Most people choose to finance the purchase of a car not because they want to impress people with a flashy ride they cannot afford but rather as a practical financial decision. With the amount of money that is sitting in your bank account, the most you can afford to pay full price for a car…

It seems like everyone makes resolutions to improve their finances in the New Year, but it makes a lot more sense to get a head start. You can reduce holiday stress if you adopt the attitude that being disciplined about your finances is an ongoing process and not a cold turkey diet that begins X…

When people talk about education as an investment, they mean that students devote their time and money to pursuing university degrees so that, when they graduate, they will be qualified for well-paying jobs. Statistics consistently show that people with university degrees earn more in the course of a lifetime than those without university degrees. Once…

One of the goals of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is to tell corporations to pick on someone their own size. Too often, abusive debt collection and lending practices result in individuals paying a substantial portion of their income to debt repayment. Once you factor in sky-high interest rates and miscellaneous fees, people often…

Everyone has the right to file for bankruptcy protection if they cannot afford to pay their debts, but not everyone will get a substantial amount of debt relief out of it, and not everyone is eligible to file under every section of the bankruptcy code. Chapter 13 bankruptcy can be a relatively painless way to…

The best New Year’s resolutions do not start on New Year’s Eve when you are finally honest with yourself about what went wrong during the old year, and they definitely do not start when you roll out of bed in the early afternoon on January 1 and start scrolling through headlines about New Year’s resolutions…

They say that nothing is certain in life except death and taxes. In today’s financial climate, it would be reasonable to add consumer debt to the financial obligations that are as inescapable as death. A relentless optimist, a veritable Pangloss who looks for a silver lining in everything, would say that, at least, the two…

Personal finance experts sometimes talk about good debts and bad debts, depending on how much each debt puts you in a position for future financial well-being. In this context, medical debts are among the worst debts you can owe. No one plans to suffer an illness or injury, so you cannot build them into your…

Just as you are never too rich or poor to file for bankruptcy, you are never too young or old. The stereotype that a lot of people hold is that people who file for bankruptcy are men in their 30s or 40s who, after a recent divorce, got stuck with a disproportionate share of the…

Social media was supposed to be fun, but it turned very dark very quickly. People have been sending online messages to ruin each other’s days since the days of AIM and Friendster. If that scene in The Social Network has verisimilitude, idle smack talk was Facebook’s original purpose. (Most viewers were less surprised by the mean-spirited origins…