(This article was originally published at ThinkingAboutMoney on June 11th, 2006.) Everybody knows that one of the first critical parts of getting your financial house in order is to create a budget. How can you know if you are living within or beyond your means without one? How can you figure out...

Whether it's due to bad or irrational decisions, youthful naiveté, a bad streak of luck, or situations totally beyond our control, we're all faced with mounting debt at some point. If it gets bad enough, some of us may even have to work with our creditors to forgive some of our debt just to remain...

I’ve been doing a little research on margin trading, because I've recently been using it to float purchases of stock while my sale of some mutual funds clear. So I had a bunch of questions, like "What’s buying power?" and "How much do I need to keep in my brokerage account?" Well, I was once again...

Today President Bush signed into law a bill that is designed to encourage 401K participation. There are many good points to this bill and estimates are that it will increase the number of people participating in retirement plans. The numbers are still foggy but you are looking at anywhere from 30%...

It was Thomas Jefferson who said: "Every generation needs a Revolution." He was, of course, talking about the fact that every few years there comes a time where the old administration must be replaced by a newer one in order for our nation and liberty to survive. Every four years this nation has an...

Howard Lindzon "smells a rat" at TheMoneyBlogs.com: > I called [the owner of TheMoneyBlgs], who picked up his own phone and asked him some questions. I immediately smelled a rat. Trading Markets will take my content and brand it in moneyblog design and keep all the advertising dollars from the...

After launching in February as the first person-to-person lending site in the US, Prosper.com has seen a good deal of activity. Now that it’s been 6 months since they opened their doors, I used Google Blogsearch to see what people’s experiences were out there in the blogosphere. I discovered that...

Almost all of us hear some variation of this from our credit card or car loan company: your interest rate is a variable rate of 14.99% based on Prime plus 6.74%. That means your current rate is 14.99% but may change at any time, so if the prime interest rate goes up or down 0.5% so will your card....

I’d like to invite you to look at a recent, not atypical, four day chart of a stock. In this particular case, it’s SiRF Technology Holdings (NASDAQ:SIRF). As you can see, the stock gapped down from the $25-$26 it had been trading at to the $19-$20 range. You see this kind of thing all the time when...

Most people invest in bonds because they want to have stable fixed income. Because the performance of bonds are very stable, they also serve to reduce the volatility of the overall portfolio. Depending on the weighting from 0% to 100%, you can reduce your stock volatility correspondingly. With...