Saving & Banking
How a CD Ladder Works and When It Beats a Savings Account
You have $20,000 sitting in savings that you will not need for a couple of years, and the bank keeps nudging the rate down...
You have decided to open an IRA, and the brokerage form asks you to choose Roth or Traditional before you have even picked a fund.
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Saving & Banking
You have $20,000 sitting in savings that you will not need for a couple of years, and the bank keeps nudging the rate down...
Retirement Planning
A reader emailed me last spring with a letter from her IRA custodian that said she owed a withdrawal of 18,868 dollars by...
Taxes Simplified
Every spring someone shows me a closet shelf with eleven years of tax folders, a shoebox of gas station receipts from 2014, and...
Investing for Beginners
In 2022 a broad US bond index fund lost about 13 percent, its worst calendar year in decades.
Retirement Planning
Take a worker whose full benefit at 67 would be 2,000 dollars a month. Claim at 62 and the check is 1,400 dollars.
Taxes Simplified
About 95 percent of married couples in the United States file a joint return, and most of them never run the numbers on the...
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Archive
Three writers who each spent years on a different side of a money decision: a former family financial planner who got tired of budget templates that assume nobody has an irregular paycheck, a one-time collections rep who now explains what a credit report actually shows, and someone who has tracked her own index fund returns since she was twenty four and writes from that spreadsheet, not a textbook. Every article carries a byline, and the numbers shown are worked through, not rounded to make a point.