Increasingly, I’ve been getting calls and emails from homeowners who aren’t yet behind on their mortgages, but think they will be soon. For a while – too long – lenders refused to talk to borrowers unless they were a few months behind. But President Obama’s Making Home Affordable plan should change things. More…
Tomorrow is Tax Day and I was on Today this morning with my last minute tips for those of you who haven’t finished filing. Check out the video below, and a written recap is after the jump.
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Hi, I’m Arielle McGowen, and I do some reporting and researching for Jean. In my downtime, though, one of my favorite things to do is cook.
This, I’m sure you know, can be an expensive hobby. I only have two mouths to feed – I live with my fiance in Brooklyn – but a good chunk of our budget goes to the grocery store and farmer’s market each week. Over the past few years, I’ve had to learn how to cut back so we could put a bit of money away for a rainy day (Jean’s influence) and, let’s be honest, so I could afford to support my other costly habits (namely, going out to eat…I’m noticing a pattern here). More…
As I write this, Teddy, my beloved cockapoo, has snuggled up to my feet (the benefits of working at home). He doesn’t know it, but last weekend he almost got a brother. We were out and about with our next door neighbors in a nearby town. They’ve been talking about getting a puppy. And together we wandered into a local pet store where there were two cockapoo puppies — brothers we were told — from a nearby breeder. “If you take one,” we’ll take the other, Eliot, my fiance, told my neighbors, not wanting to split them up.
In the end they opted to pass. I was disappointed. But then I thought about how much better this would be for my bottom line. Two dogs would mean twice the vet bills, twice the grooming, twice the food, twice the dog-sitter (when I travel for work, she often takes him overnight). In other words, thousands of dollars a year. And that doesn’t include start-up costs. More…
Yes, that’s a line from Little Shop of Horrors — the score from which has been running through my head for the last three weeks (that’s what happens when you see two high school productions and one college one inside of a six-day period). I thought I had actually gotten rid of it — replaced, you’ll be happy to know by Rock Me Amadeus, the song that runs through the new movie Adventureland, which I saw over the weekend — but no. More…
Here are some organizations that can help with everything from managing debt to saving for college or retirement.
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