Most of us want to improve our personal finances. Whether you want to earn more money or you want to learn to budget better, you can benefit from having a personal finance mentor. Your mentor is someone that can answer your financial questions, assist you in identifying your financial goals and offer advice for accomplishing what you want to in the realm of your finances. The relationship that you may have with your mentor may range from casual to formal but the benefits should be obvious either way. (more…)

You applied for a credit card and have been anxiously awaiting a response. When the envelope comes in the mail, it doesn’t contain a card. Instead, it has a letter saying that you’ve been turned down. This can be a frustrating experience. But if you follow the right steps, you can improve your chances of being approved the next time that you apply for a credit card. (more…)

When you apply for a loan, your lender is going to take a look at your credit score in order to determine some things about that loan. First of all, the lender will be deciding whether or not to give you the loan at all. If you’re going to get the loan, the lender will use the credit score to determine what the maximum amount of the loan will be and at what interest rate the loan will be made. A high credit score translates to getting more high-maximum loans at better interest rates. (more…)

When you don’t have any money to spend, you simply don’t spend it. You find ways to make your paycheck stretch until the next one comes around. As a result, there are a number of tricks that people with low income employ which can be useful to the middle class person who is trying to save some money.

Here are six areas of life where you can save money if you act as though you don’t have any: (more…)

You’ve probably got a general idea of whether your credit is good or bad. But the numbers matter when it comes to credit. If you don’t know your credit score, you don’t know all that you need to know about your credit situation. Knowing what the number is doesn’t do too much to increase your credit awareness if you don’t also understand what the number means. You should know more than just “high” or “low”; you should know what a lender is going to think when your number pops up on application. (more…)

The average person doesn’t have a savings account with any significant amount of money it. This is unfortunate because it means that they are forced to rely on credit cards for unexpected expenses. The argument by these people is usually is that they don’t have enough money to save any. However, even a person with little excess income can create a savings account by following some simple tips. If you place importance on saving and make some reasonable cuts to your spending, you can afford to give yourself a savings account. (more…)

Gather a bunch of people over dinner and ask the question, “Do you use your credit cards to pay your monthly bills?” and you might be surprised to find that the question generates a great amount of conversation around the table. In fact, it might cause tempers to flare as the debate moves back and forth between those people who do use credit cards to pay monthly bills and those people who don’t. That’s because there are pros and cons to this practice and there are people with strong reasons for standing on either side of the issue. (more…)

Picture a tree-hugging hippie and you don’t probably won’t picture someone who uses credit cards on a regular basis. Despite your assumptions, though, materialism and eco-awareness can go hand-in-hand. Today’s environmentally-aware individual tends to be a big spender; after all, those hybrid cars and solar-power-enhanced backpacks don’t come cheap. And even the average consumer tends to have a heightened awareness of the importance of making environmentally-kind choices a consideration in their purchasing. Because of this, a new service has cropped up to assist consumers with greener buying habits: green credit cards. (more…)

It’s never good to have too many credit cards. There are just too many problems that can crop up when you have more credit cards than you actually need. But, of course, deciding which credit card accounts to close out can be a difficult process. After all, you don’t want to get rid of access to money that you might need one day. To reduce the number of credit cards that you have, you’ll want to run through a process that will help you keep only the best cards.
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Everybody knows that the two biggest things that couples fight about are sex and money. Trying to negotiate finances with another person can be an extremely difficult thing which causes emotions to flare up and problems to exist within otherwise loving relationships. Bring credit cards into the mix and you can exacerbate the problem beyond the point of reason. Couples who want to be able to last throughout the years need to learn to understand the impact that credit problems can have on their relationship so the problem can be nipped in the bud. (more…)