Are you looking for a new credit card to transfer a balance to?
How about one with 0% APR for new purchases? Maybe a credit card that offers cashback rewards?
The Discover® More Card offers all of that and is worth looking into.
Let’s take a closer look at the features of the Discover More Card:
Continue Reading
Since mortgage rates are at all-time lows, refinancing should be a no-brainer for just about everyone—or so you would think.
But not everyone has refinanced or even will.
Are there times or situations where refinancing isn’t worth doing, even to get lower rates? There are at least a few, and here are some of them.
There are a number of provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) that was passed in 2010.
Now that the legislation has been mostly upheld by the Supreme Court, there is little to stop many of the provisions from the PPACA from coming to fruition. From the inability of insurers to drop you due to illness, to the individual mandate for health care coverage, to the establishment of state exchanges, there are a number of highly publicized new policies in the bill.
However, there are also plenty of other provisions in the law, some of which you might not know about.
One of the lesser known provisions is the rebates that insurance companies will be required to send a rebate to customers if they do not keep overhead costs lower.
Some estimates suggest that as much as 30% of what we spend on health care goes to overhead — and not to health benefits. This is rather distressing when the costs of health care in the United States are compared to other developed countries that, in many cases, more efficiently keep the overhead to 1/3 of what it is in the United States.
Facebook’s recent IPO and resulting stock price flop have been all the talk in both financial and general news media as of late. Billions have been made and lost on that single stock alone.
But what exactly is an IPO? And does it really matter to the average investor?
IPO stands for “Initial Public Offering”.
When a private company wants to sell a share of the company to the public in order to raise capital to continue expanding operations it is done through an initial public offering. It is called this because up to this point the private company hasn’t sold a share of the company publicly on the stock market.
In short, an IPO is when a privately held company owned by a few individuals or handful of investors, sells a chunk of the company on the publicly traded stock markets.
My husband and I recently met with a financial planner to discuss rolling over my retirement savings account from my former employer.
How we finally found a planner we felt we could trust is a different story, but this planner, I’ll call Mr. Smith, is a Dave Ramsey endorsed local provider, and as expected, much of his advice was on par with Dave Ramsey’s teachings.
In addition to discussing the rollover, we also discussed our finances in general and that we are paying off what seems like insurmountable debt, the majority of which now is student loan debt. We also spoke about our income, which is lower than we would like because my husband is working at an entry level post doc position and I am freelancing part-time while caring for our young children during the day.
Mr. Smith assured us, “Your income will grow more than you can believe once you pay off that debt because debt takes so much of your energy. Get rid of that debt completely, and all of your energy can go toward building your careers.”
While I found the entire conversation beneficial, that piece of information is the one that I keep returning to.
The 2nd annual personal finance bloggers conference, FinCon, is going on in Denver, Colorado.
All your favorite bloggers [GC edit: most, I couldn't make FINCON this year] are rubbing elbows, listening to panels, and learning more about how to make their blogs even more impactful for their readers.
I was able to attend FinCon last year and helped record some of the sessions. I wasn’t able to attend this year, but was still inspired to learn that FinCon participants helped plant trees in a local park in Denver.
When’s the last time you went to a professional conference and did a service project?
Universities and colleges have offered online courses for several years now as a way to offer students a more flexible schedule.
A nice bonus is that online courses often cost less than courses in the traditional classroom, and you also save on transportation costs because you do not have to drive to campus.
In light of the financial benefits and the flexibility online courses offer, these types of courses seem like they should be a great fit for most students, but often they are not.
If you are considering taking an online course, there are several things you must know.
Previously on Free from Broke, Glen has touched on the subject of dollar cost averaging as an effective way to buy new shares of mutual funds for retirement accounts (401ks and IRAs) several times.
Indeed, from an emotions and mathematical standpoint, dollar cost averaging makes sense.
Because of the simplicity and sensibility of the method, it is safe to say that there is a large amount of people who believe in and employ dollar cost averaging on a frequent basis to invest for retirement. So, after being convinced of the merits of this investing strategy, the important question then becomes…
I had never heard of Motif Investing when Glen asked me to take a look at them and write up a Motif Investing review. Having done so I’m really glad I’ve been made aware of this investment firm.
This is one of the most unique value propositions I’ve heard of for retail investors in quite some time. If you ever plan to invest for your future retirement I think looking at Motif is a good idea.
Renter’s insurance may be the most underestimated of all insurance policies.
Many tenants assume that they don’t need renter’s insurance because any hazards will be covered by their landlord’s insurance—after all, they’re the ones who own the property, right?
Nope.
The landlord’s insurance will cover only what the landlord owns, and that will be limited to the land and the physical structures on it. Anything inside the building that you own will be excluded by the landlord’s insurance company.
For that reason, you need to have renter’s insurance.