The credit counselor will help you to assist in order to reduce your outstanding balance as well as the interest rate on it. But if you are unable to select an authentic debt relief program then you can worsen your financial situation. Therefore, look for a debt relief plan that will help to recover you from economic doldrums.

Here are some debt relief options available for you that will help to regain your financial independence on taking the right decision.

1.   A low interest debt consolidation loan will help to combine your debts to make it affordable for you to pay off. As the interest on this loan does not fluctuate so, it is easier for the delinquent borrower to pay the owed amount through this loan. If you opt for debt consolidation then you can wipe out your debts that will help to repair your credit report. Try to compare the interest rate of the consolidation loan with the collated interest of your existing debts. Choose a consolidation loan to eradicate your debts instead of a payday loan or another credit card to pay off the due amount. Therefore, debt consolidation is an uncomplicated and beneficial way to remove the arrears.

2.   If you are trying to come out of your overwhelming debt then opt for debt settlement program. The settlement program can help you to negotiate on your behalf on the outstanding due along with the interest rate. You can make payment on the reduced amount through installment or a single payment. The negotiated amount will be considered as full payment of your debt with the consent of the lender. The effect on your credit report will not be as severe as filing bankruptcy.

3.   Your financial situation can easily be supervised by the help of a credit counseling service. The counseling program will guide you to prepare a budget and form a repayment plan to pay off your insurmountable obligations. Unlike bankruptcy the adverse effect of credit counseling will be minor on your credit report. In case, you fail to find a way out to eradicate your outstanding dues then the credit counseling session can give a solution.

4.   If you are juggling with debts and looking for an easy way to evade your financial blues then you can select the least desired option of filing bankruptcy. You can choose to file either chapter 7 or 13 bankruptcy to discharge your huge obligations. Under chapter 7 your entire non exempt assets will be liquidated and fund will be used to pay off the creditors. Under chapter 13 the court appointed trustee will give you a repayment plan to pay off the owed amount. But the stigma of bankruptcy will tarnish your credit report for 7 to 10 years. Hence, bankruptcy should be your last resort while selecting a debt relief program.

photo: Robert S. Donovan

Cooking at home is the best way to save cash, but it’s nice to go out sometimes, too. Check out Frugal Foodie every Friday for a selection of the latest coupons for casual and fancy fare.

This week: Super Bowl discounts on pizzas, pasta and party platters, among other deals.

1. Papa John’s

Sign up for the chain’s free rewards program by game time on Super Bowl Sunday, and get 25 points – enough for a free large, three-topping pizza – if the game goes into overtime. Points can be used through June 30. (EatDrinkDeals.com points out that the promo is a long shot: the Super Bowl has never gone into overtime.)

2. Souper Bowl

On Super Bowl Sunday, Mercy Meals and More in New Bedford, Mass., will host a $ 5 soup cook-off featuring local restaurants’ recipes to benefit an area soup kitchen. Diners can eat there or take the soup home.

3. Boston Market

Save $ 15 off your Super Bowl catering order of $ 75 or more with a print out coupon or web code. Good through Feb. 7.

4. Ellerbe Fine Foods

The Fort Worth, Texas, restaurant is offering a special three-course meal for $ 30 to customers who arrive between 5:30 and 6 p.m. on Feb. 5.

5. O’Charley’s

Good on Super Bowl Sunday (Feb. 6) only, use print out coupons to save $ 15 off any two party platters, or buy one, get one 50% off to-go entrées. Participating locations only.

6. King Kullen

The Hampton Bays, N.Y. restaurant is offering a Boar’s Head Super Party Hero for just $ 9.99 on game day.

7. Buca di Beppo

RestaurantCouponsandDeals.com spotted a Super Bowl Sunday print out coupon good for either $ 10 off a dine-in purchase of $ 20 or more, or 10% off ant to go order. Participating locations only. Good until Feb. 7.

8. Toscani Pizzeria

Buy a large sandwich at this Fort Wayne, Indiana, restaurant on game day and get a second for $ 5. Limit eight sandwiches per offer.

9. Smokey Bones

Save $ 10 on a purchase of $ 20 or more with a print out coupon. Participating locations only. Good through Feb. 5.

Frugal Foodie is a journalist based in New York City who spends her days writing about personal finance and obsessing about what she’ll have for dinner. Chat with her on Twitter through @MintFoodie.

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Dear Trent,

My husband and I are finally on the path to financial freedom. We have only a debt or two remaining and have built up an emergency fund. We would like to start investing. Please tell us how.

Signed,
Sally Saver

When I read this email, I know what they’re looking for. They have money beyond what they feel that they need in an emergency fund that’s just sitting in a savings account and they’d like to feel as though they’re doing something more useful or productive with that cash.

