163 plain-English reads on budgeting, saving, investing, debt, credit and taxes. Newest first unless you say otherwise.
Your contributions are always yours. The employer's may not be for six years. On a three-year cliff, resigning in month 35 leaves $14,200 behind and resigning in month 37 does not.
A 50% match is a 50% return before the money is invested in anything. On a $70,000 salary, not contributing enough to capture it leaves $2,100 a year on the table, which is $132,823 over a career.
Closing it raises your utilisation the same day and shortens your average account age much later. Usually keep it. Here are the three cases where closing is the right call anyway.
No. Checking your own is a soft inquiry and never affects the score. The belief comes from something true about a completely different kind of check, and that one costs under five points.
Your card reports the statement balance, not the balance after you pay it. Moving the payment two days earlier can turn a reported 61.7% into 6.2% without changing a thing you spend.
Two of the five factors are worth 65% of the score. The other three get argued about far more than they are worth, and one of them you cannot change at all.
Saving what is left over produced $2,245 across a year. Saving the same amount first produced $6,720, on identical income and identical spending habits. The mechanism is not discipline.
Investing all of it at once wins whenever the market rises, which is most of the time. That is a fact about averages rather than about you, and here is when averaging in is the right answer anyway.
One set of percentages cannot fit every income, because the cost of keeping a roof and getting to work does not scale down. Realistic bands at five income levels, from spending data rather than a slogan.
A 0% transfer on $9,000 with a 3% fee saves $1,784.15 if you clear it in the window. Even doing it badly still saves money. There is only one way it actually costs you, and it is not the fee.
They cost more than building it yourself, and they are still the right answer for most people. On $500 a month over thirty years the difference is $55,068, and here is who should pay it.
The transfer should land the day after payday, not the day before the next one. The same $300 a month, moved on two different dates, differs by $875 over a year.
One short email each week: a money move worth making, a number worth checking, and a trap worth dodging.