Buying a house can be stressful. There is so much documentation to get together and so many decisions to make. My family recently bought our first home and at first we had no idea what we were doing. We had looked at Zillow and estimated what we could afford based on their monthly cost estimator,… Read More

Paying your bills on time isn’t always enough to keep a high rating. Watch out for these hidden pitfalls. You don’t need to be an MBA to know the best ways to damage your credit rating. It’s actually rather easy: Just fail to pay your bills on time (or, better yet, don’t pay them at… Read More

Think that rock-bottom, factory-closeout price is a great deal? Think again. If you learned to speak Minnesotan from Garrison Keillor on his iconic radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion,” you might know the difference between “not a bad deal” and “a heckuva deal.” But for the large swath of the population who don’t speak Minnesotan,… Read More

You’ve probably encountered Minimalism in the arts: visual artists like Frank Stella and Donald Judd, composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and writers including Raymond Carver or Richard Ford. But none of them are going to save you any money. There are tons of minimalist bloggers and lecturers, however, whose impassioned posts and… Read More

How I found myself in debt is a pretty common story for many. In fact it happened, almost unconsciously, while chasing The American Dream. I found a decent paying job, bought a house, went to college and started raising a family. After some years of climbing the corporate ladder, I realized that I was not… Read More