The Essentials Of Choosing The Right Student Loan

The right student loan plays a vital role in the acquisition of higher education; however, when unwisely obtained, they produce real hardship. That is certainly why you ought to know precisely about student education loans just before getting one. Continue reading to learn all you should personally know.

Think carefully when selecting your repayment terms.

Most public loans might automatically assume a decade of repayments, but you could have a possibility of going longer. Refinancing over more extended amounts of time can mean lower monthly payments but a larger total spent as time passes due to interest. Weigh your monthly income against your long-term financial picture.

Will not default with a student loan.

Defaulting on government loans can lead to consequences like garnished wages and tax refunds withheld. Defaulting on private loans can be a disaster for virtually any cosigners you needed. Naturally, defaulting on any loan risks severe problems for your credit report, which costs you more later.

Never ignore your school loans because that may not make them go away completely. If you are having a tough time paying the cashback, call and confer with your lender about this. If your loan becomes past due for too long, the lending company could have your wages garnished and have your tax refunds seized.

Before you apply for student education loans, it is advisable to see what other types of money for college you happen to be qualified for. There are numerous scholarships available and so they are effective in reducing how much cash you must pay money for school. When you have the total amount you owe reduced, it is possible to work towards obtaining an education loan.

Once you begin repayment of your education loans, make everything in your power to pay over the minimum amount monthly. Though it may be factual that education loan debt is not thought of as negatively as other varieties of debt, removing it as quickly as possible should be your objective. You are cutting your obligation as soon as it is possible to will help you to invest in a home and support a household.

Student loan deferment is an emergency measure only, not just a method of directly buying time. Through the deferment period, the principal will continue to accrue interest, usually at a high rate. If the period ends, you haven’t bought yourself any reprieve. Instead, you’ve created a larger burden for your self with regards to the repayment period and total amount owed.

PLUS loans are something you should consider if the graduate school has been funded. They may have a monthly interest that is certainly not more than 8.5 percent. This can be a bit higher than Perkins and Stafford loan but under privatized loans. For this reason, it’s a good solution for more established and prepared students.

Do not consider the idea that a default on your education loan will provide you with freedom from the debt. There are many methods your finances can suffer due to unpaid student education loans. As an example, it could freeze your banking accounts. Also, they can collect up to 15 percent of other income you might have. Often you can expect to put yourself in a level worse situation.

To have a larger award when applying for a graduate student loan, use your very own income and asset information as an alternative to in addition to your parents’ data. This lowers your earnings level in most cases and making you qualified for more assistance. The better grants you can get, the less you must borrow.

To summarize, you should know whenever possible about student education loans just before getting one. These choices can affect you for years. Borrowing cash in a smart strategy is what you need to do, so make sure to use many of these tips whenever using student loans.

7 Books to Help you save more and multiply your money!

  1. Penny Pincher’s Book: Easy Ways of Living Better for Less – Hundreds of Money-saving Tips :Unlike a lot of books dedicated to “simple living” this isn’t for yuppies trying to get out of the rat race but for people trying to get by on modest budgets Full of ideas for saving money and living a frugal lifestyle and obviously written by people who have done it “for real”.
  2. Mr Thrifty’s How to Save Money on Absolutely Everything: This text aims to save you more than you paid for it. It has hundreds of ways to save you thousands of pounds on anything you ever buy, from building work to babies toys, cars to carpets, houses to heating.
  3. 50 Things You Can Do to Improve: How to Spend Less, Save More, and Make the Most of What You Have: Introduces fifty strategies to help readers gain financial independence by creating an investment portfolio, buying a house, planning for retirement, and getting organized.
  4. The Complete Tightwad Gazette: Whatever your financial situation this book has something to offer. For those submerged in credit card debt, or any kind of debt for that matter, there is a wealth of practical advice which, according to the many readers letters at the end of the book, has brought people back from the brink, saving marriages into the bargain.
  5. 100 Questions You Should Ask about Your Personal Finances: And the Answers You Need to Help You Save, Invest, and Grow Your Money:This is a book that teaches you how to get a grip on your money, tame your debt, and educate yourself along the way. What readers should take away from this book is the idea that everyone can learn how to create wealth and security for themselves and their family. It isn’t brain surgery. Managing your financial future is something that can be easily learned. And if you do it right, you might even find it to be a lot of fun.
  6. How to Live Green, Cheap, and Happy: Save Money! Save the Planet!: At last! A guide to downward mobility with an eco-spin. This book’s philosophy is simple: What’s good for the planet is good for the bottom line. The greener you are, the cheaper you can live, and the happier you’ll be. This book will help you: Wean yourself from your cash habit and create your own ‘eco’-nomic system; Live closer to the Earth and farther from the banks; Cut down on — and in some cases cut out altogether — many of those everyday expenses that really add up.
  7. 1001 Ways to Save, Grow and Invest Your Money: Even after you”ve made the decision to save, you need to know where to put that money so it will grow into the nest egg you need to fulfil your dreams. This book offers a simple diagnostic approach to help you figure out your own financial situation.’

