This past weekend, for the first time in my adult life, I was the victim of identity theft. We were walking into the movie theater about to sit down for a movie, and I got a phone call from a weird phone number. I listened to the message as we sat down in our seats and it was Bank of America saying there was suspicious activity in my bank account. My first reaction was that it was a scam, some kind of phishing attempt to get me to call them back and give them personal information acting like they were Bank of America. I have an iPhone, so I logged into my online banking from the BOA iPhone app, and sure enough, there were two $1,000 purchases and about a dozen smaller charges. My heart sank to my stomach. I couldn’t freakin’ believe it. Someone hijacked my account or one of our debit card numbers and was buying crap online. I couldn’t sit through that movie knowing what I now knew, so we left the theater, got rain check passes to see the movie another time, and I quickly called Bank of America.
Erik FolgateErik and his wife, Lindzee, live in Orlando, Florida with a baby boy on the way. Erik works as an account manager for a marketing company, and considers counseling friends, family and the readers of Money Crashers his personal ministry to others. Erik became passionate about personal finance and helping others make wise financial decisions after racking up over $20k in credit card and student loan debt within the first two years of college. Another one of Erik's projects is the site, Stuff We Google.
How To Respond To Unauthorized Transactions In Your Bank Account
Erik Folgate
Personal Finance Round-Up: Paying Off Your Credit Card Debt Once And For All
Money Crashers
Eliminating your credit card debt and all of your debt is the single most important thing you can do to help you start winning with money. But, it’s one thing to just pay off your credit card debt and get right back into debt. When you decide to eliminate your debt and achieve the goal, your next goal should be to never get back INTO debt. Wallet Pop has a great article about how to pay off your credit card debt once and for all. So, are you ready to cut up your credit cards? It’ll be a HUGE weight off of your shoulders, I promise!
Personal Finance Round-Up: Preparing For A Sickness or Injury
Money Crashers
We often think that getting hospitalized due to an illness or injury is something that we cannot predict or prepare for, but that’s not true. Over half of the people that file for bankruptcy do so because of extremely large medical bills that they cannot pay back. Now, this may be partly due to unbelievably high medical expenses and unaffordable health insurance, but it if you plan for bad things to happen, they won’t seem so bad when they don’t put you in bankruptcy. Here’s a good article from Bargaineering on how to prepare for a sickness and/or injury.
Tax Free Holidays Coming Up
Erik Folgate
It’s really hard to believe that Summer is almost over, and many of you will be sending your kids back to school! Sending your kids back to school can be a really expensive time of year, because your kids are growing out of clothes and need new school supplies. Fortunately, a lot of states have implemented sales tax free holidays around this time of year to help parents out a little bit. You could easily spend about $250 to $400 dollars per kid for some new clothes, shoes and school supplies, so that extra 6% to 9% sales tax could add up to some nice savings.
7 Ways To Make An Extra $1,000 A Month
Erik Folgate
Many of you are very tight on money, and an extra $1,000 a month would literally change your world. An extra grand of income per month doesn’t sound like a lot, but for a one-income family or a family with a lot of expenses, an extra $1,000 can make a big difference when it comes to reaching your financial goals or just preventing you from getting into more debt. If one of you is a stay-at-home parent, earning a $1,000 is an attainable goal, but many of us don’t know where to start. We automatically think that we’ll need to go get a part-time job with non-flexible hours doing work that we hate, but it’s simply not true. You just need to be a little creative, know the area you live in and its needs, and fulfill those needs. Here are 10 ideas for how to make an extra $1,000 a month:
Help A Reader: What To Do When You’re Upside Down On Your Mortgage?
Erik Folgate
I’m really baffled that people are so tempted to just walk away from their house simply because it’s “worth” less than they owe on it. I put the worth in quotation marks, because what a house is worth is all relative. A house is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Sure, you can base it on comparable sales in the neighborhood, but that gets very skewed when you are dealing with one of the biggest real estate corrections in the history of the United States. Just because a real estate agent or Zillow.com tells you that your house is worth $100,000 and you owe $150,000 doesn’t mean it’s going to be like that forever. It would only take a solid year of real estate recovery and lessening foreclosures/short sales in order for your property to start recovering in market value. Here’s a question we recently received from a concerned friend:
Personal Finance Blog Round Up: Is It Time To Quit Your Day Job?
Erik Folgate
Are you currently working in a job that you hate? Maybe some of you have realized that you don’t want to be in your current profession long term so you’ve taken the first steps of starting a side business that could turn into full-time work, but you’re scared to take the leap by getting rid of your day job. At Money Crashers, we believe (and statistics prove it) that you’ll make a lot more money in your lifetime if you’re doing something that you love. The folks over at Get Rich Slowly think the same thing and they’ll help you answer the all important question of when the right time is to quit your day job. Here are a few more great articles from around the personal finance blogosphere:
ING Direct Has A New iPhone and Blackberry Mobile App
Erik Folgate
This is the day that I’ve been waiting for. I’ve had an ING Direct online savings account for about 4 years now, and I’ve had an ING online checking account for about two years. We love having both, because we can set up as many sub-savings accounts as we want for various different savings goals, and we can have a debit card for the checking account which allows us to instantly transfer funds from the savings account to the checking account to be used on our debit card. Prior to now, we had to remember to make that transfer to the checking account on a computer or try to navigate through the website on the mobile Safari browser on my iPhone. ING has FINALLY developed a new iPhone and Blackberry app that easily allows you to transfer money from one account to another, pay bills online, and check your balances.