The thing is, they’re overlooking the fact that they’re already investing that money. Simply having cash in a savings account is an investment!

Investing simply means that you’re utilizing a resource that you own or control with the intent of having that resource provide additional gains to you (or to someone else). Loaning $ 20 to a friend who is very thankful and promises to pay you back is an investment. You’re utilizing a resource you own or control (the $ 20) with the intent of having that resource provide additional gains to you or someone else (helping a friend through a pinch and perhaps accruing some social capital for yourself).

Money in a savings account is also an investment – you’re putting cash (something you won or control) in there with the intent of earning interest and keeping that money safe.

Most investments offer some amount of liquidity (the ease of which you can get back the resources you invested), some amount of risk (the likelihood that you’ll lose some portion of the amount you invested), and some amount of return (the resources you hope to gain from the investment).

Money in a savings account is an investment that’s very liquid (meaning you can withdraw and deposit largely at your heart’s content), very low risk (it’s FDIC insured and doesn’t put any of your balance at risk), and earns a very low return.

Because of this, when I see someone saying that they already have savings but that they want to invest, I have to assume that they’re seeking some form of diversification. They want an additional type of investment that’s in some way different than the savings they already have.

Usually, that means an increase in return, which usually comes with an increase in risk or a reduction in liquidity. Because they already have some amount of money in a low-risk form with low returns (that savings account), they want to add something with more risk to the equation in hopes of getting a greater return.

Thus, my answer to Sally Saver, after encouraging her to figure out why she’s wanting to invest, usually pushes her towards stocks or other higher-risk and higher-reward investments. In most economic conditions, I would include a suggestion to prepay on her mortgage as well, since that is also an investment from the perspective of someone who has already signed on the dotted line.

(Right now, though, a mortgage prepayment means that you’re only getting a bit better return (4% versus 1% or so in a savings account) for much worse liquidity (you’re only getting that money back at the end of the mortgage during those months when your house is paid off early or via a home equity loan). Although that’s still a solid deal, that’s not what people are often looking for.)

So, what’s the take home message here?

The fundamental act of saving is the key to all investing. By simply choosing to spend less than you earn, you wind up with a surplus. The more you choose to spend less, the greater your surplus.

As soon as you have a surplus, you’re now investing. What’s next? Goals. What are you investing for? Without that, investing is aimless – there’s no reason to choose stocks over a savings account because risk and reward have no real meaning if you’re not investing with purpose. You can only choose rationally and usefully among investment types if you know why you’re investing, when you’ll need that investment to come to fruition, and whether you can tolerate risk.

For example, if you’re saving for a summer home in ten years and your life won’t be a disaster if you have to put it off for a year, you’re probably well advised to invest in something with high risk and high return, like stocks or real estate. On the other hand, if you need to invest for your car replacement in 2012 and you know you’ll need a certain amount as a bare minimum by then, a savings account is the way to go so that you’re not risking what you’ve already got.

I think the idea of a savings account being a “default” investment is a good one. If you don’t have a goal but you do have a surplus, put it in savings – it’s low risk and highly liquid. This way, when you do figure out your goal, you know you can rely on what you’ve been saving and you know you can easily access it and put it to whatever ends you decide.

The fundamental pieces of investing are spending less than you earn and setting goals. Everything else is secondary.

According to the report, Berrian stores “financial and account information and his Social Security number on the device” as well as access codes to his home, photos of his daughter, and “other personal photographs and video [of himself] and third parties not intended for public distribution.

While it’s quite possible that he was most concerned about those “other” photos and videos getting out into the public eye, let’s just focus on the financial information. I can only assume that he was storing this information in the clear because, if it was properly secured, there would have be no reason for concern.

At the risk of stating the obvious, you should never store this sort of information in an easily accessible format. Whether it’s on your computer or (especially) on a smartphone, there’s a reasonable chance that your data could fall into the wrong hands due to hacking, loss, or theft.

Protecting my data

While I store all kinds of sensitive info (account #s, login credentials, etc.) on both my laptop and my iPhone, I protect it with an encryption program called 1password, which automatically syncs across platforms using DropBox*, which is an onlne storage and synchronization service.

If I make a change in 1password on my computer, it automatically propagates to my iPhone, and vice versa. Either way, I’m able to manage and access this information whenever and wherever I need it without and security concerns.

What about you?

Do you have any tips for ensuring that your data is both easily accessible and secure?

*Note: If you sign up for DropBox through this link, you and I will both receive a small amount of bonus storage space – an extra 250MB on top of the 2GB that you get with a free account.

