Advice on saving money, high yield savings, and emergency savings accounts.

Regardless of your current financial situation, your income, or your overall debt burden, it’s important that you’re always working to build and maintain an appropriate emergency fund. The target amount you’ll be looking to accumulate may vary, but the principles behind building your emergency fund will be the same. This is why emergency funds are generally best placed in savings accounts rather than investment or brokerage accounts – you don’t want to face the prospect of ever losing money. But when you begin looking at your various account options, you’re likely to quickly find that you have an abundance of...

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The start of the new year is a time when many of us look to improve our lives by making resolutions. Along with health-related resolutions, new years goals that relate to personal finances are particularly common. Two of the most important financial goals are to pay down debt and to save more. The benefits of paying down your debt are immediately apparent, but sometimes the benefits of building up your savings sometimes aren’t clear until a number of years down the road. This means that sometimes personal savings gets neglected. With that in mind, here are some tips for jump...

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Interest rates have been low for several years now, and while that might be good for people with good credit ratings who are looking for a new mortgage, it has proven costly for savers. Bank CDs and savings accounts currently offer interest rates that would have been considered shockingly low just a decade ago. In this low yield environment, savers are looking at other account features in deciding where to open a new account. For something that seems to be almost a generic service, there is a surprising amount of variety in the terms and conditions that apply from one...

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Paying yourself first is one of the most powerful and underappreciated techniques for strengthening your personal financial situation. When you “pay yourself first” you treat your savings goal as another bill that must be paid each month, along with your mortgage or rent, your utilities, your car payment, etc. The reason for approaching savings in this manner is because that it helps overcome the temptation to make your savings an afterthought which, unfortunately, happens far too often. If you’re not currently following this strategy, or you’re finding it difficult to make it work, then you may want to consider setting...

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When we set out to improve our financial health by saving more money, there’s no shortage of advice on how to do it. Unfortunately, sometimes the methods that are suggested represent too much of a change for some people to handle all at once. And good financial advice won’t be particularly helpful if it’s not followed. Saving isn’t an “all or nothing” endeavor. It would be great to completely transform one’s financial picture and begin saving hundreds or thousands of dollars each month, but if that’s not a realistic option there are still plenty of easy ways you can boost...

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Over the past decade or two, vacations have become something of an afterthought for many individuals and families. Certainly increased job and career time commitments are one factor leading to less frequent vacations. But another element of taking fewer vacations is simply not being able to afford it. Fortunately, most of us realize it’s never a good idea to go into debt in order to take a vacation. Knowing that you’ll have to repay the cost later will always be in the back of your mind, so borrowing makes it difficult to get the most enjoyment out of your vacation....

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As we are already one month into 2014, you’ll find no shortage of financial advice for how to start the New Year off right. A common theme in many of the articles you may see is saving; specifically, plans and strategies for accomplishing a particular savings goal in 2014. While these money saving plans can be helpful, some individuals find that they fall short in sticking with the program. This may be due in part to a cookie-cutter savings plan not being a good fit for the individual’s particular circumstances. The best way over this hurdle is simply to come...

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Performing a regular financial audit on yourself and your household from time to time can be quite valuable. Without knowing your current financial situation, or how much progress you’re making toward your long term goals, there’s no way to know if you need to refine your financial strategies. One key element of your personal financial audit is to evaluate your current savings practices. Unless you have money saved, and have developed good habits for continuing to do so, it will be difficult to maintain any significant measure of financial stability. While it can be challenging to adjust to a new savings...

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As much as we’d like to maximize our income, and get a raise each year from our employer, we generally don’t have complete control over our income. Instead, the best way to reach our financial goals is through savings, because we have a much greater level control over how much we spend and how much we save each month. Saving isn’t just something you do over the course of one or two months. Rather, the best way to save and meet financial goals is to save money each and every month. Don’t worry, saving more doesn’t necessarily mean buying less,...

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A wedding is an exciting time. It’s a milestone that marks the beginning of the rest of your life together. But if you’re not careful, it’s also something that can cost many thousands of dollars. And it’s surprisingly easy for the costs of a wedding to ultimately climb into the tens of thousands of dollars. As you’re starting out your life together the last thing you want to do is start it with debt, so it’s highly advisable to save all the money that you’ll need to cover your wedding costs. Before you say “I do,” create a plan to...

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