In these economic times, many people are looking at their finances and wondering where they went wrong — and how they can fix it. Some despair of ever truly managing to start over financially. The good news is that it probably isn’t too late to finish rich, even if you have to start over again. David Bach offers 10 steps to help you get on the right track in his book Start Over, Finish Rich: 10 Steps to Get You Back on Track in 2010.

Recommit to Wealth
Find Your Money
Deal with Your Credit Card Debt
Fix and Protect …read more

You’ve heard that life insurance isn’t for you — it’s for those you care for. This is true. When you purchase life insurance, you are providing for your survivors. But you don’t want to just get life insurance willy-nilly. Instead, Redeeming Riches suggests four questions you should ask yourself before you purchase life insurance:

What is the purpose? Why are your getting life insurance? Do you want income for your partner? To pay off the mortgage and other debt? To pay estate taxes? Figure out what you want the life insurance to accomplish before buying it.
How much do you have already? …read more

I ran across the following MasterCard Debit commercial recently, and it got me thinking about what we use plastic for these days.
I saw myself standing there, using my debit card to pay for a handful of inexpensive things. And why? Because I didn’t have any cash on me. In fact, it sort of reminded me of how little cash some of us carry anymore. This is because it seems so unnecessary. A piece of plastic is much easier to carry around and deal with than a fat wad of cash.
However, I do try to use cash in some cases. It …read more

While I’m not always a huge fan of Ben Stein, he does come up with some interesting insights every now and again, and he does have some clever and funny things to say about them. For Fortune Magazine, he recently offered these 4 lessons that he learned from the recession:

Economic forecasting is difficult.
Financial market forecasting is more troublesome than economic forecasting.
The financial sector in this country has lied a great deal.
The government cannot predict the economy or financial markets.

These are, of course, very good lessons to learn. It is important to realize that neither the government, nor the financial “experts”, …read more

We already have P2P lending, in which you can go online and directly lend money to your peers. But what about P2P payments? Fiserv, a company that offers online billing services to banks, is getting ready to launch just such a feature. Here is what Fiserv has to say about the service in a press release:
Using an e-mail address or mobile phone number, consumers will be able to send money to anyone they know, whether it is to repay a friend for concert tickets or dinner, contribute to a fundraiser, pay team dues, pay allowances or even pay the babysitter.  …read more

Image via WikipediaIt’s a fact of life that information overload is not easy to escape. Whether you enjoy playing the license plate game or reading the New York Times on your way to work (Do they sill print a paper?), there is a lot to read, take in and retain out there in this cruel world. Luckily, with the help of many great Web 2.0 tools out there, it’s becoming a bit simpler. I’d like to point you in the direction of a few that I have used to simplify my life.
Google Reader (or any other web …read more