I frequently get e-mails from people who are in over their heads and looking for advice on how to get out of debt. While I do my best to point these people to relevant articles and provide some general guidance, I never hear back from them as to how things are going.
With that in mind, [...]

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This is a guest post from Jim Wang of Bargaineering. If you like what you see here, please consider subscribing to his RSS feed.
Credit scores are becoming increasingly important each and every day. While some people check them compulsively, almost as frequently as they check their investment portfolio, others check them infrequently, like the [...]

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This is a guest post by John of Mighty Bargain Hunter. If you like what you see here, please consider subscribing to his RSS feed.
Americans collectively have well over a billion credit card accounts. Some of those accounts make the credit card companies very, very rich. I’m talking, of course, about those that belong to [...]

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About a month ago, we had a pretty lively discussion about whether or not you should pay off your mortgage early. A number of readers made great points on both sides of the debate. Since that time, I put together some thoughts on how to pay off your mortgage early for those that are interested [...]

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Should you payoff your mortgage early? I asked that question a couple of weeks ago, and the majority of respondents said “yes.” With that in mind, I thought I’d put together a list of strategies for doing just that…
Refinance your mortgage to a shorter term
If you refinance your mortgage to a shorter term, say from [...]

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As a followup to last week’s post about finding the best mortgage rates, I just wanted to remind you that there is no such thing as a free lunch. I mention this because those of you that are in the market for a new mortgage are likely to be confronted by offers for a “no-cost” [...]

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I come from middle-class roots and was brought up with what I’ve recently heard referred to as a “middle-class money mindset.” By that, I mean that I’ve been primarily concerned with:

Getting an education
Developing a skill/career
Honing that skill
Using that skill to work and trade time for money
Saving that money
Working to a ripe old age, and then [...]

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Should you pay off your mortgage early? Or should you focus on investing with your spare cash? This is one of the most hotly debated topics in personal finance, with vocal proponents on both sides. Today, I thought I’d take a look at this issue from both angles and then share our approach with you.
Why [...]

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As a followup to yesterday’s post about FreeCreditReport.com, I wanted to open up a discussion about whether or not you care about your credit score.
On the one hand, I’ve written extensively about why you should care about your credit score… Like it or not, your credit score does matter, even if you don’t intend to [...]

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I recently ran across an interesting article about a Free Money Finance reader who has a tremendous amount of student loan and credit card debt and isn’t sure how to handle it. Here’s a slimmed down version of his story:
As a college freshman, I went crazy with student loans… In the end, I totaled $265,000 [...]

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