Necessary Virtues Finance

Welcome to the Carnival of Debt Reduction for December 4, 2006. Thanks for stopping by. I’m very pleased to be hosting the Carnival for the first time here at Necessary Virtues Personal Finance.

In reading this week’s submissions I found many to like, and two that really stood out. They are hereby awarded the Necessary Virtues Order of Merit for outstanding contribution:

• Mark Shead’s outstanding piece on The Debt Mindset from Debt Consolidation. It begins provocatively:
  

  “Many people just expect to be in debt. It is part of their world view…”

• The current installment of Erek Ostrowski’s invaluable series, Getting Out Of ...

1. A budget is a roadmap. It is a useful tool and guide. It tells you whether you are headed in the direction you want to be headed in financially. It helps you to move from spending on a whim to saving and financial planning. If you don’t have a roadmap for reaching your goals and desires, then you can’t even measure your progress and you are unlikely to succeed. Would you ever find a major corporation that operates without a budget? No. Neither should your family.

2. A budget empowers you to take control of your money instead of letting your money control you.

3. A budget can improve your marriage. The number one cause of marital strife is money. Your budget is a neutral tool to help you and your spouse communicate rationally about money. It can help to give you a common purpose and to minimize arguments about money.

4. A budget helps you prepare for emergencies. The top causes of bankruptcy ...

by Steve Diamond

What is success?

The dictionary defines success as “the achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted.”

So you must decide for yourself what success is, depending on what you seek in your life, your relationships and your career. If you’re an athlete, success can mean obtaining that gold medal. If you identify yourself as a parent, success can mean raising children with good moral values. For a doctor, success can mean relieving pain or saving a life. To many of us success means a job promotion or acquiring wealth. It depends on your perspective and how you perceive yourself and your life.

You are the only one who can judge your success. If you try to achieve success according to someone else’s standards or society’s standards, you will never be satisfied that you have achieved it.

Yet even when we know that we define our own success, we often seem to fail. We feel dissatisfied, empty, tense. Our ...

Payday loans, also called “cash advance loans,” are small, short-term loans that carry very high interest rate. Some companies have even begun to advertise them as loans to help you repair your credit, but this is very misleading. They suggest that these loans can help you pay off your bills and so establish good credit, but if you cannot afford to pay your payday loans on time, you have to “roll-over” or extend the loan - often at huge expense and interest. Many people get into a payday loans cycle, whereby much of their monthly paycheck goes towards paying off their ever-growing payday loans.

It seems as if the storefronts offering these dangerous loans have sprung up overnight on many street corners. They’re also advertising on TV, billboards and elsewhere. They make it so easy to get that extra few hundred dollars to tide you over when money is tight.

Don’t fall for the pitch. If you can’t afford to pay all your bills one month, you ...

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