Personal Finance Basics
Like trying to setup a fancy exercise routine before commiting to regular exercise sessions, trying to take on fancy investment ideas before building up solid savings is doomed to failure. Here is how to make it happen now.
Personal Finance
Top 10 Fine Print Gotchas
Being a smart consumer, or smart investor, or smart anything really is all about knowledge. Understanding the world you are playing in just makes good sense. I can spot most finance scams by reading the title. The reason? I’ve spent plenty of time reading the fine print and have grown accustomed to what fine print goes with that BLARINGINGLY GOOD TITLE! So, without further ado, here are the Top 10 Fine Print Gotchas: That’s Not It One of the most common fine print gotchas is when the really great picture you see isn’t actually what they are talking about. For cars you’ll see a fully equipped XJT9X version in the picture when the ad is talking about the base no-options model. For others, the fine print will point out that the picture is only “representative” of the product, meaning it is pretty much like that, but not just like that. Rebates The one I really hate these days is rebates. Electronic store ads are filled with them. A great deal on a monitor for $199? Sure, but you will pay $279 today. Then, you can get a rebate from the store (but it’s an “easy” rebate) for $40 and then you …
Financial Planners and Financial Advisors an Introduction
Listen to the book authors, newspaper and magazine columnists and many web sites, and you will hear that financial advisors or financial planners are nothing more than glorified snake oil salesmen out to separate you from your hard earned money. To listen to some in the finance industry and their champions, financial advisors and financial planners are bastions of righteousness steeped in knowledge about financial concepts so complex that no mere mortal could possibly hope to navigate the waters alone. The truth of course lies in between. In real life, many financial decisions are frighteningly complex and, unlike other decisions you may face in life, many of them are irreversible once a mistake has been made. More importantly, some of the biggest financial issues, like retirement, take years to accomplish, and you get one chance. If you try the latest fad diet for a couple of months only to find out it doesn’t work for you, you start over a little wiser and with a little more experience. You could try different diets hundreds of times in your life while figuring out what works for you. You could also talk to friends and family, each of whom has dozens of …
Money Psychology
I’ve decided to do a new series here at Finance Gourmet on the psychology of money. Virtually all the emails I get and questions I’m being asked from both online and in person lately have to do more with psychology than they do with raw numbers and math. I already have about eleven topics ready to go and I’m sure more will pop up as I go along. Don’t miss out on any of them by: Getting the RSS feed