ArcaMax

These days, it's practically inevitable that you or someone close to you will face a period of unemployment. Consider these practical tips while dealing with the financial and emotional toll of leaving one job and searching for another.

DON'T TAKE IT PERSONALLY

Losing a job can cause shame, humiliation and embarrassment. You may feel depressed...Read more

Discovering that you'll be getting a tax refund is certainly not the worst news you've had in your life. In fact, it's easy to see a tax refund as some kind of gift from the universe. You might even be feeling kinda proud of your forced savings account, to which you knowingly contribute every payday while living from paycheck to paycheck and ...Read more

Whether you're aware of it or not, you have a money temperament. Everyone does. It's the way you naturally think about money, behave with money or react to money. To loosely assess your money temperament, and to have a little fun with it, consider the following scenario and choose the response that's closest to what you would do.

Your rich ...Read more

Dear Mary: My husband and I have been out of debt for approximately five years. It's great. The problem is we now seem to spend a lot of money needlessly just because we can. We have so much money over and above our living expenses that it is easy to be reckless.

We keep just enough in savings ($2,000 or so) for emergencies but never get beyond...Read more

A credit score is a three-digit number between 300 and 850 generated by a mathematical algorithm (a mostly secret formula) based on information in your credit report, compared to information on tens of millions of other people. Like it or not, the resulting number is said to be a highly accurate prediction of how likely you are to pay your bills...Read more

Dear Mary: My question is about life insurance. My wife believes that I need life insurance because I am the sole breadwinner in the family and we have a baby daughter.

I am not sure it is important right now, as we just bought our first house. Our financial situation is very tight, and we will be having a lot of minor improvements on the house...Read more

Ah, tax season. That magical time of year when we all attempt to decipher the mystical language of IRS forms while hoping the government gives us back some of our own money. Before you start planning what to do with your refund, let's talk about tax identity theft.

Tax ID theft happens when a fraudster files a fake return in your name to steal ...Read more

A big coordinated garage sale in my neighborhood gave me a surprising wake-up call. It's one thing to see a family's stuff spread out in the front yard, but quite another to see a whole neighborhood's castoffs at one time. All I could think as I walked from one yard to the next was all the money wasters that led to this colossal display of stuff...Read more

There are many reasons not to carry credit card debt. The most obvious is that it's really expensive. And here's a reason often overlooked: It seems so much harder to work for money you've already spent.

But what if you do not carry any credit card debt at all? There are some who would say it is perfectly reasonable to use credit to pay for ...Read more

Dear Mary: We live in Nevada and own a second home in Arizona. My husband wants to sell the Arizona property and then use the proceeds to pay off our credit debt, auto loan and home equity loan on the Nevada property -- about $165,000 total.

I disagree. I think we should rent the Arizona property to generate income and benefit from its future ...Read more