Is There A Right Financial Time To Have A Baby?
Erik Folgate
Money Crashers is obviously a blog about personal finance, but because our money is so closely tied to our everyday lives, we often end up talking about a lot of huge life events. Getting married, buying your first house, having children, getting divorced, and looking for a job are all major life events that stir up a plethora of financial decisions and questions among you. The subject of babies and when to have them came up recently with me and a friend because my wife and I recently found out that she is pregnant! This was a major blessing for us, because we had been trying for a while and we’ve been emotionally and financially preparing for this time for about 18 months. The question was raised to me about when I think the “right” time is to have a baby and what your finances should look like before you have one. Here are a few of my thoughts:
Personal Finance Round-Up: 6 Unique Ways To Eat Watermelon
Money Crashers
Happy Independence Day! It’s the summer and it’s the 4th of July, so that means many of you will be buying huge watermelons and serving it up to your guests today and throughout the summer. Wise Bread has a fun article today on 6 Unique Ways To Eat Watermelon. What does it have to do with money? Well, sometimes we buy watermelons way too big to eat, so instead of losing money and letting it go bad, try those 6 ways to eat it quicker! Here’s a few more great articles to peruse on your Sunday holiday:
Be Thankful For Financial Freedom This Independence Day
Erik Folgate
Independence Day is one of my favorite holidays. I started out loving it, because I was a pyromaniac as a kid, and any excuse to play with fireworks sounded GREAT to me. I still love playing with fireworks and watching them, but the 4th of July has brought so much more meaning in my life when I think about all of the men and women who’ve sacrificed their lives so that we could have the freedom to pursue a life of happiness. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and so many other Founding Fathers started this country with the dream that we would live free from tyrannical dictators, monarchies, and the constraints of oppressive government. Unfortunately, with every day that passes, every politician that we elect into government, every big government program that Congress comes up with, and every dollar we spend that we don’t have, we start slowly losing the freedoms we’ve experienced and taken for granted over the past 200 plus years.
7 Things That Are Getting Cheaper To Buy
Erik Folgate
We ALWAYS notice when something gets more expensive, but do we notice it when prices fall? We should, because the prices probably won’t be falling forever, so you need to take advantage of falling prices when you can. Sometimes recessions aren’t such a bad thing, because we often tighten up our finances which lowers demand and causes prices to fall in a lot of industries. Also, our wonderful friend called technology is also causing a lot of industries to make things more efficiently and drop prices. Remember when it was minimum $1,500 to buy a flat panel TV? Now you can get a 32″ for about $400! This isn’t an exhaustive list, but here’s some major things that are getting cheaper and helping many of you out according to the bureau of labor statistics data on consumer price index.
Financial Lessons Learned From Saved By The Bell
Erik Folgate
If you’re in your 20′s or early 30′s, then you’ve probably either seen an episode of “Saved By The Bell” or you’re one of those freaks that’s seen every episode and still watches the re-runs on TBS in the morning. It was an iconic TV show for our generation. I’m not sure why it gained so much popularity. It was just one of those addicting shows that any pre-teen would get hooked on whether it was 1990 or 2010. Surprisingly, the show did tackle a lot of deep issues that teens face every day, and it even dealt with some financial issues. Some of these lessons learned might seem like a little bit of a stretch, but I know you get bored reading about private mortgage insurance and mutual fund load fees, so take a trip down pop culture memory lane with me for a little bit.
4 Financial Lessons To Learn From The World Cup
Erik Folgate
I worked from home today, not because the World Cup was on, but because we were hiring new landscapers and I wanted to talk to them before they started working on our yard. BUT, since a huge World Cup match for the U.S. was playing at 10am this morning, I got my laptop, and started working in the living room while casually paying attention to the game. I saw ANOTHER goal that was taken away by a referee who probably has a chip on his shoulder towards the United States, and I saw a lot of missed opportunities by the U.S. to take control of the game. Then, it happened — one of the most dramatic moments in U.S. soccer history. Just when it looked like the U.S. team would be flying home tomorrow, Landon Donovan cleaned up a miss from Jozy Altidore in the 91st minute of the game to win it and advance to the next round. Your finances are just like that goal from Landon Donovan. Your finances ALWAYS have a chance, as long as you are patient and persistent. Here are five lessons you can learn from watching the World Cup this year:
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Financial Coach, Ansley Sebring And The Budget Author
Erik Folgate
At Money Crashers, we are big advocates of working with a financial coach or counselor rather than a financial advisor if your financial goals are geared more towards preparing a budget, a plan to get out of debt, and seeking ways to save money in your daily life. Trusted financial advisors and planners are good sources for some of the more technical questions about investing, insurance, and estate planning, but they often neglect the part about being in the right situation to start investing or estate planning. Ansley Sebring, owner of her own financial coaching company called, The Budget Author, is based just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. She left the corporate world to be a self-employed financial coach because she saw the huge need for personal financial education during a time when jobs were being lost, real estate values were down, and people were waking up to the fact that they had WAY too much credit card and other consumer debt. I interviewed her recently about making the switch to being an entrepreneur while maintaining the role of mother of two children, wife, and owner of a company.
