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Posted
Oct 23 2007, 06:53 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity . You want to make a big-ticket purchase, you've just been offered 12-month, same-as-cash financing, and you're not sure if you should accept it. Take a breather and analyze the offer. How good a deal this is depends on what your plans are for the next 18 months. Do you plan to buy a home in the next 18 months? If the answer is no, take the offer. If the answer is yes, here's some downstream-effect math for you: What you save/earn. By taking the offer, you can potentially earn a little under 5% on the value of the purchase by putting the purchase price into a savings account. Let's say you're buying a $2,000 television. By putting the money into a high-yield online savings account, you will get about $100 in interest before taxes. (The $2,000 will slowly diminish as you make minimum payments, so $100 is the maximum.) A $10,000 home-renovation job with 0% financing is an interest win of $375. You also have to consider the
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Posted
Nov 06 2007, 07:50 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Credit card issuers track more data about your behavior than you think, according to a fascinating article at MSN Money by Liz Pulliam Weston called " 8 secret scores that lenders keep ." We all know -- or should know -- about the FICO scores that rate our creditworthiness. Beyond that, companies keep scores that tell them, among other things, how likely you are to respond to new credit offers, how you use your card and how much revenue you're likely to produce, how hard they should work to keep your business, and how likely you are to file for bankruptcy. Kind of creepy? Nickel at FiveCentNickel read the article and imagines his scores are probably boring . "We’re not overly profitable in that we don’t pay finance charges, but we’re very low risk, and we charge most of our monthly purchases, so we’re a constant source of merchant-transaction fees," he writes.
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Posted
Nov 16 2007, 03:05 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
LifeEdit.net provides some very sound advice to people in their 20s about managing money: Save for retirement, pay off student loans as soon as you can, budget and keep your credit score high. But there's more than one way to skin this cat. The Retirement Hobo is 24 years old, and he's already retired.
He's aware that some readers might be incredulous. "At a first glance, you might think my blog about (extremely) early retirement is about a lazy guy trying to find a loophole in the system so he can keep on being lazy. I assure you, that is not the case," he writes in his first post, called, appropriately, "Newly retired."
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Posted
Nov 30 2007, 04:38 PM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
You don't have to be a total screw-up -- bouncing checks, making late payments, ruining your credit score -- to be a poor money manager. You need help if you're merely "standing still." That's the message of No Credit Needed, who came to terms with his lack of long-term financial planning three years ago. Why did it take him so long? He was lazy, busy with the rest of his life, and didn't have anyone to talk to about money. "Also," he writes, "I felt like the magic day would come and I'd make enough and I wouldn't have worry about money. Sound familiar?"
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Posted
Dec 28 2007, 05:55 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. I often get notes from people who have a small mountain of credit cards. They're trying to figure out which ones they should keep and which ones they should cancel, and they're rightfully concerned about their credit score if they do that. A wallet full of credit cards can be a problem: You have more opportunities for identity theft and, with so many credit cards, your total line of credit may be high enough to hurt your credit score. There are other issues, including extra paper management and an unreasonably fat wallet. If you have a mountain of cards, what should you do to trim them down? Here are my recommendations:
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Posted
Jan 25 2008, 04:33 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
It was just a matter of time before some snarky blogger began commenting on the applications for loans at Prosper.com, the peer-to-peer lending site. If you apply for a loan at Prosper and your credit history isn't great, you might show up on Prosper lender Kyle M. Stephens' radar screen. You'd better have a thick skin or a generous sense of humor. This is particularly true if you have violated Kyle's first rule for Prosper applicants: Post a photo, and make sure you're dressed in business attire, unlike the woman who posed with large sunglasses and an outfit that exposed her navel and then some. Her photo is available at Kyle's site. "Oh, what the heck," Kyle relented, "wearing that may give her a better chance of getting the loan." He added, "If I have any readers, let's take a poll in the comment section. Sunglasses or no sunglasses? I vote she wears them." He also examined her financial information. "The other thing that really stands out for me is that her housing is only $675 a month, but she lives in San Francisco. Maybe she lives in a hostel," he wrote.
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Posted
Jan 30 2008, 06:11 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Renting your first apartment is one of those rites of passage to adulthood. So, when you're meeting with a landlord, try to act like an adult. That's No. 1 in David's "10 tips for first-time apartment renters" at My Two Dollars. "You might not want to wear your baseball hat backwards or continue smoking that cigarette," David advises. "It could reflect badly on you." The tips are excellent, covering essentials like having a good credit score because the landlord likely will run a credit check on you. Read the lease and understand it. Find out if parking is included or extra. Here's another good one: Talk to neighbors before you sign a lease. "Between finding out about the guy that sings love songs to his old girlfriend at 3 a.m. to the chain smoker in the apartment next door, you can learn a lot just by being friendly with one of the neighbors," David writes.
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Posted
Feb 01 2008, 02:47 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
What happens to people after they lose their homes to foreclosure or a short sale? DebtKid lived in his office for two months until he saved enough cash to rent a place. He showered at a nearby gym every morning before returning to the office for the workday. His employees never suspected. His post, part of a group effort by several personal-finance bloggers on the topic of homeownership, provides several options for no-cost housing until you can get back on your feet -- and tips for finding a rental despite your damaged credit score.
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Posted
Feb 19 2008, 02:33 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
It's a sign of the times that Web sites have sprouted up telling people how to walk away from homes they can no longer afford or -- in some cases -- are no longer willing to pay for. While some sites trumpet offers to buy homes from stressed-out owners, another one sells a foreclosure kit. California-based YouWalkAway.com says its kit will enable you to stay in your home "for up to eight months or more without having to pay anything to your lender!" It also says: "With our money-back guarantee, you get it all for only $995." The list of services provided is stuff you can do on your own if you're so inclined. And the steps won't eliminate the damage foreclosure does to your credit score. Writes blogger Sam Glover at Caveat Emptor, "Foreclosure ain't pretty, folks, no matter what this Web site would like you to think." All of this raises questions in our mind: In the wake of the mortgage crisis, is foreclosure becoming a more acceptable option? Should it?
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Posted
Feb 26 2008, 08:13 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
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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