I sat down today with my grandmother for coffee.  Grandma is getting old (past eighty but don’t tell her I told you), and she has live an interesting life.  She has lived many places in Canada, but settled here after her husband (my grandfather) died in 1978.  I try to get together with her often to hear about stories of her life and how it was different than my own.

Somehow we got on the subject of money.  She doesn’t always approve of what I spend my money on – to be honest she quite rarely approves of what I spend my money on.  When I got an unsecured loan for my first car, she was there telling me that when she was my age, they would never have thought about getting a loan to buy a car.  Instead they would save the money.

Then she goes on about how I should never get a secured homeowner loan (to renovate my house for example) because "those banks just want to take away your home."

Basically for her loans are bad news.  Her philosophy: if you don’t have the money, don’t buy it.  Some of her advice rings true – if you look at people in her generation and the number of bankruptcies compared to my generation you would find very few of her generation ever went bankrupt.  Whereas my generation, the bankruptcy rates are rising.

I will have to think about our conversation a little more – there are definitely some nuggets of advice I should take away from it.  Grandma is so wise…

Reading the newspaper everyday gets a little boring after awhile.  It seems like they just recycle the headlines or make them as serious as possible.  Take your news back and spice it up – we’ll show you how.

Step 1: Find a News headline

Scan through your paper to find a news headline.  It can be any headline – for this example we will use "Man steals screws from factory" – that is a little boring.

Step 2: Give the headline a twist

If you want to make your boring headline to become a weird news headline, give it a little twist.  In our example here, you could change the headline to "Man gets screwed" as he got caught stealing screws from work and is going to jail.

Well, it is as simple as that.  Try it out next time you read the paper – it will make your reading a little more fun.  Don’t be shy, take a pen and turn your boring news into strange news.

I am a pediatrician from Ridgefield, Connecticut.  I offer both specialized and primary care to my patients.  When I was going to college to become a doctor, I decided to specialize in pediatrics, as I have always had a big heart for small children, especially those in need.

Being a part of Ridgefield pediatrics, has definitely fulfilled a big part of my life.  Although, as a pediatrician, you try not to get too emotionally involved with your patients and their families, when a child’s struggle ends on a high note, you can’t help but feel joy.  On the downside, when the battle is lost, you can’t help to cry with the family for the little person that made such a big impact.

What really keeps me going, though, is my primary care patients.  I get to watch these children grow and know that I have been a big part of their health and well-being.

I am a pediatrician and I love what I do.

I want to start this off with explaining the title.  I just use the term "financial chores" to talk about some of the tasks I need to regarding keeping up with my personal finances – not something I am required to do as traditional chores are.

Now that I have that settled, I just would like to tell you my fall financial cleaning that I do each year.  Just like spring cleaning helps you get your house in order for the summer, my fall financial cleaning helps me to get my finances in order for the winter.  For me, the fall is a slower time of year, so I have time to look at my financial situation and products that I use and make some choices that will affect me for the next year.

Specifically, I look at three areas that affect my money situation: my credit cards, car insurance and bank accounts.  I look at these three as there are so much competition in the marketplace in these three areas that it seem that if I try each year, I can save myself some money each time.

For my credit cards, I visit other financial institutions in my area, get their brochures and compare credit cards to determine which would give me the most benefits and save me the most money.  Quite often you can find a similar card with a lower interest rate, or other incentives such as frequent flyer miles to give you some reward for spending your money.  Also, with the information I learn, sometimes my current credit card company will match the incentives or interest rate from their competitors to keep my business.

Next I look at my car insurance.  If you haven’t noticed, over the last few years, the number of car insurance commercials on TV have increased.  Most of them urge you to do a car insurance comparison on their website – and I have tried this on numerous occasions.  You can usually save a little money on your premiums or get other benefits from switching such as lower deductibles on your insurance.  Even though it requires a little work to switch back and forth each year it is usually worth the money I save.

Last but not least, I look for the best rate on my savings account.  I usually like to park my extra money in my savings account to make some interest and to protect the money from losing a lot of value, so the interest rate is key for me.  I also don’t care for those savings accounts that either charge you fees to have the account or charge you for each withdrawal from your account.  I go out in my community to the banks and credit unions to find the best savings accounts.  Once I find the best of the best, I find the one that best fits my investment style.  I don’t find that I switch banks very often, but it never hurts to check.

Usually it takes me a week or so to get done these three tasks once I start them.  I am just going to get organized and begin my work on Monday, when regular businesses are open.  I encourage you to look at your finances once a year to see where you are and how you can save yourself a little money.

It seems that when you least expect something to happen it does.  This week, we were merrily driving our car to go out for lunch.  We left our car in the parking lot of the mall we were at and went inside to eat.  We came out about an hour later and went to start the car… and it didn’t work.  It wouldn’t start, so I called my brother to come pick me and the kids up.  He showed up fifteen minutes later… and the car started!

So maybe it was a fluke that it didn’t work that day.  Fast forward a week later to today.  Guess what?  The car doesn’t start.  We had our mechanic over in the afternoon and to our dismay, he suggested that we get a new vehicle as ours is not worth repairing.

So now we have to look at getting a newer vehicle.  The big question my wife and I were fighting with was how we were going to pay for a new car.  You see, she doesn’t have a high paying job and I just quit my job to work at home – and even though it is going ok, I am not bringing in the big bucks yet.

We decided that perhaps our only option was to get a car loan.  We jumped on the computer so that we could compare loans from the major lenders in our area.  Looking at these sites, a trend started to emerge:  we could either get a personal loan or a secured personal loan.

Personal loans are the easy to get if you have good credit.  The repayment period of the loan is short (usually five years or less) so that you can be out of debt in a shorter period of time.  There is also a little more variety, as you can get a fixed or floating rate with the loan.

Secured personal loans allow you to borrow against the equity in your home (the catch being that you need to own a home) but can allow lower interest rates as well as longer repayment periods.  In fact, some lenders can let you make payments for up to 25 years!

For our car purchasing needs, it looks like we will be going with a personal loan.  I setup an appointment, and we go in next Tuesday.  Now, all we need to do is find a good car to buy…

I recently had some plumbing problems in my house.  My toilet was running continuously, I had a plugged drain and a leaky faucet in the kitchen.  I called around to get some quotes from companies that offered in-home plumbing service and found them to be a little more expensive than I thought.  I wanted to get another option as opposed to paying big bucks for what seemed like simple repairs.

I took my search online.

I looked for home plumbing repair websites that would tell me how to do the repairs myself.  I found a few and started reading.  What really got me was that the problems I had were really easy to fix – provided you didn’t mind trying to fix them yourself.

So I tried.  A trip to my local plumbing hardware store and about an hour of my time, I had everything running smoothly again.

My advice:  don’t be afraid to try to fix things yourself.  Lots of stuff around the house that needs to be fixed is really quite easy, just take a look online and you may find the solution.