There’s infinite space on the virtual folding table that is the comments section for readers to add their eBay auctions – a great way to clean out the closets and make some extra cash to pay down bills or build up savings. We’ll get this started with two items of our own:
money
Thinking About Financial Portfolios Makes Shoppers Spend More
By 11.26.07
Consumers can be cued to spend more through a series of simple “priming” questions. A study in the Journal of Consumer Research split subjects into two groups. One was asked a series of questions about the contents of their wallets: Did they have any library cards? Did they carry pictures or cash? How many other wallets did they own? The other was asked about their financial portfolio.
By 11.26.07
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4 ways for small-business owners to save on next year’s taxes. [WSJ]
The 10 Most-Hated Money Saving Tips
By 11.26.07
The 10 Most-Hated Money Saving Tips [Free Money Finance]
Guide To US Bank Service Fees
By 11.26.07
If you’re a customer of US Bank and would like to know if any fun fees apply to your region, like 25 cents every time you buy something with a debit card and punch in your PIN code, here’s a handy guide. 23 states and smaller zones, like “California Metro” and “Council Bluffs, IA” have unique fees, all other fall under the rubric of “Minnesota and All Other States Not Within U.S. Bank Footprint.” It certainly is expensive to run a bank, and everything being electronic has only increased fees. Hey, the electrons have to travel on, like, gold conductors, don’t you know.
By 11.25.07
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There will be a Consumerist Neighborhood eBay Garage Sale starting tomorrow, Monday. Get your listings up and when the post appears, add your stuff in the comments. Let’s clean out the closets and make some cash.
How To Tell A Good Stock Picking Strategy From A Faulty One
By 11.21.07
Okay, so Jack Hough’s column in SmartMoney this week is really just an extended ad for his new book. But in this case, the content of the book is something valuable that we think a lot of Consumerist readers will want to know about: how to identify reliable stock picking strategies.
Who To Tip And How Much
By 11.21.07
Ah, holiday tipping, that peculiarly American pastime that erupts into an orgy of envelopes and awkward “thank you”s at the end of every year. Kiplinger tries the impossible: putting together a guide for who to tip and how much to give. Even they admit that it’s nigh impossible to create a definitive guide—they suggest “handing out end-of-the year tips for one to three people who have given you exemplary service during the year.”
Which Retirement Funds To Tap First
By 11.19.07
So you’re an old geezer and you’re ready to start enjoying all the money you saved up for retirement. If you’re under 70.5, this is the order you should spend your assets in, according to the Autumn 2007 Vanguard report:
5 Myths Of Retirement Investing
By 11.19.07
Here’s 5 common myths people tell themselves that can end up bungling their retirement savings plan, cribbed from the Autumn issue of the Vanguard market report.
Finding Legal Lucre In Identity Theft
By 11.18.07
A slate of companies legitimately profit from identity theft by offering services that the three credit reporting agencies refuse to make easily accessible to consumers. The Times brings us the stories of three such companies that are sucking the venture capital teat all the way to market:
Why Do You Hate The Dollar Coin?
By 11.18.07
Our beloved U.S. Mint has apparently redesigned the dollar coin to feature a rotating slate of Presidents. Each President gets a three-month stint on the coin. On Thursday, James Madison, our 4th Chief Executive, took his rightful place on the golden slab – but nobody seemed to care. Why?
Saving Money The Lazy Way
By 11.17.07
If you’re like approximately 25% of the writers at The Consumerist, then prolonged talk of budgeting makes your eyes glaze over with boredom as you imagine yourself somewhere else doing something fun, like playing a video game or looking at pornography. Here, then, is a list of 10 so-called “easy” ways to save money, none of which require that you read a book or finally open that Quicken box your parents bought you two years ago. Many (or most) of the ideas may be of dubious value, but nobody said being lazy was profitable.
Cheap Ideas For Holiday Parties
By 11.16.07
Kiplinger set itself three basic rules to follow for affordable holiday entertaining: “make it a team effort” by splitting hosting duties or having guests bring food, “borrow what you don’t have,” and ” be creative.” Following these rules, they came up with ten ideas for holiday get-togethers that even people on tight budgets can pull off. Here are the first three.
10 Great Finance Books
By 11.16.07
Trent at The Simple Dollar read a new finance book every week for a year, ranking them according to how original and useful they were, and now he’s compiled a list of his top ten picks. According to Trent, if you read these ten books (and maybe the ones coming in at #11 and #12), “You’ll have absorbed basically all the useful material in every book on the list.”
His top pick is “Your Money or Your Life,” by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, a “big picture” book that looks at how and why you spend your money.
New Ruling Means Banks Could Have Tough Time Foreclosing
By 11.15.07
There’s big ramifications to a federal court’s dismissal of 14 foreclosure cases because the bank couldn’t prove that they owned the mortgage note, reports NYT.
