She was my pride and joy. A champagne colored, 4 door Chevy Lumina Sedan, that was suitable for a grandmother to drive. In fact, one did- mine.
In college, I was driving a ’96 red Pontiac Grand-Am. I bought the car when I first moved back to Illinois to attend junior college. It was my first car that I was responsible for paying for. I didn’t care- it was my mine.
I was lucky enough to have an awesome grandmother who, for my college graduation gift, loving enough to pay it off. Not having a car payment was huge for me. Although I constantly visioned myself driving something cooler-anything; it was still nice having extra cash to enjoy life. See, I was supporting myself all through college (with the help of the National Guard) and shelling out $350 a month for a car payment just didn’t sound or feel right. […]
Recently, I emailed my readers and asked them the following question,
“I want to hear from you about the number one story or event that made the most dramatic impact on your life financially. What was it that you’re so thankful to have experienced?”
I got some amazing and uplifting stories and felt that I had to share them here. Each of the readers have given me their permission to share their story. Here’s Lacey’s story….
About 3 years ago, I lost my car. It was not stolen although that is what I told several people due to embarrassment. Nope, it was repossessed.
I was about 3 months behind on my car payment but I usually fall behind trying to cover rent, groceries, daycare, etc as a divorced mom so it was no big deal to me. Well, it probably would not have been if the company I owed was not AIG who, come to find out, was in dire need of cash as the economy started to visibly tank in 2008. […]
When I was 18 I was on top of the world. I had a good paying job at the mall, a checking account that was almost $500, and I felt that nothing could stop me.
After getting my first paycheck it was time to get what I deserved. I bought some cool clothes. I bought some creatine at the local GNC to fuel my desire to “get buff”. And I bought a bunch of other crap that I convinced myself I needed (but obviously didn’t).
I was a young man in control. That is until “it” happened. […]
Boot Campaign is a grassroots fund-raising effort started by 5 friends from Texas, know as the boot girls. After reading the book, Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell, the women were inspired to do something more for injured soldiers who had served our country. They began selling combat style boots, donating 100% of the proceeds to charities that work to support wounded soldiers.
And that’s exactly how I heard about them – through Marcus. Marcus had served in Afghanistan around the same time I was in Iraq, but I didn’t know his story until just this year when I read his book, Lone Survivor (sorry Marcus that I just learned your story).
What’s even more puzzling is that I was familiar with one of Marcus’ fallen buddies Lt. Michael Murphy. I knew him as one of the Hero inspired Crossfit workouts named “Murph”. Which, by the way, was the first Crossfit workout that I ever puked from. Yes, it’s that bad. Here’s a video of some Crossfitters putting themselves through it: […]
People with bad credit have learned to live with a low FICO score: they’re denied most rewards credit cards and have to swallow lower credit limits and higher interest rates. Conditions have only worsened.
In the first quarter of 2010, interest rates for those with bad credit spiked from 15% to 25%. But while having poor credit has always meant accepting worse terms, there are some terms that should just never be ok.
Below are a selection of credit cards that everyone should avoid, no matter how bad their credit.
The Bad Guys
The First Premier cards: First Premier Bank gained notoriety with their 79.9% APR credit card, which was then replaced by a card with “only” 59.9% interest. The latest iterations of their sky-high interest rate cards are the Aventium and Centennial credit cards. […]
Welcome to another field exercise edition of Soldier of Finance. Today I’m going to be demonstrating how to properly probe your credit report for possible land mines.
When I was in basic training we had to do many, many different tasks, and I have already showed you how to do a proper military low crawl. While that was definitely one of the most annoying tasks we had to do, probing for land mines was equally annoying, but it was just as vital as all the other tasks we had to do. When we were trained as infantry soldiers everywhere that we went we were on our boots or on our feet. That was our main mode of transportation, and a lot of the different scenarios that we would run were if we were doing land movements out in the wilderness and then all the sudden we came across a mine field. […]
Today I want to share a quick story. I met with some folks that were telling me a story about their daughter. Their daughter had received her paycheck directly deposited into her checking account. Two days later, for whatever reason, the payroll company took the paycheck back out of her checking account, and she was totally unaware of this.
This happened right before Christmas, and the daughter proceeded to write several checks paying for things, paying for bills, etc. Next thing she knows she gets a phone call from the bank stating, “You have some overdraft charges. We have some bounced checks coming.” In a frantic, the daughter races to the bank to find out what the heck is going on because she knew that she got paid and that was in there. […]
Today I am going to be talking about the skeletons in your closet. When I first signed up to join the Army National Guard, I first had to go to MEPS. MEPS was the Military Entrance Processing Station. This is where I went to take my oath, to swear in, and to also go through medical screening and provide all of my background on who I was as a person.
If you had any skeletons in your closet at this point, this is where it all came open. If you were trying to hide anything, if there was anything that you didn’t want your recruiter to know about, something you had done in the past; guess what, they were going to find it. […]
Whenever I was in basic training, each recruit, each private was assigned their own roster number. That roster number was our identifier. We had to put it on all our gear. I had to have it strapped across a tape on my Kevlar, which is our helmet. It dictated as far as when we would eat chow and what order we would fall in. It also would designate when we would draw our weapon from the arms room when we had to go to the different ranges. Our roster number was our second name. First name was Private, and the second name was our roster number. Every time you heard your roster number yelled by a drill sergeant or a captain, you always knew either you were called to do something, or you got caught doing something you shouldn’t have been doing. […]
Today, I am going to be talking about checkpoints. Whenever we were running our operations in Iraq, we always had to call into our command center to let them know whenever we crossed various checkpoints. The idea behind that was so when we were out away from base, if we called into our TOC (Tactical Operation Center), we would let them know, “Hey, we’ve just crossed checkpoint 1-4.” They could look on the map and know, “Okay, here’s where 2-2 Alpha team is at.” That was our call sign. That way whenever we had multiple operations going out, they could always keep track of where we were just in case we had to support another mission, another team that was out. It was very imperative that we always acknowledged to our command center where we were at so that they were always abreast of what was going on.
When it comes to your own financial life, when you cross various checkpoints you want to be able to record that and keep track of that. By hitting these various checkpoints, these are pivotal points in your life that you need to have documented, not only to have a record of it, but also to have momentum going forward. […]
Hey, this is Jeff Rose from SoldierOfFinance.com, where I am teaching people to enlist, take charge, and succeed in their lives financially. Today I am going to be talking about a topic that we will be talking a lot about here at the blog and here on the YouTube channel. Today we are talking about [...]
My name is Jeff Rose and in my life I've trained with the U.S. Army to be an Infantry soldier. In my professional career I've trained to be a financial planner. The recent financial catastrophe brings to light how so many people have become victims of their poor financial management. I combine the discipline of my army training with the rigors of my financial planning experience to help people do something about it. I want to help you become a Soldier of Finance and take control of your life and personal finance today. To read more about me, please check out my