Don't Quit Your Day Job…

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs 1955 – 2011

There is a mortgage strategy variously described in different corners of the internet where a mortgage is refinanced… and payments stay steady. For this strategy, a borrower is currently paying some monthly payment, and will continue to pay the exact same monthly payment after their mortgage is refinanced. The benefits are usually explained as an acceleration of mortgage payments and a “guaranteed investment return”. You may find yourself in a situation where you are considering this form of accelerated mortgage payments. Is it worth it? Let’s run the numbers and find out!

Another week, more featured articles and links.

We’re on a roll recently, we cleaned up the front page of the site – let us know if you like the changes and our Twitter follower count is now up to six! (0 to 6 in a week is an infinite percentage increase.)

Writers on personal finance blogs and websites are, on the whole, a frugal bunch. The reasons we started our respective sites are varied – influence, to chronicle paying off our debts, the spread uncommon knowledge, altruism, or merely to build a stage to have our financial opinions heard. Our readers are a much more diverse bunch. While most all people have to deal with their own finances, our readers come to us with their finances in various stages of disarray. While us writers, as a whole, have our finances in order (or at least on the right track), some of our articles tend to preach to the converted. I feel there is an overabundance of frugality articles in our corner of the internet – so I ask, “Is Frugality Overrated?”.

Conceptually, it’s easy to grasp why and when you should refinance your mortgage. In practice, inertia is the main reason people hold back from refinancing. With that in mind, we present these mortgage calculator which will allow you to see how your current mortgage will compare with the mortgage you are considering. Perhaps if the math is enticing, you’ll shop around? Enjoy!

We’d like to thank Hugh Chou for compiling the equations that we needed to create this calculator, and Ironman at Political Calculations for providing the calculator framework.

Well, probably not the death of free checking accounts, but a little hyperbole never killed anyone, right?

DQYDJ already gave you a “view from 35,000 feet” analysis of new debit card transaction caps in our last article, but we wanted to follow it up with something deeper, for those interested in how the sausage is made. We’ve dug into two of the more recent Bank of America investor releases and are ready to share our thoughts on why Bank of America’s move is rational – and you can expect other banks to follow. Yes, likely even online banks and credit unions. However, first up is Citibank, who is eliminating free checking… unless your account is over $6,000.