Summer is a great time to use unique opportunities for saving to your advantage. If you have been hoping to add to your emergency fund or pay down debt, summer is a good time to find the extra cash that you can put toward reaching your financial goals. Here are some easy ways to turn summer time into easy savings:

Use Your Car Less

During the summer, I like to walk or bike instead of taking my car. When I need to run errands around the neighborhood, or take my son to a Scouting activity, I ride my bike. The warm weather also makes it more pleasant to walk to the bus stop and use public transportation. If you walk, bike or ride the bus, you can save a great deal on gas especially with the current gas prices. On top of the gas savings, you can enjoy the added perk of better health as you get more exercise.

Keep the Lights Off

One of the great things about summer is that you can keep the lights off for longer. Read more…

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– Most professionals, and almost all executives, have learned to man or woman up in hard times.  They wear a mask that displays confidence and projects success to the world, because they know there’s no whining in business.

The Great Recession has made executives a little more willing to be honest, but only if they are projecting a positive and confident “turn-around” future outlook no matter how dire the future may be in reality.  Failure is not an option.  Failure is seen as personal and still remains shameful even if out of one’s control. 

It takes guts for a professional to take the mask off.  It takes strength for anyone to be vulnerable by opening themselves up publicly for judgment by the world.

Former construction company CEO Mollee Harper is courageous.  She has character.  Mollee is willing to be painfully raw and powerfully real for what she sees as a larger good.  She is speaking out.

The Great Recession has turned her life upside down and inside out with no mercy.  She went from being a custom construction company CEO to being on food stamps.  She still exudes personal confidence, but she is taking the mask off when she reveals she is uncertain what her life will look like in a year.   She wants it to include a job she can be an asset in again.  She wants to get her life back on track.

Why should you care?  This is just another failing economy hard luck story, right?  We can’t fix what we don’t acknowledge is broken.  When America has a growing class of highly qualified, well educated, and starving for work former professionals who have now been unemployed 12-24 months, there is a major problem. 

The combination of a jobless economic recovery and a growing dismissive attitude toward the unemployed professional by the employed business class is creating an “unemployed professional to poverty” class.  This could never happen to you, right?  Mollee Harper didn’t think so.

Mollee has always been successful and considered her work her primary focus in life.  She certainly could never have imagined not being able to afford food.  She has been looking for employment since the construction company folded over two years ago.  She went through all her savings in eighteen months and applied for government food assistance with no other options. 

How could this happen?

The recession is moving into its third year, and the recovery has been the worst since the Great Depression.  The official unemployment rate has remained at or above 9% for a record setting 21 months and rose again to over 9% in June 2011.  The official rate only counts those that are collecting unemployment benefits. 

On December 8, 2010, the Labor Department released its 2009 work report. In 2009, there was an increase of 2.7M long-term unemployed Americans looking for jobs in 2009 over the 2008 total.

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One of the issues that has received quite a bit of play lately is that of financial infidelity. This is when you keep secrets from your significant other about what is going on with your finances. In this day, when many of us have separate financial lives even after marriage, financial infidelity is a fairly easy trap to fall into.

If Our Finances are Separate, Why Does It Matter?

Are you committing financial infidelity?

When you have joint accounts, it is obvious that you need to be completely honest with your partner about your finances. However, what about if you have separate accounts? While some spending might not be your partners business, the fact of the matter is that there are still joint expenses that need to be taken care of. Read more…

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The CapOne Venture Rewards card has grown to be our favorite card over the last few months, based exclusively on its travel rewards benefits. And now its gotten even better by bumping up the signing bonus from 10,000 to 25,000 miles (or $250 for those keeping score at home), redeemable toward your travel purchases.

One big reason is because the Venture is now the only card on the Visa/MasterCard network that offers a straightforward 2% back on all purchases, from the first dollar spent. So its an awesome alternative to the once-great Schwab Visa that is no longer offered.  There are no spending minimums to meet, and the only catch is that the 2% back is only redeemable toward travel. No Hassle Miles can be redeemed for cash, but at a reduced 1% reward rate.

For travel rewards, this is hard to beat, because you arent restricted to a single airlines frequent flyer program, or a single hotels loyalty rewards.

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Are ethically minded consumers missing out on the best rates? We compare these products with the market leaders.

CREDIT CARDS

Barclaycard offers the Breathe credit card which donates 0.5pc of the amount you spend to projects that tackle climate change – such as Pure, the Clean Planet Trust. This card charges 16pc APR, but provides interest-free balance transfers for 10 months, with a 3pc handling fee.

Another option is the Co-operative’s The Think credit card which allows customers to protect a third of an acre of Indonesian rainforest for 100 years when they make their first spend on the card. The Think credit card comes with a 12.9 APR, but for every £100 spent the Co-op will donate 25p to the RSPB’s Indonesian Rainforest Project.

Verdict: The fact that the table-topping Platinum Simplicity Visa from Barclaycard charges just 7.9pc APR goes to show that protecting the environment can cost you more than you might think. Read more…

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