Someone recently asked me if having credit card minimum monthly payments made automatically from their bank account would be a smart way to avoid penalty interest and fees if they forgot to make a payment or were incapacitated somehow. It was a good question, and it brings up something important that everyone should think about, […]
Six months after graduation is when most people are required to start paying back their student loans. Unfortunately, some just don’t start paying their loans back on time. So they get off on the wrong foot with bad credit, making things like renting an apartment or buying a car more difficult or more expensive. It’s […]
There are plenty of people 40+ who look back to things they wish they’d done, especially when it comes to saving. Many feel like it’s “too late” to start now. Not true! Something a little different affects younger people who are just starting out. Specifically, with their often relatively small resources, it can feel like […]
The other day, a friend told me how her daughter, now 26, recently learned something about health insurance. After graduating from college and taking a full-time job at a regional office of a multi-national foods corporation, this young woman had stayed on my friend’s family medical insurance plan (which has somewhat preferable benefits) until she […]
The only guaranteed way to avoid being scammed is to arrange it so that you are never approached by a scammer. Unfortunately, that’s impossible. Scammers work all day, every day to come up with new ways to catch people off guard so they can scam them. It’s best to accept that there’s no way to […]
So many people are sure they would never fall for many of the scams they hear about. For most, that’s probably true — especially if they’re confronted with something they can recognize as a scam and walk away. Scammers have to reach out many, many times before they connect with a potential victim. Right now, […]
The Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) is probably one of the three top bank products/accounts ever invented. People love them. Up until about the early 1980s, the equity homeowners had in their homes technically could be accessed via a second mortgage, but in those days, second mortgages were frowned upon. That was unfair. A […]
This past May, I wrote a Smart About Money column about the failure of “banking-as-a-startup” fin-tech Synapse and how Synapse customers who thought their money was FDIC-insured learned that was not the case. A reader asked, “What’s a fin-tech?” The words are short for financial technology and, according to IBM, a fin-tech company’s “core capability […]
Buying a house in a super-hot sellers’ market (meaning most of eastern Mass.) favors buyers who are prepared as much as possible before they start seriously looking. Yes, there are exceptions, and everyone’s heard about buyers who found their unicorn house with a unicorn seller and it all happened like magic. But it’s best to […]
A 24-year-old young man recently called a radio program to explain how he’d been scammed out of his savings. This is the important part — it started with a text. He got a text apparently from his bank asking if he’d approved a transaction of $8,930. “Reply Y for Yes and N for No,” the […]
