As if college wasn’t expensive and frustrating enough, students are forced to deal with the increasing cost of textbooks. Textbooks are overpriced and they become obsolete with every new edition that comes out. You shouldn’t have to deal with the battle of textbooks when you’re bat...

As a recent High School graduate, I have survived the insanity known as application season. As October ends and November starts, many college and scholarship applications come due, and many students are scrambling to start, finish or refine their writing. Out of all of the essays that students do du...

Ever heard of the FDIC? That’s too bad. You see back during the Great Depression, banks lost a lot of money. People panicked and ran to the banks to take out their money. Banks lost even more money, and this processed repeated itself for awhile. Savings were being wiped out. It was ugly with a c...

When it comes to shopping and saving, there’s many common-sense solutions for students. Here’s a list of helpful shopping tips for strapped for cash students. Use Discount Stores They may be hard to find in some locales, but dollar stores still abound. Also, Big Box retailers can often b...

I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal Online (WSJ) about prepaid debit cards the other day. It’s basically a debit card that isn’t linked to a traditional bank account. Here’s a quick run down of some of the advantages and disadvantages: Advantages: It’s co...

Textbooks: They’re high priced, we don’t have a choice usually but to buy them, and they suck. Don’t worry about them too much though. Here are some tips to help you minimize the pain and potentially maximize your gain when it comes to college textbooks: 1.  Ask the teacher if the...

Have you ever seen the section in the newspaper with a ton of little writing and decimals that tell you the closing price of stock, amount of shares and plenty of other useful information? Were you completely lost? Here’s a breakdown of the columns you might come across in the investing sectio...

Identity theft. Anyone is vulnerable.  It very well can happen to you.  I recently experienced a scary situation regarding personal information.  I own stock in a large company.  A well-known bank was the company’s transfer-agent, and both have great reputations. Several months ago, the...

Compound interest has been called the eighth wonder of the world. Although it may not be as jaw dropping as the Great Wall, if you use this wonder to your advantage, it will affect your financial life more than you ever imagined. First of all, what is compound interest? To quote Albert Einstein, it ...

The Retirement Guru says… that the IRS is sort of like a boyfriend or girlfriend that you’re in a fight with. Anything you do will get used against you, if not now then later. The good news with the IRS is that you get to pick your battles. The problem is, American citizens aren’t...