Odds and ends: GRS news + MORE

Welcome to Wise Bread’s Best Money Tips Roundup! Today we found some great articles on writing a Craigslist ad that sells, things to spend your money on other than gas, and breathing life into stale bread.
Top 5 Articles
Writing a Craigslist Ad That Sells — To write a Craigslist ad that sells, make sure to list the condition of the item up for sale…

Often times you hear of home ownership referred to as the American dream, but this isn’t always the case. There are numerous factors to consider when deciding whether to buy your first home or to continue renting – especially when you’re out of college.
Since living expenses consume a considerable portion of most people’s income, it is a good idea to put a lot of thought into the decision and where your money is ultimately going…

I think everyone has fantasized about winning the lottery. So much of our lives are spent working towards specific financial goals. Everyone wants to pay off debt, buy their dream house, and spend every summer on a tropical beach and every winter on a mountain. Some people want a wardrobe where they can wear different clothes every day of the month, and others want to spend their life on a boat or the beach…

You know those movies which show you what your life would look like if you had chosen a different path? Well, yesterday morning I chose the wrong one quite literally, and ended up smacking right into a brand new car as it cut across my lane without looking. Ugh…
All of us are safe and sound and no one hurt at all (or else I wouldn’t be able to blog this right now, haha),  but nonetheless it shook us up a bit…

Use Airbnb.com to rent out your couch, room, or entire home.The same city that banned big sodas is now making it harder for New Yorkers to rent out their homes, or for you to find alternative lodging on your next trip to NYC.
This week, a local judge ruled that a resident who used the service Airbnb to rent out his home was in violation of a local hotel law that says that a resident cannot rent out part or all of their property for less than 30 days if the resident isn’t present…

If you’ve read The Simple Dollar for very long, you’ve learned that, in my opinion, one of the most important things in personal finance is setting goals. Where do you want to be in a year? In five years? In twenty years? Establishing those goals gives you something real to work towards and makes a tough choice today seem a little easier because you can connect it to something much bigger…

The good life?
This past weekend I tweeted:
I am fairly confident that one day I will tell people ‘I used to be an accountant’
A fellow accountant, Lance from Money Life & More responded to this tweet and led me to reflect on what my goal really is with my career, income, and my dang entrepreneurship itch that I’m afraid will never go away…

There is a new study that says homes belonging to smokers are harder to sell and sell for less money.  You can read the survey here but it is pretty boring.
http://www.pfizer.ca/en/media_centre/news_releases/article?year=2013&article=426
In college I worked as a waitress in a smoky nightclub and would come home at 2:00am and shower to get the sticky spilled beer off me (I didn’t say I was a good waitress just a waitress)…

The following is a guest post from Gerrid Smith is CEO of the charity-focused coupon website, Save1. They provide coupons and deals from over 5,000 online stores! Each time a coupon is used, they provide a meal to a child in need. There’s no lack of how-to retirement articles online. You can learn about everything from travel to estate planning…

So far, so good. This year, it hasn’t taken a genius to profit from the markets. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index, Dow Jones industrial average and many other general stock market indexes have been recovering from past woes and advancing, turning in a bit of a profit for a change.
But while it’s nice to have a rising market that helps the stock prices of even many of the questionable and dodgy companies, don’t let it get to you…

Sell too soon. Buy too early. Sound familiar? Welcome to the club. I am the King of making suboptimal trades due to fear and greed. Whenever I’m about to make a trade, I begin to have delusions thinking I’m smarter than the market. After all, I need to have conviction if I’m going to put tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to work…

When I started this blog, I wrote about the Smith Manoeuvre in the first month and implemented the controversial strategy in 2008.  For those of you new to the strategy, the Smith Manoeuvre is where you leverage your home equity to invest in the stock  market.  I modified the strategy by first paying down my mortgage with my existing non-registered portfolio, then invested in tax efficient dividend paying stocks while using the home equity line of credit (HELOC) to pay for itself…

Girl Ninja and I have a significant amount of our net worth sitting as cash in a “high yield” savings account. It’s exciting that we are just a few weeks away from hitting our $100,000 savings goal, but it’s also terribly depressing to know this money has earned a paltry 0.8% over the last couple years…

You can barely get through a week of network news without hearing something about America’s obesity epidemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese – and our kids are right behind us, as one out of every three kids is now overweight or obese…

If you have looked at your 401(k) investment options recently, chances are you have noticed a list of funds that all have similar names with the exception of a year at the end of each. These “Target Date” funds were built as an all encompassing investment to help you plan for your retirement all in one product…

As you may know, Get Rich Slowly is part of the QuinStreet family of personal finance websites, which include MoneyRates.com, Five Cent Nickel, Consumerism Commentary and others. We’ve recently launched a weekly newsletter as part of the MoneyRates.com Network. The newsletter offers tools, advice, and our proprietary research on interest rates for savings accounts at a hundred banks (including online banks), among other educational articles…

Yesterday, I was walking to the Portland State University library to do a little blogging and saw a big van with a sign “We’ll Pay You $1.00 to Watch This 4-Minute Video.” How could I say no to that? A volunteer led me to one of the 10 video monitors installed and I spent 4 minutes watching a segment of the Farm to Fridge video…

If you’re heading down the aisle, we have some scary statistics for you. Nearly 30 percent of married couples say money is the No. 1 source of stress in their relationship, according to a study by American Express, and money issues are largely blamed as a top cause of divorce by many experts.How do you avoid the strain? In the video below, Money Talks News founder Stacy Johnson explains how to get on the same financial track as your partner before you wed…

“Steve, you’ve got to think of every one of these deals as buying another headache. Do you really want this particular headache?”
My friend Brad Thomason gave me that advice a few years ago, and it stuck.
I’d asked him for his advice; I was interested in a tiny property-investment deal that I thought was a “slam dunk…

Last Friday, BudgetBlonde.com turned 3 years old! It’s really incredible how much fun I’ve had on this blogging journey. I just love it so much, and I’m amazed at all the people I’ve met and all the changes that I’ve gone through that have been documented on my little slice of the Internet…

It is conventional wisdom that entrepreneurial success takes persistence and dogged determination, but the importance of knowing when to give up is also an important trait of business innovators that is often overlooked.
Researchers at Oregon State University and Utah State University analyzed the decision-making processes of 135 entrepreneurs in high-tech industries to better understand the balance between persistence and knowing when to give up in business success…

I graduated college in the first heyday of internet-connected businesses in the late 1990s. Jobs of all types were abundant. And although the “dot-com” bubble burst soon afterwards, unemployment rates remained historically low. This year’s graduates are facing more obstacles than those from fifteen years ago…

There’s a lot to be said for paying off your debt and living debt free. But should you really work hard to pay off all of your debt right now?
High Interest Consumer Debt vs. Other Debt
Too often, we lump all debt together and call it “bad.” And while there is an argument that there’s no such thing as good debt, the truth is that some debt is worse than other debt…