Save money with your holiday

Everyone likes to go on holiday but not many of us like paying for them as after all they are one of the most expensive purchases that we make in a year. In order to save ourselves money like most purchases it is important that we shop around and compare prices from a wide variety of travel agents whether online or down your local high street.

The major benefit of shopping online for a holiday is that it is very simple for you to compare lots of prices of different holiday destinations very easily and quickly from the comfort of your own home, without having to stand about in a queue.

Which type of holiday deal is best for you depends when and where you want to go and how happy you are to book your own flights and accommodation or whether you would feel better just going to the one shop and letting them do all the work for you. The more flexible you are with your dates and destinations then the better the deal you are likely to get and if you are willing to leave booking your holiday until the last minute you have the chance of picking up a real bargain.

The package deals offered by travel agents can be competitively priced if you intend to go to some of the more common holiday destinations. The reason for this is that travel agents buy all the seats in the planes and most of the rooms in hotels they can negotiate cheaper prices for the accommodation and flights than you could on you own. However whether the price they intend to sell the package holiday to you is competitively priced is another matter.

The websites of travel agents such as Thomas Cook and Thomsons allow you to view accommodation in the area that you want to spend your holiday. Their sites also allow you to make your booking online, to compare local prices with those back home, to purchase your travel insurance, to purchase your foreign currency and travelers cheques, to arrange your car hire and purchase almost any other holiday related product you can think of. Some travel agents even offer special discounts for booking online as opposed to buying from their shop in the high street. In terms of getting a feel for how much it would cost to go to your desired holiday location this is a good place to start.

Once you know how much it would cost to go on a package holiday from one travel agent you simply visit another travel agents website to find out how much they would charge you until you find the best deal. You can then either buy this holiday or if you fancy saving possibly even more money why not try and see how much it would cost you to purchase tour flights and accommodation yourself.

A recent survey showed that more and more of us are taking this option to book our own individual holidays using online sites such as Trailfinders, Cheapflights and Expedia. Arranging your own holiday sounds a daunting task but in fact thanks to the internet it is fairly easy to do.

Whilst the package holiday might look like a good price you can save yourself even more money by getting yourself the best deal on accommodation in your holiday destination and by arranging the cheapest or most convenient flight times to suit your journey. You can also shop around to get the best deal on car hire (Hertz and Avis are two popular sites), on holiday insurance and on foreign currency rather than being tied to the one travel agent.

When buying foreign currency beware of people offering commission free deals as these tend to offer less competitive rates than others so be sure to compare the rates as well. Also always try to avoid using bureau de change at airports and ferry terminals as these tend to offer some of the worst deals so plan a little ahead of your holiday.

Money managers

Is the amount of money you earn sufficient to allow you to live comfortably? If you are similar to the majority of the people in the UK, the answer is no. It does not seem to matter how much we each earn because we all seem to have trouble living on it. It seems to be in our nature that even if we get a pay increase or make money some other way all we do is to go out and spend this extra income.

The problem with spending all our money is that we never put enough away for any unexpected costs (such as car repairs, burst pipes etc). When they happen we have to borrow money to cope and then have to pay back the amount we borrowed along with interest. However, by doing this we have entered into a vicious circle as our earnings have stayed the same but our outgoings have now increased by the amount of the loan repayments. We are therefore forced to reduce our standards of living as we cannot afford to spend so much money on items we could afford before we had to borrow the money. It then becomes even harder to save money than it was before and if another unexpected cost comes arises and we have to borrow more money then the circle gets smaller and smaller and we are on a downward spiral in monetary terms.

It could be suggested from the above that all we have to do is to earn more money in the first place but as stated above all we would do is to increase our outgoings to meet those additional incomings. No, what we really need to do is to manage our money better.

There are a variety of reasons why we do not manage our money better.

