I recently received a gift of $10k from my father in law, yes this is truly a gift. However, he told me that he would like to see me invest in and create a handsome roi. I agree. I am a second year law student, I own a home in AZ (that I currently rent out) but live and rent in another state. I have 55k in a money market savings with capital one, no 401k, or other investments, I have about 80k in student loans accrued with about 30k more to go. I am trying to figure out what would be the best vehicle(s) to invest in. I keep hearing gold is strong and stable but don’t know too much about it, my wife thinks we should just put it in a CD for 1.5 – 2 years, I disagree, especially since the markets should rebound within the next year or two and I would hate to miss out. What would you recommend, I would love to have a 10% roi for this upcoming year, but realistically 5-6% would be suitable. What do you think?

My advice is to go online, shop around, and lock in a price on an economy car before you go. At the counter, they will push you to upgrade, and you just have to tell them no.

I made the mistake one time of agreeing verbally to an upgrade, because the rate increase sounded negligible. The agent was persistent and I was tired from my flight. So the agent did the paperwork for the mid-sized sedan, and when the rate was totaled up for my entire week stay, it was $300 more than I originally had agreed to online. I refused to sign off and said give me the economy car that I asked for online. So I paid what I was quoted online … and they ended up giving me the more expensive car because they didn’t have an economy car on their lot at that moment!

What wordpress plugins do you use?

There are other expensive, upper-echelon private schools that do offer merit scholarships: Duke (my alma mater) and Washington University in St. Louis are two that I have some experience with. But there are only a handful of these scholarships per year (in my class at Duke, there were more people with full scholarships for women’s lacrosse than for academic merit), so they are very hard to get – you really need to have distinguished yourself at a national level in some way or other. If you get one, though, it’s a fantastic opportunity. I know people who turned down free rides to Duke in order to pay full price at Harvard. I think these people are nuts.

My position has me moving to Chicago (I’m a Canadian), and will have to get a place to stay.

I will be making a base salary of $50k/yr and with a bonus and other compensation as well (my company has an
interesting pay pyramid with utilization fee’s etc, essentially the more I work, the more I get paid) I can expect
to make close to $60k-70k/yr a year.

My govt. loan for school is $13k – I worked while going to school to cover some of the costs and keep the loans to
a minimum
Credit Cards are:$5k
My parents debt totals around $60k of varying from several Line of Credits to credit cards etc. Insane interest lol

My question is in regards to how I should focus my financial attention towards achieving all my future goals
that is, to pay down my debt, and my parents respectfully while trying to put some away to invest if possible.

My plan is to attack my debts first starting with Credit Cards then school debt and all the while slowly
helping out my family until I free my debt up enough to tackle it in larger amounts.

I will have to pay rent, and living costs food, clothing etc etc.

Is this the right way to be attacking the situation? Also, where should I invest if the bank’s are failing, gov.
backed bonds? and how long can I realistically expect to be free of these shackles. I am predicting that my
debt can be undertaken in a solid year or two while my parents will take maybe 3-5yrs. (of course I understand
it may take much longer)

Forgive the long Question.

P.S. One more thing, I am 25 and would like to buy a house before I’m 30, the housing markets look to be in my
favor but accumulating the capital seems to be another issue, what are your thoughts?

Thank’s for the read and hope you get to answer, and of course keep up the great work on The Simple Dollar!

My question is, since we’re switching to an all cash system in the New Year, and I want to make sure we both keep diligent track of where that cash is going, does anyone know of an iPhone application that will be functional but still “fancy” enough to actually keep him interested in sticking to our new budget?

My husband and I are in our early 30s and have managed to get rid of all of our high interest debt. In this crazy market, what would you be doing if you were in our shoes — continue to chip away at our mortgage (5.75%) or invest as much as we can since everything is on “sale”?

Thanks for everything!

I would not benefit much from greater resolution or improved speed on a new scanner, by the way – a new scanner would be used the same way as the old one.

If you have a gold mastercard, you also can use that to reserve your car and pay for it and that will cover the insurance issues.

Also, when you book your plane tickets (if you do so online) most major airlines also will connect you with car rental information that also may provide some savings. I typically have priceline, hotwire, and the airlines tabs open when I book tix.

I went to Barnard College of Columbia Univ. & it IS noted for small classes and a good teacher/student ratio. I did see a big difference between the level of education there when I worked at a top UC school on the undergrad level. My college years were wonderful and stimulating. And I was surrounded by people who were all on my level or far above, which is challenging.

My Ivy League cred has helped me in ways as an alumna that I couldn’t have foreseen. Not a free pass by any means – but it still has some force…

But I also see kids burdening themselves with tremendous debt from their undergrad years. Beware of that unless you can hope to make enough to pay it all off! But DO make a serious effort to research all possibilities of financial aid – and use the resources of your financial aid office – they are professionals and can make up complicated packages of various sorts of aid.

And if you get a full scholarship to say, Cornell, as a friend of my niece did – by all means GO! (sad to say my niece settled for a much lesser school because she didn’t want to go back E.)

What is a good book or program to teach a teenager about saving money? I have a stepson that does not learn anything from his mother (she cannot manage finances so isn’t teaching him anything) and our time with him is limited since he lives in another state.

When he is here and earning money for chores and such, we do make him put half into savings and tithe 10% and then he can spend the rest as he likes. However, he still doesn’t understand the value of money and thinks that it grows on trees. We did make him purchase his own Wii with money he earned, however we didn’t make him put half into savings so he didn’t work more to earn it (as he should have if we followed our own plan) and didn’t purse other options to earn more money.