The Sun's Financial Diary

When I was growing up, the only thing my mom ever tells me is to save as much money as you can. However, there was one other formula which I found out many years later is to invest your money. My mom was right about half of it on what to do with your money [...]

This past week, I received an e-mail from my employer’s Human Resources department. After years of staying away from them, my company’s 401(k) plan will now give us the option to take a loan from our retirement savings account. It doesn’t really come as a surprise as seemingly all 401(k) plans nowadays are offering personal [...]

Here are our favourite five role models who faced financial ruin but who avoided disaster. There is a huge negative stigma attached to bankruptcy, and whilst it’s certainly not something to aim for, bankruptcy’s really not the end of the world. Financial difficulties affect even the rich and famous, and some of the most successful [...]

As my wife and I begin to find ourselves firmly entrenched in the “middle-aged” demographic, it’s becoming more and more important for us to plan ahead. When we were younger, our later-in-life planning consisted mostly of which warm weather destination we wanted to retire to. Now, there’s so much more than that to consider. And [...]

Wikinvest generated a lot of buzz a couple of weeks ago when it announced a platform that lets users track their investments at brokers in real-time. If you are not familiar with Wikinvest, it works kind of like Mint.com, which tracks transactions in my bank accounts,  but what Wikinvest tracks are investments at brokerage accounts. [...]

Have you heard the popular statistic that a college graduate earns an average of $1 million more over the course of a lifetime than a person with only a high school education? That number should make just about any lackadaisical high school kid scramble to open a savings account in anticipation. However, it’s doubtful that [...]

When we began to look for a house to buy late last December, we planed to have the purchase closed before May so that we could take advantage of the $6,500 homebuyer tax credit from the government. That’s why we started well ahead of the deadline to give us plenty of time to find the [...]

“Help me save money!” More and more Americans need advice on saving money but they don’t have time to create a budget. Also, budgets are rigid, complex and cause guilt, especially if you don’t stick to them. They make people anxious every time they go to buy something, trap them into a set spending schedule, [...]