6 Ideas for your Mid-Year Financial Checkup

1) Maximize retirement plan deferrals. Deferrals to your employer’s retirement plan reduce current federal income tax liability and enhance your retirement savings. If your employer offers a match, don’t pass up this benefit. The 2006 basic limit is $15,000 ($20,000 if you are age 50 or older). (more…)

My Super Sweet 16

I caught an episode of the MTV show "My Super Sweet 16" for the first time the other night. For those of you who haven't seen the show, it "takes you behind the scenes for all the drama, surprises and over-the-top fun as teens prepare for their most important coming-of-age celebrations". But, these aren't average teens. These are teens of super rich parents and the money that gets spent on these sweet 16's is ridiculous. Besides being fairly disgusted with what the kids expected and rec...

Half a grand to fix the brakes

So, we're heading out of town for the weekend. We'll be driving the wife's car so you can imagine my delight when she called me on the way home from work to tell me that her car is making a bad squeeking noise. So now it's Friday night and I have to find someone to fix the brakes before we leave on Saturday. But, it's not so bad, right? It's not expensive to replace brake pads and, hey, it's just something that has to be done every once in a while, right? Wrong. We can't just replace the...

Money Camp For Kids

There are countless summer camps out there. Summer camps that teach survival skills are pretty common, but what about a camp that teaches financial survival? Teens have a lot to learn. Only half of high school students in a recent survey correctly answered questions about saving, budgeting and retirement. Money camps are growing in popularity and that's good news because many schools don't cover the topic and parents aren't always the best teachers. They've made mistakes with their own mone...

Yahoo beats Google in finances

Although when it was launched in March it drew a lot of attention, Google Finance has not yet come to surpass Yahoo Finance or MSN, according to Hitwise. The statistics show that Yahoo is the leader in Web-finance domain with 34.9 percent share of the market, as of the week ending June 10, 2006. The second place is taken by MSN Money Central, with 13.67 percent while the third place goes to CNN Money, which holds 4.50 percent share. Google is situated on a disappointing 38 place for the week ...

Welcome!

I'm finally back. As some of you know, my former site Million Dollar Goal was disabled by the folks at Blogger for unexplained reasons and since then, that web address has been taken over by someone else. So, I've created this new site on a new server and I'm ready to roll. So, check out the new site and let me know what you think. Hopefully you'll like the new design. I was able to copy over a few of my old posts, so feel free to browse through them and thanks for stopping by.