The Civil Life

It’s not clear who’s worse, the people filling out credit card applications after stealing your identity or the credit card companies themselves. At least there is some chance the identity thieves will go to jail after taking over your credit, while the credit card companies enrich themselves legally with hidden fees and exorbitant interest rates. My wife and I signed up for American Express Blue Cash, thinking that we’d be making 5% back on some of our purchases, and intially we did, but not for long.

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In a previous post, I discussed how a credit score is calculated. What happens when your credit score is too low? A few years ago I helped a friend rebuild her credit score from the bottom. In college, she had a serious medical problem that wasn’t covered by health insurance, and went to the hospital associated with her college. She couldn’t pay, and the college, her college, sent the collection agencies to work her over and destroyed her credit. Being the type of person who felt bad about jaywalking, my friend went into a panic, thinking she could never escape. Seeing this happen, I couldn’t let my friend be treated this way, so I helped her work out a plan:

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The economic slowdown and bad loans have taken a bite out of everyone’s credit score. Even if your credit score hasn’t changed, you’ll find it much harder to get good terms on loans. If your credit score has been significantly lowered, you’ll find it difficult to get loans and you may be locked out of other opportunities, like nice apartment rentals. In this post, we’ll talk about what a credit score is.

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Avoiding bad deals is an important part of maintaining your financial health.  It’s shocking to hear from friends how they have been preyed upon by high pressure sales people that sell anything from time share condos to home furnishings.  Fortunately, you can detect these sales creatures by the tactics they have in common:

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The average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is now around $20,000 — the price of a new car.  It seems wrong to handicap a young couple’s family just when they are starting out with such huge expenses.  We were able to cut our wedding costs signficantly with a few simple steps:

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Like door-to-door salespeople, junk mail, email, and telemarketing can be unwelcome daily visitors. Even 1 minute of day wasted on things you’d rather not bother with works out to 6 hours a year. Here are some quick tips on how to save loads of time each year that you can spend on your family, relaxing, or writing blogs:

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There are many spreadsheets and formulas on the web that claim to give you an idea of how much life insurance you need. Life insurance, like life, can be very complicated and some insurance companies take advantage of this, so keep it simple. The real answer is that it depends — do you have people who depend on your income? If not, you may not need a cent of life insurance. To give an example, if you are single, childless and without dependents, you probably don’t need to buy any life insurance, even if you make a million dollars a year. Similarly, if your kids have gone through college and your spouse’s retirement is taken care of, there is no need to hand your money over to the insurance company.

What if someone does depend on you?

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In general, yes, if you have at least 18 months of service and are married at least 9 months. The 9 month rule doesn’t apply if there was a child born of the marriage or your death was accidental.

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Today, I saw an advertisement on the side of a bus shelter that said “Move your old TSP or 401k account to [Major investment firm]“. I’m not sure what an “old” TSP account is, but the advertised move is almost guaranteed to move your money into someone else’s pocket. Why is this?

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Many people are eligible for the Roth IRA, which is a retirement account that you fund with after-tax money and whose earnings and payouts are entirely tax free. In comparison, the Thrift Savings Plan, a 401k, 403b or a regular IRA are funded with before-tax money, earnings are tax free, but payouts are taxed as income. Which is better?

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