Lack of knowledge

Most people lack the financial knowledge to manage their money better. This can be due to them being bad money managers as they believe they are unlikely to be come rich because their parents and friends are not rich and so they do not make the effort to learn how to manage their money better. Instead they simply follow the crowd and if their friends have poor money management skills then they will inadvertently copy these bad habits. A good money manager should try to improve their knowledge by reading the financial pages of the papers, or financial sites on the web to find out how best to maximise their money. This would allow them to find out about the best places to save their money, the cheapest places to borrow money and to find out about tax free products.

Lack of planning

Most of us live for today and try not to think of tomorrow, we have no plan that we follow in terms of our spending habits. A good money manager would have a budget, showing his income (wages, dividends and interest) and a list of his expenditure (mortgage, electricity, food, clothing, alcohol etc). By comparing these two lists the good money manager will know if his income exceed his expenditure in which case he can save money or alternatively if his expenditure exceeds his income then he needs to either reduce his expenditure or to increase his income.

If you draw were to sit down write now and draw up a budget you would probably be surprised as to much money you spend on items that are not essential and that you could live without. Living without a few of these luxury items would allow you to save money up for any unexpected emergencies that might arise and would save you having to borrow money.

Once you can start saving you can set yourself targets, for example to increase your savings by £1,000 by this time next year. The following year you could increase this target to £2,000, then £4,000 the next year and so on. If you can meet your targets you will be well on your way to having a financially secure future.

Want it now attitude

In the UK at the moment there are very few people who live within their means, most of us see something we want and instead of waiting and saving up for the item we either put it on our credit card or take out a loan to pay for it. The banks and credit card companies are almost throwing money at us with “But now, pay later” advertising so we end up taking their money, paying them a hefty amount of interest and hoping that at some point in the future we will be able to afford to pay them back.

However, a good money manager should be willing to wait because they know if they save money up to pay for the item they are earning interest on their savings whilst a bad money manager ends up paying interest on their borrowings. Given that some credit cards are charging in excess of 20% it does not seem a good idea to borrow money when we could just wait a little bit longer and save up for the item.

Delaying saving

If you invested £10,000 in an account at a fixed rate of interest of 5% with the interest compounding every year, it would build up to £26,533 in 20 years, ignoring the effects of taxation. Lets imagine a friend invest £10,000 at a fixed rate of 10% it would seem reasonable to expect his balance after 20 years would be £53,066, being double the £26,533 but in fact it would £67,275. This shows that a small difference in interest rates can make a significant difference in the value of money over time. This is known as compound interest because you are earning interest on the interest your initial deposit has earned.

The earlier you start to save the more money you will earn as shown by the fact that if you invested invested £10,000 when you were 20 for 40 years at a fixed rate of 10%, it would be worth £452,593 when you were 60. However, if you invested the same amount when you were 30 you would only receive £174,494 when you were 60. Worse still if you waited until you were 40, your investment would be worth only £67,275 by the time you were 60.

Interest rates are currently considerably less than 10% but the above signifies how important it is to make your money work for you and to highlight how small differences in savings rates can really add up. You should therefore keep an eye on the interest rates you receive from your savings to make sure they are competitive against other savings accounts.

Good money managers

To become a good money manager we need to improve our knowledge of financial matters as this will ensure we get the best savings rates and pay the lowest rates on our borrowings. We should shop around and not just ask the nearest bank or building society if they will lend us some money.
We need to have a plan as to where we are going based on our current income and expenditure. By sticking to a budget and being prepared to wait for something we want it will save us money rather than costing us money. The sooner we start to apply these ideas then the sooner we can become good money managers and start out on our road to financial security.

14 Tips to Save money when buying a car

If you want to save money when you buy your next car then you will need to haggle with the salesman to get a better deal. The salesman will expect you to haggle and if you are a good haggler then you could save yourself thousands on your car purchase. We have listed below some top tips to help you negotiate a better deal.

1. Do as much research as you can before you visit the garage. Try to find out how much cars are selling for at other garages and other sources. If you let the salesman know that you can get a similar cheaper elsewhere they should be willing to offer you a better deal.

2. Keep an eye on car models that are about to be replaced or are slow sellers as the garage may be more likely to offer a better deal.

3. Visit garages near the end of the month when they are more willing to offer better deals on their cars in order to meet their sales targets.

4. Be polite and friendly to the car saleman and avoid being rude as that it just likely to annoy them and make it harder for you negotiate a good deal.

