The Sun's Financial Diary

Well, almost. A while ago, shortly after we moved from New Jersey to Virginia, I wrote a post on why we still bank with Bank of America. In that article, I listed a few reasons for staying with the bank when there were a lot of talks about moving away from big banks such as [...]

In the past, I have wrote about different versions of credit cards from Citibank that offer cardholders ThankYou Points as rewards, including ThankYou® Preferred Card and Premier Card, which I own. Those are the cards for people with excellent credit who are looking for credit cards with decent rewards. With those Citi ThankYou cards, members [...]

The truth may indeed set you free, but it can help improve you bottom line, too, in very real ways. From honesty with others to ‘fessing up and coming clean with yourself, here are just a few of the specific ways that owning up to the truth will not only leave your conscience clean but [...]

[This is an updated offer from Chase for its British Airways Visa Signature Card. For a limited time you can earn up to 100,000 Bonus Avios Points with the current promotion.] If you travel a lot with British Airways, then the British Airways Visa Signature Card will help you rack up rewards points with the [...]

The first ever credit card I got was a student card that I applied for using those credit card application forms commonly found on college campuses 16 years ago. Since I had never had a credit card before, there wasn’t any credit history of me at all to be based on for the credit decisions. [...]

For years, I have done our tax returns myself using tax preparation software from Intuite or H&R Block. The reason for not using a CPA for our taxes wasn’t about a few hundred dollars we have saved by filing our taxes ourself, but that with software tools like TurboTax and TaxCut, I felt that we [...]

Ugh! I just wrapped up a full audit. And, let me tell you, it was awful. It drug on for over 6 months. It costs me literally countless hours spent on hold over the phone. It required a lot of effort on my part to remedy errs, and not my own either. Time and time [...]

There’s a long tradition in China during the Lunar New Year celebration that, in addition to eating dumplings and getting new clothes, parents, grandparents, or even relatives give children red envelopes containing a small amount of money. The money is for the whole year since parents usually don’t give kids any extra allowance during the [...]