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[This post is written and copyrighted by FIRE Finance (http://firefinance.blogspot.com).]
July 14, 2009: We all need to keep a tab on our credit and identity. Checking our credit report at regular intervals is a nice way to keep an eye on the state of our credit card accounts. It also helps in early detection of suspicious activity. Usually we recourse to a couple of options for procuring our credit reports. Either we buy them. Or we participate in some offer which offers a valid credit report FREE if we try some service for a month (where we can cancel the service within 30 days of activation without any charges).
Well, now we have a better path. We can get our credit reports FREE from Experian, Equifax and Transunion once a year from AnnualCreditReport. The best part of this freebie is that we can see our credit reports from all three agencies at one place and store them online for 30 days at no charge. Instead of printing our reports, we saved them as Adobe pdf files thus saving some trees. Happy credit report surfing :).
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The past decade saw the boom of the "power of leveraging" - a fancy name for debt. Until recently, most Americans put their purchases on their credit cards and personal savings fell to nearly zero. Credit was easy, and people used it to build wealth. Can building wealth with debt be a 
.... you have more exposure to leverage than you think, especially now that everyone is trying to unload debt. Perhaps your employer borrowed a lot over the past decade and now needs to conserve cash, so it's laying off staff. Suddenly that HELOC you could easily handle on your salary doesn't look like such a super idea. You can't lean on your investments for help, because many of the companies you owned used leverage to pump up profits, and now they can't borrow, so their earnings and stock prices are falling. And it's harder to shore up your own balance sheet by selling your house when banks are reining in lending and potential buyers are scared to borrow for an asset that may decline further.
Have a wonderful weekend filled with innocent smiles and joy :).
While the U.S. economy is in recession and the stock market in shambles, is it a good idea to invest in 
On hindsight we wish that we knew about this new money rule of considering our earning potential and its stability while designing our portfolio. Present times are teaching us that no career is high paying or stable forever. We need to adapt to new cash cows and skills with changing times. In that light, capital preservation (a good percentage) should be on our agenda right from the start. This will give a person some bandwidth to create fresh cash inflows according to new necessities.
For some people, it just makes more sense to rent. Renting is good if we don’t plan on being in the area long enough for prices to appreciate to cover our closing and maintenance costs. Or, if real estate prices are depressed in our area and are continuing to fall. Buying too high will only cause distress for a homeowner. Elderly and single parents often choose rentals and town homes because of the lack of maintenance and some property oversight by someone who has more time or mobility.
Now we explain how we went about lining our trash cans with grocery bags. Luckily for us, we had invested in small trash cans for our home. So the grocery bags were a perfect fit! If you are planning to replace your trash cans, we would advise you to go for medium sized rectangular models. Most empty grocery bags fit these models pretty well.
After emptying grocery bags, we neatly fold them and store them in a Rubbermaid basket. We also take an extra step and classify the recyclable ones and put them in a separate stack for use elsewhere. Next we separate the big sized shopping bags from the normal sized grocery bags. We use the big shopping bags for our kitchen trash and the smaller ones for our bathrooms and bedrooms.
While using a grocery bag to line a trash it is advisable to make sure that the bag does not have any holes. If it does, then we set it aside in an empty box. On our next grocery trip we carry these holey bags for recycling (most supermarkets recycle plastic bags).
A caveat that might arise by using smaller trash cans is that we may have to empty them frequently. But we are not complaining since we are getting FREE bags. Not only that, this policy is more environmental friendly since we are trying to reuse the plastic stuff (most of which is not biodegradable) as much as possible before it ends up in land fills.
We know that we shall not be able to retire on our savings by not purchasing trash bags. But our humble efforts to reuse materials before they hit the landfill is our little way of thanking Mother Earth for sustaining us.
Thankfully we had successfully built an emergency fund which had about 8 months' worth of our living expenses. This fund protected us from an immediate financial disaster. You can say it was one of the most practical personal finance advices that we've implemented in our lives. More so, since a falling market had erased about 50% of our portfolio. In addition, we have also saved cash for some unavoidable big ticket expenses which are in the horizon for next two years. Now we are considering how we can trim our expenses further to stay afloat longer.
Create a nice weekend and enjoy it thoroughly :).
If you have any tips or question(s), we'd truly appreciate it if you could kindly 
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