Personal Finance

Articles on Money Q&A about personal finances and how it affects and interacts with your money and finances every day.

Top 9 Simple Strategies for Overcoming Lifestyle Creep in Your Budget

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Reasons to Add Fun Money to Your Budget

When you start making more money through your business, job, or investments, the next thing that typically happens is you start spending money more freely because you can finally afford to do so. There is a danger of lifestyle creep. Unfortunately, our desire to disregard our budgetary restrictions comes with a serious downside. We won’t make much progress in our financial goals if we’re too busy spending money and living at our means. It’s nice to have a little cash to wave around, especially if that wasn’t always the case. Nevertheless, you really need to rein it in, or you’ll end up practicing lifestyle creep. What’s that? In a nutshell, it dwells on the logic that an increase in income … Read more

What Is Identity Theft? And How Do You Prevent It?

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How To Protect Yourself From Identity Theft

Identity theft is a crime whereby an impostor acquires important pieces of personal information including driver’s license and Social Security numbers to impersonate somebody else. The impostor then uses the information to obtain merchandise, credit, or services in the victim’s name or to provide the impostor with false credentials. Other than running up debt, the impostor can provide false identification to the police thereby creating a criminal record for the person whose identity they have stolen. Exactly What Is Identity Theft? Account takeover type of identity theft, the impostor uses personal information to obtain access to the existing accounts of the person. In most instances, the impostor will change the mailing address on the victim’s account and run up a massive … Read more

It Turns Out Money Really Does Buy Happiness

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How to Protect Elderly Family Members

For those of us who aren’t millionaires, the phrase “money doesn’t buy happiness” is certainly a welcome one. Sure, being in the top 0.1% sounds great in theory. But they’re not any happier than the rest of us…right? Well, a study has been done into just that. And it turns out that, in fact, all those extra dollars do, indeed, lead to extra happiness. It’s perhaps not exactly the result you were hoping for, especially if you were looking at pictures of your billionaire of choice on a yacht recently and being sure they were actually miserable.  But as you’ll see, there are actually some great lessons that the rest of us can take from this. Background For around a … Read more

Is Your Side Hustle Actually Costing You Money?

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How To Find The Perfect Work Life Balance At Your Job

Nobody knows how many Americans are actually participating in the gig economy; estimates range widely from 4% to 40% of the workforce. What we do know is that some people have managed to successfully transform their former side gigs into full-time work, while others continue working full-time jobs to support themselves and use side hustles as extra income streams to pay the bills and grow their savings. But, is your side hustle costing you money? The problem with side hustles is that they can complicate your income and tax situation much more than simply being a full-time regular employee elsewhere could. There’s nothing wrong with wanting an extra income stream besides your job, but it’s important to accurately assess whether … Read more

Smartest Ways You Can Spend Your 300 Dollars On

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save money

If you have the impression that to invest money, you first need to have a lot of it. If you spend $300 smartly, even a small amount of money can grow to large, and sometimes much faster than you think. Don’t let limited funds stop you from investing what you have. Get out of debt first, create an emergency fund, and then consider smart ways to spend $300 and increase it to $1000. In case you do not have 300 dollars you can be sure that 300 dollar loan available at dlt right now. Investing $300 can be a good start toward growing your wealth, but it’s important to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. The … Read more

How Crypto Scams Are Conning Millions of People Out of Life Savings Every Year

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The following is a guest post by Erica Stanford, author of Crypto Wars: Faked Deaths, Missing Billions and Industry Disruption. If you’d like to submit a guest post like this one about crypto scams or any other topic, please check out the Money Q&A guest posting guidelines. Crypto hacks and scams are big news and are getting more sophisticated by the day. Where a few years ago, one could look at the larger scams, and in the vast majority of cases, see signs of a Ponzi scheme or at least see an indication that all was not well, today, scams are almost indistinguishable, in some cases, from what they are intending to replicate. It can now be very hard to … Read more