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The Coronavirus Might Just Kill Your Finances Before It Kills Anyone You Know

The coronavirus, AKA COVID-19, might be more life-threatening to the those who least suspect and the old but the life implications might just kill the financial lives of a wide swath of people. Year-after-year the warnings come out about how much people save for an emergency. The results are never good. Bankrate reported in 2019 …

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I Was 10 Seconds Away From Getting Screwed by Best Buy

I once heard someone say there is never a great day to have a flat tire. So very true. But you can add this to the list, there is never a good day to have you eleven-year-old refrigerator crap the bed. Yes, our refrigerator greeted Tuesday by deciding that’s the day it would expire. It …

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Federal Workers Took a Financial Beating From Shutdown But Learned Lessons

The researchers at Prudential released a very interesting study on how the shutdown affected the household finances of federal workers. As you can imagine, the impact was pretty dramatic with nearly a month of missing paychecks. Eighty-three percent of survey respondents reported an uptick in their overall stress levels as a result of the shutdown, …

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I Wrote You When You Were the Debt Coach on the TV Show Starting Over. – Sari

“Dear Steve, I am not sure if you are the same Steve Rhode I wrote to about 7 years ago. I heard about you on the TV show Starting Over, with Rhonda Britten. I wrote to you asking advice on how to get out of the large debt we had from attempting to start our …

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Your Primary Language Impacts Your Ability to Save for the Future

In a paper by M. Keith Chen of Yale University School of Management and Cowles Foundation, a conclusion was drawn that the language you speak has an impact on your ability to save for the future. Languages differ widely in the ways they partition time. In this paper I test the hypothesis that languages which …

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I’ve Never Missed a Payment But I Have No Savings and Not Really Getting Out of Debt. – Brian

“Dear Andy, I am 31 years old and I own my own house. I have never missed a payment, yet can’t get refinanced due to my lowered house value. (Currently I owe about 149,000 and I just had it appraised at 140,000). My mortgage rate is 6.2%. That is part of the story…the other part …

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The Unforeseen Importance of Having a Boring Savings Account – Ask Steve Video

This week I answer Brandon’s question about saving money even if you are barely able to make ends meet. When you are just making it from month-to-month and paying the minimum payments alone it seems like a strange time to need to think about saving money. Most people don’t and then guess what happens when …

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