5. Try to stay calm and focused, remember that the salesman negotiates with people for a living and will therefore use different selling tactics on you so be alert for these.

6. Don’t be afraid to ask for a discount and to haggle with the salesman. If you are slightly embarrassed then why not say something along the lines of “My wife/husband will hit the roof if I spend that much on the car, couldn’t you reduce the price a bit?”. This will allow you to remain friendly with the salesman whilst at the same time asking for a discount.

7. Never accept the first offer the salesman makes and respond with something like “surely you could do better than that?” or just be patient and keep silent and eventually the salesman may throw in some further extras to close the deal.

8. If you want to make an offer for a car then start at a low opening price but try to be realistic and allow the salesman to negotiate you up to a price that is acceptable to you.

9. If you show that you are serious about buying a car the salesman should work harder to try and reach a reach that will suit both parties.

10. Don’t be persuaded by the salesman to buy a car specification that you do not want or that does not meet your requirements.

11. If you feel that you are getting close to making a deal say that you will buy the car at a particular price if the salesman agrees now.

12. Do not be afraid to just walk away if you do not feel you are getting a good deal, there are lots of garages out there and one will offer you a good deal for your custom.

13. Be careful that if the salesman gives you a very good discount that they do not claw back their profits and your money by undervaluing your trade in. Similarly they could try this the other way round and give you a good price for your old car and a low discount on the car you want to buy.

14. Special finance or insurance deals are often used by garages to attract potential customers. Some salesmen will then use these as an excuse not to give a discount but often the special offers are funded by the car manufacturer and not the garage. If you can combine a decent discount with a cheap finance package then you will have negotiated yourself a good deal.

How To Read The Stock Market – Priceless Advice

How to read the stock market is not as difficult to understand as one would think. Each and every company who is on the stock market is issued a 3 letter abbreviated name or ‘Symbol’, and through this symbol you are able to research what a particular stock is doing right now or even over the last year. This information is readily available on-line or from a number of other locations such as the business section of your local newspaper.

Basically what you have is a 52 week high which pertains to the highest value that a share of stock was worth in the past year, as well as the 52 week low. You may also find that other information may be available such as if there was a dividend release and if so how much it was per share of stock.

Furthermore you may also be able to tell what a particular share of stock has done in the previous week and if it is a gainer or loser you may also see the last day’s trends. More advanced data can be found on-line in the form of charts.

The most common terms you will see when looking at any stock’s value is the “High” or “Low” price, as well as the “Close” price which is the last price that was paid for that stock on the day you are looking. You will also see the “Change, or the difference between the previous close and the current one and of course the “Volume” or the number of shares that were traded during the time period.

The concepts on how to read the stock market for dummies are very simple. What is not simple is figuring when to buy, when to sell and if you would like to hold on to the shares for a longer term period. This is the most important information that the stock market investing for dummies guide tries to teach and is the key to creating sustained growth.

How To Find Stock Market Help

For most people, when it first comes to researching more about dealing in the stock market, almost every newcomer is wondering how to find stock market help. To answer this question, it is important to note that there are many forms of help available and whilst some may me bad, others can be very helpful to both you and your bottom line.

It only takes a second to go on-line and type in a phrase regarding what type of help you want, and you will almost certainly come up with millions of results, but how good is all this information?

Truth be told, a vast majority of the ‘help’ covers the same concepts that have been rewritten so many times in one stock market for dummies book after another that it is next to impossible to tell if it is all just the same information. This does not mean it will not help you, it just means that finding the answers you need will take more time than you originally thought.

Furthermore, some of this information you may not be accurate, because it is not uncommon for one who is trying to find stock market help to come across stuff that is just made up. People do this to draw you to their websites, and in some cases this made up stock market information can cause you to loose money – so be careful.

At different stages in all our careers, we have all been searching ‘stock market for dummies’ for help and advice, but choosing the information that will help us succeed in investing on the stock market, comes down to knowing the basic fundamentals of the stock market and from there using our own common sense to determine if the information will help or not.

Of course one of the best ways to find stock market help is to keep an eye on the major financial media centers like Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and a lot more. All of these publications will provide you with the latest information and trends in the stock market today.

Things To Know As A Stock Market Beginner

While at first glance, the stock market can seem like a very intimidating monster, there are some things to know as a stock market beginner that will help you overcome this intimidation and maximize your profits.

The concept of trading is a bit misleading. You are not actually trading the stocks for another stock, but rather you are trading them for money which more or less constitutes as buying and selling, but not actually trading.

