I recently received an e-mail from a reader named Steve. For background, he’s 30 years old and has only recently started getting his financial house in order. Over the past six months, he’s built up a $2k emergency fund at ING Direct, and he’s been working to reduce his debt. That being said, he still [...]

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A reader named Tony wrote it with the following question:
My grandmother found among her papers a certificate of deposit (CD) from 1984, with a 9.5%(!) interest rate. The bank, of course, is no longer around. Is there any way to find out how to claim this? What would you do?
Short of trying to figure out [...]

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A reader recently wrote in with what he termed a “complex question” about creative strategies for debt reduction.
My wife and I have FICO scores around 750. We have about $28K of debt on top of $238K in two mortgages (191K & 47K). The first is at 5.75% for another 5 years, while the second is [...]

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A reader recently wrote in with the following inquiry:
I am looking to pay off a student loan of just under $22,000 and saw that I can borrow from my IRA to pay for school without incurring the added 10% tax penalty, would this also apply to paying off a student loan? This is a private [...]

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I just received an interesting question from a reader that relocated from New York to Denmark in 2003. They have since decided to make the move permanent, and have a question about using IRA funds to help with the purchase of a home overseas:
“Can we withdraw from our traditional IRAs to use as a down [...]

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A recent search engine visitor asked:
Who gets to keep the earnest money a real estate deal falls through?
My answer: While I’ve talked in the past about the cost of a failed house deal, I’ve never really dealt directly with the issue of earnest money. In case you’re not aware, the whole point of earnest money, [...]

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In looking at my site stats, I’ve noticed that a number of people arrive here from search engines looking for answers to fairly specific question. In some cases, those answers can be found in one or more articles within my archives, but in other cases they can’t. Thus, I’ve decided to periodically pluck out some [...]

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