June 2011

Aurora Bank is the King of CD’s

June 30, 2011

For anyone who hasn’t lived in or visited the state of Delaware, I’ve gotta tell you it’s pretty small.  Whenever my family and I would drive to and from Florida for vacation, we would pass through the state of Delaware on I-95 and it never took longer than 20 minutes.  But even though Delaware is [...]

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Capital One Platinum Prestige Credit Card Review

June 29, 2011

When my wife and I were paying off our credit card debt, 0% balance transfer credit cards helped us a lot.  We not only saved money by paying no interest, we paid off our debt much faster.  And we’ve managed to stay out of debt, too.  If you are looking for a low interest credit [...]

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Is the IRS Friendlier Than It Used To Be?

June 28, 2011

Growing up, I had always been under the impression that the IRS was the most brutal of government agencies.  To receive an audit from them was nothing short of misery and once the IRS had you in their sights, there was no escaping the financial nightmare.  Now, having experienced the IRS a few times on [...]

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How To Use Complaining as an Effective Refund Strategy

June 28, 2011

When you think of complaining, you usually do so with a negative context.  Complaining is the result of unhappiness and powerlessness and if you hang around people that are constantly complaining, you’ll find your mood to take a sudden shift downward. Earlier in life, I would get agitated at people that complained about every little [...]

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How to Pay Off Your Mortgage Early (for FREE!)

June 27, 2011

Now that my wife and I have paid off all our non-mortgage debt, it’s time to turn our attention to the mortgage. We currently owe over $500,000 on our home (gulp!). No, we don’t live in a mansion; we live in Northern Virginia. And even with the downturn in the housing market, real estate prices [...]

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What Makes Ivy League Schools So Darn Attractive To Students?

June 24, 2011

Oddly enough, the schools that comprise the Ivy League, eight private institutions located in the northeastern United States (Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University) did not receive their name for academic reasons. The term Ivy League, or the “Ivies” was first coined [...]

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Can You Put a Price on Safety?

June 22, 2011

When I lived in an apartment in Boston, my apartment was broken into while I was at work.  I came home to a front door that was lifted off its hinges and carefully placed in the hallway next to where I left it (closed and locked) that morning.  The place was ransacked and all my [...]

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OptionsHouse Review: An Online Discount Broker with Professional Grade Trading Tools

June 21, 2011

What distinguishes one online discount broker from another? As more and more online brokers enter the low-fee arena, they each try to distinguish their trading services and cost structure from all the others. OptionsHouse has two features that set it apart from other discount brokers: (1) professional grade online trading tools, and (2) stock trades [...]

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The Real Cost of Using a Real Estate Agent

June 20, 2011

I knew something was amiss when my wife and I bought our first home way back in 1993. We had a “buyer’s agent” represent us. That means in theory that the agent was representing us, not the sellers. But when a problem with the inspection surfaced, our agent wanted us to eat the cost of [...]

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