Mr. Money Sense 
Are you thinking of closing a Citi credit card? Maybe you’ve taken advantage of some of the lucrative American Airline bonus miles that Citi was offering with the Aavantage Executive card and now you are facing a big annual fee for the next year. Or maybe you have too many cards in your wallet that your back is starting to hurt and you want to lighten the load.
Whatever your reason is for deciding to cancel your card, it does not have to be a hassle.
While American Express credit and charge cards come with a lot of impressive member benefits, sometimes cardholders decide to cancel their cards. It may be because they no longer use the card regularly or they do not want to continue paying the annual fee, which on American Express cards are higher than many other issuers.
If you wish to cancel your Amex card, follow these easy steps on how to cancel your card.
When you are getting a loan, a new credit card, or even a quote for car insurance, a little three-digit number determines whether you are approved and what rates you will pay. This number is your credit score and it is calculated from everything that is in your credit report to determine your credit worthiness. Lenders use your credit score to quickly decide the chances that you will repay your loan obligations if they do business with you.
As you can imagine, your credit score is very important in your financial life. It is not often that someone can pay for an entire house in cash, so for most people earning and maintaining a high credit score is key.
Before I started doing my taxes myself, I had a CPA and each year I would receive a manila folder from him that was almost an inch thick containing a copy of my tax return and all the supporting worksheets. I think that was his way of justifying how much I was paying him for tax services. That folder would join the other folders from previous years in a big file cabinet never to be taken out again… until last fall when I had to move the cabinet to paint the room.
Maybe you are in a similar situation and have years or even decades of previous tax returns and receipts taking up your shelves and are wondering how long you need to keep them around in case you need them.
Thinking of going abroad this summer for vacation? If you are a first-time passport applicant, you may want to apply early if you want to save some money.
U.S. passport fees are going up $10 starting on April 2, 2018.
Perhaps your parents are taking you off their auto insurance policy now that you’ve graduated from college or you’ve been paying for your auto insurance for years without a second thought of what you are paying for or what you actually are getting. Auto insurance doesn’t have to be confusing.
Learn more about insurance and how you can save money on your car insurance.
As a self-employed individual for the majority of my adult life, I’ve found there are many perks of self-employment. But one thing that may keep some people from taking the leap to being their own boss is the lack of an employer-sponsored retirement plan such as a 401k.
Enter the Solo 401k, a tax-advantaged qualified retirement plan for the self-employed individual. The Solo 401k not only allows a business owner to save money for retirement; it also makes it extremely easy to supercharge one’s contributions for maximum tax-benefits and retirement savings over all the other self-employed retirement plans and even the traditional 401k.
It’s that time of the year again that no one looks forward to. 1099’s are showing up in the mailbox which means tax season is right around the corner.
If you have a big tax bill due to the IRS, there is something you can do to lessen the blow to your wallet by paying your taxes with something that’s currently in your wallet. No, I don’t mean pocket lint. I’m talking about paying your taxes with your credit card.
A few weeks ago I found a nice desk on Craigslist that someone was giving away for free. It was perfect for the office my brother was planning to lease, so we headed out to pick it up. The person who was giving it away lived about 30 miles away and Google Maps showed that it would take 50 minutes to drive there. Only it was 6 PM and the middle of rush hour. By the time we got there it was over an hour and a half later with a lot of time sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
This is an all too common occurrence in many cities every morning and again later in the evening. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2016 the average American spent 26 minutes in their car commuting from home to work. As a nation we are wasting billions of hours of our lives sitting in our cars.
For many people, starting up their ice cube of a car and letting it warm up a bit is something that we don’t really think about because it was something that’s always been done. Our parents did it because their parents did it or you hear how someone had a friend who didn’t warm up their car and the engine blew up and so on.
It turns out in modern vehicles, the practice of idling your car during the winter is no longer needed. In fact, most manufacturers and auto experts recommend driving off gently after about 30 seconds. You are actually hurting the engine, wasting gas, and polluting the environment when warming it up for much longer than that.