Get smart with your money
Here’s a round-up of good recent stories tied to Tax Day (deadline’s tomorrow) and one of my favorite topics, credit scores. Can’t pay? Amy Feldman’s article “What if you can’t pay your taxes?” for Reuters walks you through what to do if you’re facing a big bill, rather than a refund. Bottom line: don’t ignore […]
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The homes in our Los Angeles neighborhood tend to have small back yards. We’ve struggled to make ours liveable for most of the 14 years we’ve been here. We wanted to have space to entertain and relax, as well as room for our dog to run and our daughter to play. What we wound up […]
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Financial planner Allan Roth has a pretty good piece in the latest issue of AARP the Magazine on “The Two Faces of Your Financial Planner” (renamed “How to Choose Your Financial Planner,” a much snoozier headline, in the online version). Although it’s geared for older readers, it should be read by anyone who gets professional […]
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You’ve gotten the college acceptance letters, and their accompanying financial aid offers. But how do you really decipher how much college will really cost you? More than 1.5 million students and their families are wrestling with these issues, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wants to help. The bureau just announced a tool that can […]
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Most college students graduate with manageable student loan debt, but there are plenty of exceptions. Marketplace Money highlighted one case last week: the medical student who expected to owe nearly half a million in loans by the time he graduated. I was in the studio with host Tess Vigeland and senior producer Paddy Hirsch to […]
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wants to “whip the mortgage servicing industry into shape,” as this post on The Consumerist puts it, and such action is long overdue. Mortgage servicers have been the choke point in the mortgage mess, often costing people their homes because of their inefficiency, inaction and indifference. The CFPB wants to […]
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Dear Liz: Is there any way to expedite the foreclosure process? My wife bought a townhome shortly before we were married. Long story short, it didn’t fit our family once we got married and had a baby. We bought a larger house and tried renting the townhome but couldn’t cover the mortgage payment. We attempted […]
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Dear Liz: I have all my money (less than $150,000) in one small bank. I love my bank, but Bankrate.com’s Safe and Sound report shows the bank having only a single star. I asked someone at the bank about it, and this person said the rating wasn’t important. Is it? Answer: Of course it is. […]
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Dear Liz: My wife and I went through a foreclosure last year and need to rent an apartment. We have no credit card debt and over $30,000 in savings on an income of $75,000. We know that our credit will be an issue on apartment applications because of the foreclosure. What can we do to […]
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If you’re sick of rising bank fees, check out a new feature at NerdWallet that allows you to compare the costs of more than 120 different checking accounts across a spectrum of banks and credit unions. You’ll answer a few questions about how you use your account, including the minimum balance you can maintain and […]
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