First of all, I’d like to wish a Happy Easter to everyone out there who happens to celebrate it.
Second, given the large number of people out there that are competing in March Madness basketball pools, I thought I’d share something that I heard on the radio the other day. Apparently, ESPN received 3.65 million entries [...]

Read the full article »

Here are some of my favorite FiveCentNickel posts from a year ago this past week:
» How to Avoid ATM Fees
» How I Dodged a Speeding Ticket
» How to Decide When to Refinance Your Mortgage
» More Thoughts About Refinancing Our Mortgage
And here’s what was going on two years ago:
» Dodging Taxes with a Lame Excuse
» Safe [...]

Read the full article »

FiveCentNickel participated in five carnivals this week. Here they are along with links to my articles that were included in each.
The Carnival of Personal Finance included “Middle-Class Millionaires.” Also included was “Can Merchants Require a Minimum Purchase for Credit Card Transactions?” from Credit Addict.
The Carnival of Family Life included “The High Cost of Instant Gratification.” [...]

Read the full article »

Over the past few months, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to our investment mix. We’re now maxing out our available retirement options, so we’ve turned our attention to investing in a taxable account. This brings up a number of issues related to both asset allocation and asset location. While we need to maintain [...]

Read the full article »

Okay, I realize that I’ve written a lot about the tax stimulus rebate recently, but this seems to be a topic of great interest, so I thought I’d throw out another little nugget of information… While I previously posted a calculator for figuring out whether you qualify for the tax rebate, that’s not an official [...]

Read the full article »

Update: They’ve decided to start making payments early.
Yesterday I noted that I had received the official notification letter related to the tax stimulus rebate checks. In that letter, the IRS noted that they would start sending checks in May. The IRS has, however, since come out with official guidance on when you can expect your [...]

Read the full article »

Today was a big day in our house, as soccer season is once again upon us. Unlike last fall, when my wife and I coached three teams between the two of us, we’ve scaled back to just one team this year. But we still have three kids playing, so it’s busy, busy, busy nonetheless. Just [...]

Read the full article »

For what it’s worth, I just received notification of the Economic Stimulus Tax Rebate checks. This is the same mailing that is reported to have cost the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) nearly $42 million to send out. While this pales in comparison to the $168 billion rebate program, it’s still a ton of money (more [...]

Read the full article »

The extent to which frugality and Earth-friendliness intersect has always been interesting to me. Thus, I read with great interest an article call “Conserve Your Energy” in the most recent issue of Reader’s Digest. In short, this article was pitched as a “guide to effortless environmentalism,” essnetially targeting the well meaning but lazy amongst us.
I’ve [...]

Read the full article »

This is just a quick note to introduce you guys to CreditAddict.com…
Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed periodic links out to this site, as well as its presence in the RSS aggregator block near the bottom of every page here at FiveCentNickel. In case you haven’t made the connection, Credit Addict is a new project that [...]

Read the full article »