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If you’ve seen the ads on television that promise to eliminate your worries of debt then you need to know exactly what steps you must take to consolidate your debts into one manageable loan. This information will guide you through the things you need to learn about the debt consolidation service.

You should choose this option only if you can manage the strict budgeting limits. If you prefer to maintain a chic lifestyle, then a debt consolidation service can ruin your credit history. If you take a secured loan, you can become homeless. That’s why this debt relief option is not recommended for spendthrifts. According to statistics people who opt for debt consolidation and can’t make payments often find themselves in a worse financial status in a few years because they had not solved the basic problem that lead to debt in the first place.

There are some alternate options you should check before selecting a debt consolidation loan. You Read full post…

It’s that time of year when high-school students are thinking about their future plans and what they’re going to do for college. Most will be leaving the nest to live on their own for the first time.

My brother attended college in our home town, so he lived at home, saving on housing expense. However, I decided to get my college experience in another city and, after a long good-bye, set out to live in the campus residence during my first year of school.

I assured my parents that I could handle the landlord duties and that I could easily find four students to rent the extra rooms. We opened a joint checking account for depositing rent money and paying the mortgage, utilities, and other bills. To this, we added $2000 overdraft protection in case all the rooms weren’t rented year-round or other unforeseen expenses came up.

I’m sure it was horrifying to my mom (who was a banker) to have a child with such poor money-management skills. Luckily

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Today’s electronics deals, courtesy of The Consumerist:

• Dell: Dell Inspiron 560 Pentium E6700 Desktop, 4GB RAM, 500GB 7200RPM HDD $299.99, free ship
• Lenovo: Bluetooth Laser Mouse $14.40, free ship

Entertainment

• Game Stop: James Bond Goldeneye 007 for Wii for $9.99 + $2.99 Shipping

Asset rich, cash poor The estate tax is a potentially confusing and burdensome issue; critics claim the tax forces farmers and small business owners to liquidate assets simply to pay the tax. Farm businesses are frequently framed within the debate as “asset rich, but cash poor.” Ohio’s estate tax will disappear in 2013, a compromise date included in the final version of the budget bill passed by the General Assembly. The original authors of the provision intended to backdate repeal of the tax to the beginning of 2011, but settled on the later date in conference. “Of course, the Ohio estate tax is a much smaller part of the overall estate tax issue,” Hall said. “The federal estate tax is a much larger issue than the state tax.” The federal estate tax has been the center of a contentious debate for years; it returned to its full force this year after a gradual drawdown over the past decade, and brief sunset period in 2010.

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Shortly after finishing college, a friend of mine was fired from his first job. He kept showing up to work late — sometimes hours late. He was charming and smart and reasonably good at his work, but his employer just couldn’t rely on him to be at his desk on time, so they let him go.

After a short, frantic job search, he leapt into the next job he was offered. As a teller at a bank. He didn’t last long in this job either. There are few positions where punctuality is more necessary, and he already knew this wasn’t his strong suit.

He took that bank job knowing he’d just been fired for his lack of punctuality, but he really believed that through a simple act of will he could turn over a new leaf and become stellar at time management, despite having struggled with it in the past. Instead of playing to his strengths, he exhausted himself trying to live up to his ideals. He felt h

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For the second time this year, Whirlpool is raising its prices, citing the rising costs of materials. “It’s been the biggest commodity and material cost inflation period we have ever seen,” said Chairman and CEO Jeff Fettig in a call with reporters.

Like some other manufacturers, Whirlpool was forced to lower prices during the economic downturn. But, as we reported earlier, that ended in April when Whirlpool raised its prices between 8 and 10 percent.

Whirlpool commands more than 40 percent of U.S. appliance sales compared to LG Electronics and Samsung, which have 8.7 percent and less than 1 percent, respectively, according to Zacks investment research. But Zacks says the price hikes may cause Whirlpool to lose more market share to its South Korean rivals.

Whirlpool is still a winner in many of Consumer Reports tests. Whirlpool nabbed the top spots in our ratings of both front-loading and top-loading washing machines. Whirlpool’s brands also include Maytag and KitchenAid. Read full post…

I’m currently house-sitting in Anchorage, where one of my duties will be kid-wrangling while my niece does the Alaska Run for Women. The first order of the day: Breakfast at IHOP, my treat — and at 8% less because I’ll be paying with a discounted gift card.

Sites like Plastic Jungle, ABC Gift Cards, Cardpool and Swapagift re-sell unwanted gift cards to hundreds of different retailers. A secondary-market aggregator called Gift Card Granny can help you find the deepest discounts.

Discounted gift cards are as good as coupons: They provide a consistent discount of 3% to 30% or more. While I don’t buy a whole lot of Stuff, I do use these cards to save money on haircuts, groceries, movies and more.

Where do they come from? Most often from someone who needs or wants the money more than the card. Since resale sites will pay up to 92% of face value, it’s an easy way to raise some fast cash.

But plenty of cards end up on the market because they were colossal fails. Maybe you

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The kiddie tax applies to children under age 19 and full-time college students younger than age 24. It is a tax on the unearned income of minors and young adults. In 2011, a dependent child’s unearned income over $1,900 is taxed at his or her parents’ marginal tax rate. The only way that young adults under age 24 can avoid the kiddie tax is to be at least partially financially emancipated from their parents. To avoid the kiddie tax, they must provide more than one-half of the total cost of their support from their own earned income sources (salary, wages, or net income from a business). Unearned income from securities is excluded.

More information can be found from the IRS at .