The Sun's Financial Diary

When we bought our house nearly five years ago, we chose a 5-year ARM (from Countrywide BTW) over a fixed rate because we didn’t plan to stay in this 3-bedroom townhouse for 5 years. So it made more sense to get an ARM, which was about 1% less than fixed 30-year mortgage, to save some [...]

After having been mostly in the credit card accumulation mode for years, it seems that the time to cut down my “holdings” has finally come. The main reason that I probably will never use some of the cards again because they don’t offer any reward that’s better than those cards I am actively using now. [...]

Can you use $10,000 for college expenses? If you are creative and good at making videos, then here’s a chance for your to earn $10,000. UPromise is running a Tuition Tales Video Contest which will reward 3 winners with three grand prizes of $10,000 each. The videos will be judged on creativity, quality, and a [...]

The deadline to file your tax, April 15th, is less two weeks away. It’s time to get the work done. I got my TurboTax software and all the files/documents I needed and started our taxes in early February, but haven’t touched them in more than a month after I found out that, like the past [...]

This isn’t a topic I talked a lot here. In fact, I probably have never written about it, but last week I did write a guest post for Quicken Blog on budgeting. The post, though a short one, covers what one needs to consider before setting up a buget and how to actually create one. [...]

Whenever you receive a replacement credit card, the issuer always asks you to destroy the old card, like cut it in half, so the old card can no longer be used. Do you always follow what you are told to do? I don’t know about you, but I never destroyed a single card and never [...]

Early last week, I received my brand new UPromise Credit Card from Bank of America. The look, however, isn’t the only change that was made after UPromise switched the card’s association from Citibank to BofA. The rewards program itself also got an upgrade. I have been a UPromise credit card member since 2002, using it [...]

IRS today announced a special tax break for new car purchases (the tax break was actually approved by the congress as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009). If you are planning to buy a new car, then you may get a break on state and local sales taxes and deduct taxes [...]