Recent Blog Posts
Freezing And Unfreezing Your Credit Report
Monitoring your credit score can be stressful, especially if it is getting lower, or if it is not increasing as quickly as you would hope. Even worse, requesting credit reports too frequently can adversely affect your credit score, so the best-case scenario is just to live with the uncertainty of only finding out whether… Read More »
Pet Store Loans Through Rent-A-Banks Are A Perfect Storm For Debt
Most people’s debt problems are not the result of consumers wantonly spending beyond their means. Instead, catastrophic debts usually result from medical emergencies, chronic illnesses, the need to support family members who are unable to work, or just the simple fact that everything is expensive and many jobs do not pay well enough to… Read More »
Legal Protections Against Predatory Automatic Renewals
Most people’s debt problems are not due to poor financial decisions but simply to the fact that, unless you were born into money, necessary expenses have become unaffordable. Despite this, cutting your expenses as much as possible can help you reduce your debt and put yourself on firm footing for bigger interventions like applying… Read More »
4 Abusive Debt Collection Tactics That Are Perfectly Legal
It is illegal for creditors to contact you about repayment of debts before 8:00 in the morning or after 9:00 at night. They cannot contact you at your workplace or otherwise publicly shame you about failing to pay money that you owe. They cannot threaten you, curse at you, or call you offensive names. … Read More »
The Statute Of Limitations For Florida Debts
Conventional wisdom about personal finance holds that ignoring debts can only make them worse. Meanwhile, debts have a statute of limitations, which means that, if you have not made payments toward a debt after a certain amount of time has gone by, there is little that creditors and debt collectors can do to get… Read More »
Are Microloans Your Best Hope For Getting Access To Credit?
In 2006, the economist Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in founding Grameen Bank, an organization that provides microloans to women in Bangladesh who would not otherwise have access to credit. In 2008, Professor Yunus founded Grameen America, which operates on a similar model to provide microloans to women in… Read More »
How Risky Are Balloon Payment Mortgages?
From groceries to insurance premiums, the most affordable ones are reserved for people whose finances are already in pretty good shape. The same rule applies to mortgages. The most affordable home mortgage loans are called qualified loans. Before entering into a loan agreement for a qualified mortgage, the lender conducts a rigorous review of… Read More »
Florida Celebrity Bankruptcy Files: Trick Daddy
Filing for bankruptcy protection is your legal right. No one can take that right away from you, not your ex-spouse, not the beneficiaries of your will, and not even the family court, the criminal court, or the bankruptcy court. In some cases there is a waiting period after one bankruptcy filing before you can… Read More »
Which Debts Should You Pay Down With Your Tax Refund?
The idea of universal basic income has been around since before the COVID-19 pandemic, but several rounds of stimulus checks have offered insights into what people actually do when they get a temporary and modestly sized windfall while living paycheck to paycheck. Most people did not splurge their stimulus checks, whether or not they… Read More »
Florida Celebrity Bankruptcy Files: Lakeisha Williams, Stepmother Of Venus And Serena
People who have seen the movie King Richard will be familiar with the story of how Richard Williams and his wife Oracene Price bought a house in South Florida and outfitted it with tennis courts where their daughters Venus and Serena would practice playing tennis until they became world champions. Today, the house bears… Read More »