Charge Responsibly Blog

When it comes to things that totally stress-out average consumers and make them dread walking into an office for an appointment, the experience of dealing with a car or truck salesperson ranks right up there at the top. Give many people a choice between going to haggle over a new car or going to the dentist for a major root canal treatment, and a lot of them will choose the dentist chair over the customer hot seat at a car dealership. Buying from these seasoned sales pros subjects you to a whole toolkit of sneaky car dealership tricks, and one of the big ones they like to deploy is the so-called “four square” sheet.

As its name implies, the four square is a sheet of paper divided into four sections or squares. The salesperson puts it in front of them while they discuss your pricing options and you try to get the best sticker price or the most affordable auto loan. Here’s how it works:

One square is devoted ...

Many top economists point to recent data that indicates were are headed into another year of foreclosures fueled by mortgage delinquencies. But interestingly enough, several others believe that the homeowners who are expected to become foreclosure victims are just bluffing.

That’s because much of the data regarding foreclosure predictions relates to mortgages and mortgage market information that has to do with loans made to people who no longer have positive equity. Negative equity is a condition that happens when the home is no longer worth what is owed on it. Commonly referred to as “being underwater” or “upside down” in the mortgage, it means that if the homeowner sells their house to a typical buyer they still won’t get enough money from the sale of the home to pay off the mortgage. They’ll be left with no extra cash from the home sale but will still have a mortgage debt to deal with, so they are in a very ...

Loans are terribly hard to come by in 2010 because banks have tightened their standards, people are short on savings and income due to the lingering impact of a severe recession, and credit scores need to be higher than before in order to secure a reasonable loan. So many American taxpayers are eager to get any IRS tax refunds that are owed to them because they or their employers overpaid into the IRS fund that takes out estimated taxes on a regular basis. If that estimate was too high – and people paid in more than was necessary to meet their tax obligations – then the IRS does everything in its power to promptly refund the difference owed to the taxpayer. But many tax preparation businesses or other short-term money lenders also offer to give people their refunds ahead of time, in exchange for an added cost, so that taxpayers can essentially enjoy a cash advance on their upcoming IRS refund.

These short term loans are also called “ ...

The demographic population of senior citizens is the fastest growing one in the USA, and as that segment of the population ages there is more and more need to shop for retirement homes and senior care facilities. Here are some ideas to keep in mind while looking and doing retirement planning:

• Plan for the an Unexpected Future

Perhaps the biggest mistake that people make when paying for membership in a retirement community or assisting living facility is that they fail to ensure a continuum of care. If you live in a great senior community, for example, it might serve you well right now but if you later get sick or disabled it could be no longer appropriate for your needs. Try to buy into facilities that offer a continuum of care that includes independent living, assisted living, nursing care, advanced nursing care, and an Alzheimer’ ...

Nothing is harder during tough economic times than to set aside money for some future date that may be years and years away, and that is why everyone should establish a system that automatically saves for their retirement. Once you get some money into your account or hands, you have to decide what to do with it, and that usually means that you will spend it on whatever bills or purchases happen to be staring you in the face at that particular moment in time. Retirement seems far away and less important, but before you know it you will be facing a retirement without an adequate nest egg to fund you after you stop working. To avoid that scenario, just set up an automatic system of retirement saving that requires no thinking or deciding.

The easiest way to do this is to open some kind of individual retirement account, and if you don’t have one at work you can easily set up a ROTH IRA – which is a user-friendly type of retirement savings account ...