Thirty-year mortgages rates haven’t been this cheap in my lifetime.  Considering this was the year of my 20th high school reunion, that’s a fairly long time. A fixed-rate mortgage costs more to obtain than an adjustable-rate mortgage of the same term because the lender bears the interest-rate risk.  The means that the lender agrees to charge you a constant interest rate for up to the entire term of the mortgage, regardless of how... 

I don’t remember what prompted me to poke around on eBay to check for gift cards .  I do remember that there had been some restrictions placed on gift card sales on eBay because of rising occurrence of fraudulent activity. However, I did find a new practice that I found a little hard to believe.  It was hard to believe because I couldn’t imagine too many people buying a gift card this way.  Yet a number of sellers were doing it.... 

My Google fast-flip brought up this article on the U.S. News site:  21 Ways to Make Extra Money In Retirement .  It was aimed at present retirees.  The advice ranged from one-time money raisers (sell your stuff) to on-going money savers (ask for discounts, use a rewards credit card) to on-going money makers (consult, temp, garden, blog, etc.) Starting up a blog, for example, is not fast money.  (Take it from someone who knows.)  It can... 

My wife knows how to do so many things well.  One of her (and my daughter’s) favorite activities is drawing and coloring.  For a five-year-old she colors quite well.  (Ariel is her favorite subject.) She called me at work to ask if she could splurge on some Prismacolor art pencils .  (She’s also very good at discussing purchases before going ahead.)  These are top-drawer colored pencils: high color saturation, smooth blending,... 

User davr over at a new web applications question-and-answer site is looking for BugMeNot alternatives that don’t suck .  For those of you not familiar with BugMeNot.com , this is a site that collects username and password combinations that allow access to web material that is behind a free registration firewall.  Here’s how someone would use the site: A search engine points to an interesting article at GiveMeUrEmailz.com but the... 

The rates on 30-year, fixed rate mortgages hit historic lows this past week — 4.57% according to Freddie Mac’s data collection.  These low rates may provide a rare opportunity for saving a substantial amount of money through mortgage refinancing.  The essence of mortgage refinancing is just paying off a current mortgage with a new mortgage, presumably with a lower payment, shorter payback time, either, or both. The catch is that... 

A friend recently took a job as a restaurant server to stop a mercifully-brief bout with unemployment.  He’s a quick study: after only a week his tips are averaging 20% and only one server is doing better.  Not a poor server by any stretch. A few days ago comes this little gem in his updates: “I got an 18 cent tip today!” Not 18%.  Eighteen cents, as in a dime, a nickel, and three cents.  He later apologized for appearing... 

Customer reward programs go by a number of different names: customer loyalty programs, frequent flier programs, shoppers’ club, and so forth.  In exchange for some of your personal information and the ability to laser-target their advertising to you by tracking your purchases, you get discounts or rebates on your purchases. Maybe it’s just my opinion, but haven’t rewards programs gotten a lot more restrictive recently?  Credit... 

The majority of Americans are homeowners, and many of them carry mortgages for much of their adult lives, if not all of it.  A mortgage is a loan that has a house as collateral, and it’s usually the biggest loan a family will take out. In this post, I’ll describe and compare two kinds of mortgages:  fixed-rate mortgages and adjustable-rate mortgages.  Hopefully this will help you decide as you compare mortgage options . But first,... 

Well, my Bargaineering Bucks were burning a virtual hole in my electronic pseudo bank account, so I bid on Gregory Karp’s The 1-2-3 Money Plan: The Three Most Important Steps to Saving and Spending Smart , and won the auction. I was impressed with the book.  It covers a broad variety of financial topics, including estate planning, discretionary spending, banking, insurance, telecom expenses, how to buy used things, saving for college,... 

Commenter Marlene on my post on how to value gold jewelry asked this: Is 14k Italian gold different in price than gold in the USA? The answer depends on which gold price we’re talking about. On the one hand, there is the retail price of the gold jewelry.  This is what you’d pay at a jewelry store, secondhand store, or pawn shop.  I’m by no means an expert on Italian-made gold jewelry, but from what I gather on the internet... 

This weekend we went to a yard sale at the YMCA.  The yard sale was an event to raise money for the Kids’ Spot; people wanting to sell stuff bought a spot within the event, and this money went toward Kids’ Spot. Amongst a bunch of other things we had demanding our attention, we got the ending time of the sale wrong.  We had thought that we would have an hour or so at the sale, but we arrived there about 15 minutes before the end. ... 

My cell phone is on its last legs.  I have to insert the phone very carefully into the charger now, or else it won’t charge up.  For the nine (or so) years I’ve used a cell phone I haven’t upgraded as soon as my provider would allow me to. I did feel a little bit of urgency to upgrade to some kind of smartphone (either an iPhone or an Android) when I heard that my carrier soon was going to do away with unlimited data packages... 

Totally on a lark I visited the blog Violent Acres after staying away for a long time. The points that “V” makes in her posts are frequently flashes of brilliance, despite all of the cursing. I refrained posting about her work because I resented being put in my place as unworthy of being able to even pay her a compliment on her blog.  But, it looks like the blog has comments enabled now (for whatever reason), so this is a Good Thing. ... 

A few months back I received a complimentary review copy of Mariusz Skonieczny’s Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? which claims to help you “[l]earn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market. This book was a very easy, quick read, and was very clear.  Mr. Skonieczny is the founder and president of Classic Value Investors LLC, so from that one might expect that the strategies...