While there are many ways to make money in the stock market, the easiest way for you to trade in the stock market is by opening up an account with a broker through which you will be able to invest in the stock market. The big name players that you may hear about in the news are people that have made so much money over the years with a stock broker, that they have either become a broker themselves, or they own the brokerage firm.

Once you have made a deposit into your broker’s account, you are then able to buy and sell stocks on the stock exchange. When you are new to investing, it is better for you to start simply by creating a diverse portfolio which means purchasing small amounts of stock of different companies in different industries.



When you choose to purchase a share of stock, you will instruct your broker to purchase them and that request will be sent to the firm’s floor runners who are the representatives of the firm on the stock exchange floor. They will be responsible for the purchase for you in exchange for a small fee.

At Stock Market Investing For Dummies, we would always advise stock market beginners to start off making small investments in a wide variety of companies so that your risk is spread wide. By doing this you are far less likely to be affected if certain sectors of the stock market start to fall.

Learn The Stock Market Fundamentals

When it comes to learning to trade in the stock market, it is first very important that before you even open an account, you learn the stock market fundamentals you will need in order to make money rather than lose it.

One of the first and also the most important stock market fundamentals is understanding exactly what a stock is. A share of stock is a form of ownership. Companies use these stocks to sell off portions of their company ownership in exchange for liquidity. The share of stock itself is a representation of a portion of ownership in that company. If one were to have enough shares in a company, they are able to influence decisions within the company based on voting.

While a business can have shares of stock and not be part of a major stock exchange, this does not mean that you cannot buy them if they are for sale. However for reasons of simplicity, the average person will deal only through a major exchange, as the demand for the stock there is higher, and you can therefore buy the stock when there is less demand and sell it when there is higher demand.

The value of the stock in general is based on this demand, and knowing that there is only so many shares available, so if someone truly wants a share, he or she will increase the value simply by offering more money per share. Should the company run a profit and decide to release a dividend as a means of increasing its value, then this causes a higher demand for the stock and thus increases its value.

In all simplicity, the stock market fundamentals are to know what a stock is, and anticipating an increase in demand for a particular share of stock – when you have mastered this you will probably move away from Stock Market Investing For Dummies and on to a website offering more advanced stock buying techniques.

Start Investing

If you’ve ever watched the financial section of the news, channel surfed and landed on a financial channel, or browsed through a financial website, you’ve probably heard that you need to start investing for retirement. Maybe you’re not too worried because you have a pension and social security, but what if neither of these are available once you retire? Or, what if the money you get from them is not enough?

Increase Wealth by Investing

Whether the markets are booming or our economy is in great distress, no one will tell you never to invest a dime of your money.If someone tells you to just hide your money under your mattress, they are either very ignorant, or they want to steal it from you.

If you look back in history, recessions and even the Great Depression don’t last forever.The economy has highs and lows, and overall, the average return on the stock market is about 13%.If you had invested $10 in the stock market 100 years ago and earned the average historical rate each year, by now you would have $1,797,902.

Now I know you might not live to 100 and even if you did, that nearly $2,000,000 probably won’t do you much good, but that’s why you need to invest more than $10 one time.This just shows you the power of compounding and what kind of money you could make.Just think how much money you could make if you invested 100 times that every year?

In 10 years, investing $1,000 a year with even just 9% interest, you would have over $16,000. Give it another 10 years and you would have over $55,000. If you are 30 now and you invest $2,000 a year for the next 35 years until you retire at 65 and make a 9% annual return you would have over $466,000. Bump that percentage up to the historical 13% average and you would have over $1.2 million.

How Much can I Make through investments?

The amount you all depends on how much you invest, how much time you have, and how active you are investing.Don’t invest more than you can afford, but be honest with yourself about how much you really can invest.Also, don’t be afraid to increase how much you invest as you begin to save more.

What Should I Invest in?

Invest in whatever you want: stocks, bonds, mutual funds, commodities, derivatives, real estate, or anything that appeals to you. Nowhere does it say you have to invest in stocks or you have to buy bonds. Diversifying in all sorts of investments is better for your portfolio anyway.

How do I get started with investing?

Before you invest a dime, you need to learn about investing. Sure, you could pay a financial advisor to make all your investments, but that can cost you a lot of money that should be earning you more money. Start by reading, reading, and reading, until you are ready to make an investment plan you are comfortable with. If you are worried about wasting time that you could be investing, save your money and put it in a high interest savings account until you are ready to begin.