When you start investing in stocks, there is a lot you probably won’t initially be aware of. While the process of investing has a life long learning curve associated with it, there are a few things you should know from the very beginning.

Unfortunately, not everyone takes the time to learn these basics before they plunge in headlong. Often they spend a lot of time wondering why they fail. Hopefully this list will help to minimize your failures and maximize your successes.

Dividends are Your Friend

A lot of people who buy stocks never really think about the dividends some companies pay out. While you might be primarily interested in investing for capital gains, you might also want to buttress those gains with the payouts of a steady dividend or two. Oddly enough, stocks that pay dividends tend to do better from a price appreciation standpoint than their non-paying counterparts. If you reinvest your dividends, you can do even better. [Read more…]

So you now have a teenage driver? In addition to worrying about their driving habits, the extra wear on your car, and of course all the other things teens can get into when they start driving, here are some things you should consider when it comes to buying auto insurance:

1 – Yes, Your Rates Will Go Up

Adding a teenage driver to your auto insurance policy will typically add 50 to 100 percent to the cost of a standard auto policy. So if you’re currently paying $700 a year for a policy, you can expect it to jump to between $1,050 and $1,400 the day you add your teenage driver. And that’s if you’re only at $700 a year now.

The reason for this is all based on statistics: Auto Insurers recognize that teenage drivers are less experienced and are far more likely to cause or be involved in accidents than any other age group. Worse yet, teen drivers are also tend to speed more than others and receive more moving violations – these alone can trigger huge rate increases. [Read more…]

You don’t need every kind of insurance that’s out there. That’s right – you don’t need it all. And why waste your money on insurance that you don’t need?

A good example is trip insurance, a decent (and relatively inexpensive) buy on a plane ticket so that if your travel plans change or you don’t end up going on your trip, you don’t totally lose out on the cost of the tickets.

Flight life insurance, on the other hand, is for people with those “better safe than sorry” mentalities when it comes to everything in their lives. Flight life insurance covers you if you’re ever injured in a plane crash. A little over the top? I think so.

Or how about credit protection insurance? That’s something that you can opt to pay an additional charge for on each of your credit cards to ensure that if you ever die or your credit card gets lost, you’ll be entitled to your money. The fact is – you already are entitled to that money. The insurance is just unnecessary. [Read more…]

Living (and loving) Life

With gas prices on the rise, the cost to fill-up your tank can be staggering. With five simple tips, you can boost fuel economy by over 10% without reducing the amount you drive. That’s like getting a free fill-up every tenth time!

1 – Drop the Extra Weight

If you are looking for a good place to start, how about cutting out some of that junk in the trunk. Losing 100 pounds of cargo can increase fuel economy by 2%.

Instead of using your trunk (or truck bed) as a catch-all for those things that don’t have a permanent place in the garage, clean it out and leave only the essentials. A few blankets and an emergency kit are fine but ditch the bowling ball and those two bags of water softener salt. [Read more…]

Are we witnessing the end of the credit card? Credit cards have become cheaper and more accessible than ever and they have also become increasingly popular over recent years, particularly in the recent recession when a lot of people struggled to get credit.

And yet, more and more people are recognizing the problems of a payment tool that remains susceptible to fraud, theft and piling up debt. Which is why debt charities, consumer organizations and experts alike have begun recommending prepaid cards as a safer alternative to the traditional credit card.

[Read more…]