Personal Budgeting: Keep More Cash
Congratulations! You have kept the U.S. economy afloat by opening up your wallet for everything from cars to candy bars.
Build Your Budget
Think of your budget as a planning device, a means of setting and reaching your personal finance goals. You project future expenditures (including savings), record them when they’re made, and see whether your projections were any good. If they aren’t, you adjust your planning or your spending, whichever is out of line.
Take a Financial Inventory
If you’re on top of your regular income and outgo, then maybe you can safely skip this section to personal budgeting. But if you’re barely making it from payday to payday, or have the distinct feeling that you’re treading water while others swim merrily by,…
Family Budgeting: Thrive on One Paycheck
For Raffi and Elaine Boloyan, both 32, stretching their income became doubly-challenging when they chose to cut their income by nearly half. In 2004, Elaine left her $67,000-a-year job in human resources to stay home with daughter, Ava. To make this kind of transition, the…
Budgeting: Stretch a Small Income
It’s tough enough to make ends meet in a pricey city like San Francisco. It’s even tougher when you’re a grad student and a budding actress, and neither of you makes more than $27,000 a year. So if anyone knows how to stretch an income,…
Investments: Set Goals and Adopt a Strategy
Investment goals tend to be long-term: enough to pay college tuition starting in ten years, for instance, or enough to retire on in 15 or 20 years. In fact, it’s this long-range outlook that causes many people to set such vague, half-hearted goals that they fail to reach.
Save or Pay Down Debt
Should you be putting money in savings or investments at the same time you’re paying off a loan? That’s one of the most frequently-asked questions we get, and the answer isn’t always obvious. Even if you have run up a balance on a high-rate credit…
Save Money on Phone, Internet and TV
Bundle your services and you’ll save some green. For about $100 a month, you can get cable or satellite TV, local and long-distance telephone service, plus high-speed Internet service. This is often cheaper than it would cost for each service separately.
Save Money on Utilities
Here are 15 quick, cheap and easy ways to cut your electricity, heat and water use, while also cutting your expenses by hundreds of dollars:
Save Money on Transportation
The average cost of owning and driving a car 15,000 miles a year is $8,121 according to the American Automobile Association (AAA). SUVs are even more costly at $10,448 per year. That includes all costs of ownership, such as gas, insurance, maintenance, registration, taxes depreciation,…