If you have several debts such as Credit Card, Mortgage, Line of Credit and Personal Loan, chances are these each have a different interest rate. If possible, you can “pay off” the higher interest debts by adding more debt to the lower interest ones. For example, if you have $5,000 debt on you credit card at 16% interest, and have a line of credit @ 7% interest with $9,000 (but has room for $20,000) it would be in your best interest to pay off the credit card debt by adding $5,000 to your line of credit. Thus you’d eliminate the higher interest debt, and be left with the same total debt amount, but over all at a lower interest rate. This is good stuff! Interest will always get you over time, so any way to minimize it on your debts is a good thing.
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Post CommentInteresting article from Financial Times on a trend away from buying a house early in life due to increasing cost of housing.
This highlights the need for proper personal financial management, education and budgeting early in life. If you don’t have these basic skills coming out of college/university, it can be a real challenge.
This education is typically free, so you have to get it. Talk to any financial planner, the internet is filled with links about it. This blog outlines some points, but is in nowise complete. My personal favorite is Personal Finance for Dummies 
A great intro and straight to the point.
This is a great site with lots of tools to help you stay prepared. It has sections on budgeting, financial management, emergency preparedness, food storage, etc. I haven’t been through the whole site, but it seems to contain tons of great info!
This is a guest post by Robin Poulin:
I’ve been wondering about this new Children’s Fittness Tax Credit from the Canadian government. I just didn’t understand how it actually applied to me. After some study of a couple pages on the internet I’ve realized it’s not as I was hoping it to be… but it’s still good.
Having 5 children and trying to keep them socialized and fit by enrolling them in these different sports activities… well becomes quite expensive. Before we knew about the credit we enrolled our 3 oldest children in gymnastics and just figured we’d have to just eat the cost and chalk it up to investment for the future of our children. It was a pleasant surprise to see that we could get some money back on that and don’t have to hold back on the 4th child enrolling because it’s too expensive.
I found the following 2 sites helpful to explain what this new Fitness credit was offering.
http://www.fin.gc.ca/news06/06-084e.html
http://www.fin.gc.ca/news06/06-084e.html
Does anyone know if there is anything like this credit in the US?
