Here’s a quick look at some of the articles that caught my eye over the past week…

Read the full article »

Earlier this week I talked about jumping ship from Netflix to Blockbuster Total Access. Then yesterday I received an e-mail that may have driven the final nail into Netflix’s coffin…

While we have a Netflix shipping center just 50 miles from our house, their e-mail specified that our next movie (Wild America; it’s for the [...]

Read the full article »

FiveCentNickel participated in four carnivals this week. Here they are along with links to my posts that were included in each.
The Carnival of Personal Finance included “How to Decide When to Refinance Your Mortgage.” Also included was “Allowance Insights” from Raising4Boys.
The Best of Me Symphony included “Free Bonus Miles for Applying for Frequent Flyer Credit [...]

Read the full article »

We’ve been happy customers of NetFlix for quite some time, but have been recently considering Blockbuster Total Access. We actually tried Blockbuster’s online movie service a couple of years ago and, to be totally honest, we weren’t crazy about their service. At the time, we found it to be slower than Netflix, in part [...]

Read the full article »

This week Georgia lawmakers narrowly rejected a bid to repeal a state law banning payday loans. Supporters of House Bill 163 have argued that the state went too far in banning payday lending back in May 2004, and they want to bring the industry back, albeit with new regulations.
According to an article on Georgia.gov:
Usury laws [...]

Read the full article »

I’ve written in the past about how to protect yourself when writing checks (see also “Checkbook Security“), but I haven’t talked much about “check washing.” Check washing refers to the chemical removal of ink from a check that you’ve written such that fraudsters can change the amount and make it payable to themselves. Apparently check [...]

Read the full article »

The Final Four came down to the wire but, in the end, two of my posts were left standing. FiveCentNickel narrowly (very narrowly) edged out NoCreditNeeded for one of the spots, and Raising4Boys defeated MyFinancialJourney for the other spot. These were the matchups:
Ten Simple Ways to Cover Your Ass(ets)
(barely) defeated
Avoid 10 Common Debt Reduction Mistakes
Teaching [...]

Read the full article »

Late last week I received an interesting e-mail from a reader — it seems that the juicy $150 signup bonus for the Amex Business Gold Rewards might not be dead. (And yes, anyone can apply for business cards – just use your SSN instead of an EIN and use your name as the business name.)
Hi! [...]

Read the full article »

Given the recent uptick in our income due to my new job and our growing self-employment income, I’ve recently been thinking of ways to reduce our 2007 tax liability. The first step, of course, is to contribute to my employer’s basic retirement plan, which is held at Fidelity. But… I want to do way more [...]

Read the full article »

Here are some of my favorite FiveCentNickel (subscribe) posts from a year ago:
» Safe Deposit Box: A Confession
» Ten Real Estate Mistakes, Part 1 (and Part 2)
» Storing our Stuff
» Staging Your Home for Sale
And this is what was happening over at Raising4Boys (subscribe) over the same period:
» Taking a Header out Back
» Braces for [...]

Read the full article »