Photo by: Fauxen
This article is part of a group writing project started by Lynnae at Being Frugal. 11 different personal finance blogs are participating in the effort and are writing a series called The Twelve Days of Christmas – Personal Finance style. You’ll find links to all of the other articles towards the bottom of this article.
On the 10th day of Christmas (PF style) my true love gave to me…
Photo by: pmarkham
I went Christmas shopping yesterday for my wife. I had a list of items she had pointed out to me over the past few months or so that I had written down along with a few ideas of my own. She loves photography and I wanted to get her something for her camera. A year or so ago, I gave her a 70-300mm Canon image stabilizing lens. For those of you not into photography, its a really nice telephoto lens. The lens really upped the anti on the quality of her pictures. But being a telephoto lens, it only made a difference when she was taking pictures of something relatively far away. Canon now makes a 28mm-135mm image stabilizing lens that I wanted to get for her. This would give her high quality lenses for the full focal range.
Photo by: Björn Söderqvist
Mrs. Micah started a collective post that asked readers to share their best personal finance practices of the year. Here’s mine and it applies to those of you that are married:
Money problems and disagreements are the number one cause of marital strife and divorce in the US. The key to avoiding these problems is communication. I’ve discussed this topic before in these articles: How to get my wife or husband to follow a budget, In Financial Chaos? Pass the test, and 1 year ago today – 10 things we’ve done to regain financial control.
Photo by j / f / photos
A reader named bmhumphries made the an interesting comment and asked a great question recently on my How to make paying your year end property taxes painless:
I have a question for you and your readers. How many separate accounts do you have in you on-line banks? I had to call ING recently and asked the customer service if I had too many. (I have 8). He said the most he has seen is 30!). It makes sense though to have a separate one for each non-monthly expense. I have one lumped into “Future Liabilities” and keep a spreadsheet. That has 9 annual expenses in the one ING sub account. I have often wondered if I should split them out into their own sub account in ING. It would make it easier to track, no spreadsheet work to do.
Photo by: r-z
This article is part of an ongoing series where I write about Money Saving tips and strategies each Monday. You can see the rest of the series articles here.
Generally, keeping the change involves telling someone you are giving money too to not bother giving you your change back. Unless you’re leaving a tip, I can’t imagine why anyone would do this. I am going to flip the concept of “keep the change” around with this money saving Monday tip and suggest that you always get your change back and keep the change!
The first time I heard MercyMe was on our local Christian radio station. The station was playing their first big hit, I can only imagine. The song is powerful, and both Bart’s voice and the band’s sound was unique. They quickly become my favorite band. Not only were they incredibly good, they seemed to somehow escape that non-professional sound I was used to. MercyMe seemed to be the first band to actually sound as good in quality as popular secular bands.My personal favorite song by MercyMe is Homesick found on their Undo CD released in April of 2004. Here are the lyrics:
4:00pm today signals the beginning of 3 weeks of vacation. I don’t have to return to my real job until January 7th! I have been looking forward to this for weeks now. We aren’t planning to go anywhere, but I look forward to spending some time with my wife and children and just enjoying the holiday season. Since I haven’t completed all of my Christmas shopping yet, I guess I will have to venture out into the shopping chaos a little.
This is a guest post by Linda Bustos who is an editor for Creditor Web, where you can learn about credit cards or chat in the credit forum.
A recent survey by BIGResearch reports that 69% of consumers plan to give at least one gift card this year, and over 50% of consumers hope to find a gift card in their stocking, under their tree or in their email inbox. Gift cards are convenient last – minute fixes for holiday shopping dilemmas and give recipients more freedom to choose what they really want or need. Americans will spend an estimated $26 Billion on gift cards this year, but as with anything, consumers need to know how to shop for gift cards wisely.
“Thank God for Credit Cards!” where the words spoken my our neighbor and minister’s wife while talking one evening at our local Toys-R-Us. We had taken the kids over to Toys-R-Us to help them come up with their Christmas list. While browsing through the store, we heard a friend shout “Hey!” (southern speak for Hello) and looked around to find our neighbor also in the store doing the same thing. The conversation focused around Christmas and the amount of gifts we where buying this year and how much they would cost. I mentioned we were much better off this year as we had been saving gradually for Christmas throughout the year. She looked at us, laughed and said “Thank God for Credit Cards!”.
I just hung-up the phone with Chase after once again trying to request a rate reduction. I called them as almost weekly I receive convenience check offers and balance transfer offers from them for 0% and 4.99%. The cover letters always begin with “A special offer for a valued Chase Customer…your account has some exciting news for me!” Wow, I’m a valued customer and my account has some news for! They must love me! No not really…
