Mortgages and retirement can strangle a tight budget and require special planning to be successful. More than a third of older homeowners are approaching retirement saddled, to some degree, with a home with a mortgage. Compounding the struggle is half of retirees without a pension, just drawing mainly on Social Security benefits, will receive less…
Card annual fees for general purpose credit cards, such as Visa and Mastercard, have been a fixture in the U.S. marketplace since their inception in the late 1960s. When CardTrak began tracking U.S. major credit cards in the 1980s, all of the top ten issuers offered the same pricing: a 19.8% annual interest rate and…
Dining with a nice complementary wine is great, but dining without whining is awesome! While dining out can be a gut buster and a budget buster, especially with a family, there are some simple ways to eat healthier and trimming costs. Consider These Time-Tested Proven Suggestions Do Lunch, Not Dinner Dinner prices are typically 20-50%…
Summer vacation season is just around the corner and most families have already started sketching out their trips and excursions. Parents are looking forward to the opportunities they’ll share in new adventures with their kids while also hoping to sneak in a little quality relaxation. What could possibly disturb such a joyous time? The most…
For more than two decades the nation’s largest payment networks, top banks, numerous financial firms, trade associations and tons of non-profit consumer advocacy/education have all been preaching the same sermons to teach and develop responsible money management skills. The hard work spearheaded by Visa with “Practical Money Skills for Life” in the mid-90s has paid…
Grandparents today share in the financial and cultural support of their grandchildren, like never before. A new survey estimates grandparents spend $179 billion dollars per year on their grandchildren. The average age of becoming a first-time grandparent is 50 and the average number of grandchildren is four to five. The AARP’s Grandparents Today National Survey…
More than half of Americans associate retirement with the words “freedom” and “enjoyment,” and a sizable portion associate retirement with the word “stress-free.” However, the reality is many are forced, out of necessity, to work during retirement, are deeply worried about their future Social Security & Medicare benefits, rising costs of medications, and other unforeseen…
Debt settlement companies are most often for-profit companies claiming they can negotiate with your credit card company to reduce the amount you owe. Credit card companies generally do not have special offers available to only debt settlement firms, so you are paying the debt settlement company for work that you can do yourself. The Consumer Financial…
Americans are still blowing their budgets dining out. Repeated surveys list the top budget buster as eating out, followed by food and groceries (20%) and travel (20%). Around 15% of consumers said not saving enough was their biggest financial blunder of the year. Whether fine dining, casual dining or quick-service dining (“fast food”) most meals…
Increasingly, parents and schools are now on-board with saying goodbye to paying with cash for school lunches and opting for debit cards the students can use on cafeteria transactions, like using MySchoolBucks. While this idea has been helpful in expediting long lunch lines and making for cleaner accounting at the end of the day, electronic…
