Reserve Board has proposed rules to curb the type of lending abuses that helped create the subprime-mortgage debacle. You can read the mainstream media report or you can enjoy Sellsius' snarky take on "More rules for those who hate rules." For instance, one of the rules would restrict prepayment penalties. Sellsius says: "It does not take much to figure out that steep penalties for paying off a loan early would limit consumers' refinancing options. Hmm ... you don't pay back the bank, they're unhappy; you pay them back early, they're still unhappy. You just can't please some people."
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Posted
Dec 11 2007, 08:05 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Mark Huffman at partner blog ConsumerAffairs.com. A stroll through the Scam Alerts archives finds it's been Christmastime all year for the world's scam artists. The Federal Trade Commission tells us that scams hit 30.2 million adults -- 13.5 percent of the adult population -- during the last year for which it has added up its complaints. While the FTC's latest figures are for 2006, there's no reason to think the number declined in 2007. Human ingenuity is constantly on the prowl, after all, seeking new ways to fleece the unwary, the gullible and those looking to get rich quickly. It's not just the greedy and the gullible who get taken. The poor and desperate also are falling victim to modern-day bandits -- those in grimy boiler rooms as well as corporate board rooms. The dictionary definition of a "scam" is "a fraudulent business scheme designed to make a quick profit." In making our list and checking it twice, we combed our database of nearly 300,000 consumer complaints to find the scams that made great strides forward, roping in new victims and increasing their take in 2007. So, here they are -- ConsumerAffairs.com's Top 10 Scams of 2007:
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