40 year mortgages are becoming more popular. To date, these loans have been rare because banks couldn’t sell them to investors via Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. However, that all changed this month when Fannie Mae started buying 40 year mortgages. Whether or not they’ll catch on is a different issue. While monthly payments are […]
Just a quick note to let everyone know that I switched to a summary RSS feed last night. I apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause, and hope that you’ll understand. I’ve made this move in order to protect my content from blatant ‘scraping’ and republication. I’m not a big fan of summary feeds […]
CNN/Money has an interesting article on home price appreciation in the 100 top markets, including a table listing the percent increase in each over the past five years, as well as a forecast for 2006. Some of the five year numbers are pretty unbelievable… On the one hand I’d love to have been in the […]
Editor’s Note: This limited-time offer expired and is no longer available. Please see our list of CD rates I just got an e-mail from Pentagon Federal Credit Union announcing that their 3 year CD pays 5% APY (rate effective June 1- June 29). It’s sort of a strange rate schedule, as their 3, 4, 5 […]
I previously wrote about how we’ve gone about setting an allowance for our kids. Briefly, starting at age five they get $0.50 per year of age per week, and this (along with all other money coming in from gifts, etc.) gets divided into one of four pots — spending, short term savings, long term savings, […]
The IRS has announced the closing of 68 of their 400 walk-in service centers nationwide. The IRS claims that visits to their help centers have declined by 19% over that past two years, while phone support has grown by 7% and traffic to the IRS website has more than doubled. This cost-cutting move has, however, […]
Well, I spent two or three hours this afternoon sorting through my e-mail inbox at work. It had somehow swollen to 678 (!) messages. I used to be in the habit of sorting out my inbox – filing, deleting, and and trimming things back down – every Friday (at worst), but I’ve recently let that […]
About a week ago, I mentioned that I’m interested in learning more about real estate investing. The two sources for more information that people suggested were the writings of John T. Reed and Home Buying for Dummies. I can’t vouch for either of these, although the latter seems to focus more on purchasing a residence […]
If you’re anything like me, you hate having to login to gain access to news stories online. Since I sometimes link to such stories, I thought I’d post a tip for bypassing this annoyance… In case you haven’t heard, there’s a service out there called BugMeNot. This site is a repository for usernames/passwords for sites […]
The Senate Finance Committee introduced a bill today that would make the tax exemption for 529 college savings plans permanent. The Senate bill, which has bipartisan support, mirrors one that was introduced in the House last week. The 529 exemption is currently scheduled to expire in 2010, so this is great news for anyone with […]