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Have been trying out the 30-day trial of the credit tracking at myFICO.com.  Yesterday, I got a email alert that both my wife and I had our scores increase.  My wife’s score jumped 6 points to 632 and mine jumped a nice 33 points to 596.
My score is still crap, but if I could get just [...]

I know sometimes when you are working for your goals, you need to make some sacrafices.  Maybe you eat ramen for a while, avoid going out to movies/bars, etc.  But where is the line for sacraficing for a cause and sacraficing too much?
One situation we are in right now… my wife’s grandfather is going to [...]

I decided to make a few changes to my mortgage debt reduction goal.
First, I realized a flaw with how I was counting progress.  Before, I had looked at it, said I wanted to pay off $10k, and then any payment I made was being counted against that total.  The problem I spotted was that amount [...]

When you are looking to making an important financial decision, one important thing to do is to separate reasoning from justification.
For instance, with us looking to buy a house, some of the justifications include:

Owning something
Building equity and stability
Tax break (including staying in a lower tax bracket)

These are benefits that come from purchasing a home and only [...]

Don’t confuse “change” with the “act of changing”… I am talking about those coins you get whenever you pay cash for something that then end up in your change drawer, never to be seen again.  Change can pretty influential, especially in crunch time or when you looking for that extra dollar to throw at a [...]

he other day, I sat down and was doing some calculations as far as realistic retirement goals.  As a part of that, I was using JLP’s retirement savings calculator.
Using the calculator, I figure I am about 40 years away from retirement, and planning on about 30 years of being in retirement.  This would put me [...]

I’ve been using Experian’s CreditExpert service since January, as Money 2006 came with a free year of service.  CreditExpert is just a simple credit monitoring service, it is pretty decent, though kind of barebones.  But it is free, so I don’t have any problems using it for now.
As a part of it, you routinely get [...]

about the estimated tax brackets for 2007 was released and this got me doing a little bit of checking.
I keep a running estimate of our taxes in Microsoft Money and we’ve been sitting in the 15%, but with the release of the 2007 estimates, it got me thinking… how close are we to peaking out [...]

Put together some graphs that I will be using to chart my progress on my way to my debt and savings goals.  I always like seeing charts on other people’s blogs, and in general, I like math, data tracking, etc.  So I’ve added a couple of images to help track my progress on a couple [...]

Of course when someone first starts thinking about buying a house, the first thing they ask is “how much can I afford?”  Very reasonable question.  Good thing to know before you go out shopping.
The problem is that different banks/lenders calculate it slightly different.  They all usually look at two things: your payment-to-income ratio (only up [...]