I recently ran across an interesting article by Ric Edelman in Bottom Line/Personal (no link, sorry). In it, he ran down a list of the biggest lies that you’ll hear from a financial adviser, and how they could cost you money. What follows is a synopsis of that article, along with some thoughts of my [...]

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How’s this for awesome customer service? We were settling in late last Saturday morning to watch some college football when my wife and I decided that we wanted to get some takeout from our local burger joint. While they offer counter service and a drive-through, their motto is “We don’t serve fast food. We serve [...]

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FiveCentNickel participated in three carnivals this week. Here they are along with links to my articles that were included in each.
The Carnival of Personal Finance included “Beware the Siren Song of Gift Cards.”
The Carnival of Money Stories included “Changing Our Reward Credit Card Strategy.” Also included was “What’s the Right Age to Start an Allowance?” [...]

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A little over a week ago we converted two of our reward credit cards to, well… More rewarding versions. This included a switch from the Chase Perfect card to the Chase Freedom card, and a change from our old (old, old, old) Amex Optima card to an Amex Blue Cash card.
All in all, this was [...]

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As I noted the other day, we’re changing our reward credit card strategy, in part due to perceived inflexibility on Citi’s part when it comes to making automated payments. It turns out that I may have been wrong about what you can and cannot do, so I just hopped on over to the Citi website [...]

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Just a quick note to say that we’ve drained our flexible spending account (FSA) for 2007. Given that we set aside $1200 pre-tax dollars, we saved somewhere in the neighborhood of $475 this year (33% federal tax bracket + 6.5% state tax bracket). While going through our open enrollment paperwork, I decided to bump our [...]

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Here are some of my favorite FiveCentNickel (subscribe) posts from a year ago this past week:
» Standard Mileage Rate Increases for 2007
» Flexible Spending Closed out at a Profit
» Putting Together an Estate Plan
And here’s what was going on two years ago:
» Money Moves for 2006, Part 3: Your Job
» Money Moves for 2006, Part [...]

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My son is fond of saying that I have two recipes: chili and meatloaf. While this is a bit of an oversimplification, I must admit that these are two of my favorites. I bring this up because I spent part of yesterday afternoon making chili with our leftover Thanksgiving turkey — try as I might, [...]

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I’m a bit late with this, but here goes…
October was another great month at FiveCentNickel, thanks in large part to contributions from readers such as yourself. I just wanted to take a moment to thank those of you who stop by and comment. If you like what you see here, keep in mind that you [...]

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FiveCentNickel participated in two carnivals this week. Here they are along with links to my articles that were included in each.
The Carnival of Personal Finance included “How Does Zecco Make Money?” Also included was “What’s the Right Age to Start an Allowance?” from raising4boys.com.
The Festival of Frugality included “To Gift or Not to Gift: Frugal [...]

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