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» How to Protect Yourself Against Identity Theft
» Here We Go Again… More Financial Data Compromised
» FeedBurner Leaked my Sensitive Personal Information
» Online Financial Statements
» Got me a Safe Deposit Box
» Ten New Money Scams, Part 2
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Here’s a blast from the past. I think I was reading an article about how savings bonds stop earning interest after 30 years, and so I asked my mom if she bought any bonds when I was born. I don’t know why, I figured that’s just what people did back then. It turned out she did, and the earliest bonds happen to stop earning interest next month. She dug them out of storage, and sent me a scan of them:

She bought an EE savings bond with a face value of $ 100 for the purchase price of $ 50 in February of 1981. I was two years old. Using the savings bond calculator at TreasuryDirect, I found the current value to be $ 300.04. So over the last thirty years, the value went up 6x. This works out to an annualized return of about 6.1%.

According to TreasuryDirect.gov, for bonds issued before November 1982:

Bonds which have not reached final maturity are earning interest at either guaranteed or market-based rates; whichever produces the higher redemption value.

The guaranteed “original maturity period” was 9 years for this bond, which meant it was guaranteed to be worth the face value of $ 100 after 9 years. That works out to an 8.0% annual interest rate. If only we could get such a guaranteed return now, but the early 80s was a time of high inflation.

When the original maturity period ends, the bond enters a new 10-year maturity period where the government can reset the minimum rate. That’s why my bond is now earning only 4%. I can’t find the market rate for 1981, though. I could probably calculate it if I really wanted to, as it is defined as “85% of the average of 5-year Treasury marketable security yields”. The market rate in November 1982 was 13.05%!

If you have some old savings bonds, find them before they stop earning interest completely. In addition, the IRS supposedly requires you to report the interest as earned in the year of final maturity, even if you don’t redeem it. If you have a lost, stolen or destroyed savings bond, you will need to fill out Form PD F 1048. Also check out this Treausury Hunt page.

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Not quite as good as Amazon.com, but Groupon is offering a $ 20 gift certificate to Barnes & Noble for $ 10. Valid either in-store or online at BN.com. Valid on sale items. Expires 4/11, which means on that date the value goes down to $ 10.

You can usually get free shipping once you reach $ 25 total online as well.

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This routine takes about three minutes. Most nights, I estimate that my actions during that routine save me about three dollars or so, all told. That’s $ 60 take home per hour of effort if you want to think of it in terms of wages. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

What does that routine encompass?

I check each faucet and showerhead to make sure it’s not dripping. This involves sticking my head into each bathroom and listening for a second for the sound of dripping or running water. If I hear it, I turn off whatever is dripping.

A faucet that drips one drop of water per second will waste two gallons of water overnight. Not only that, the continual dripping of the water is a noise in the house that can easily disturb sleep. Yes, it’s not a huge savings, but with the minimal effort required, it’s well worth turning the tap off.

I flip all switches that have electrical devices wired to them. For example, all of our entertainment center (save the DVR) is set to a single switch. Flipping that switch means that none of the devices are eating standby power, which is an energy savings.

If I have six devices hooked up to a single switch and each device eats twenty watts in standby mode, I save about ten cents during the overnight period by flipping that switch. Wouldn’t you happily take a dime in exchange for flipping a switch as you exited a room, particularly if it were a dime that magically just appeared in your checking account?

I turn off all lights. Yep, this is an obvious one, but it’s a vital one. Lights left on but unused are nothing but a financial drain; flipping them off when you’re leaving the room (especially when you’re leaving the room for many hours) is well worth it.

Every sixty watt light bulb that you turn off for an eight hour overnight period saves you about five cents in energy costs. So, if I’m standing in the kitchen and I go back to the laundry room, where there happens to be four light bulbs, and make sure the light is turned off, the savings is about twenty cents for about ten seconds of effort. That’s about $ 72 per hour in after tax money.

I check the thermostat and adjust the temperature if needed. Yes, we now have a programmable thermostat, but this became such a part of my routine that I still do it in the evenings. I make sure that in the winter, the thermostat is quite low. In the summer, I usually turn it up and make sure that the air conditioning is turned off.

Remember, when an electric furnace kicks on, it’s using somewhere around 15 to 20 thousand watts in a typical American home. That means for every hour that a furnace is running, it eats between $ 1.50 and $ 2. If your furnace kicks on every fifteen minutes and runs for fifteen minutes on a cool night, it’s running for four hours during an overnight period. If you can lower the temperature, you’ll not only give your furnace a period of not running, you’ll also reduce the frequency with which it needs to run. Then, the next day, when it’s warmer outside and there’s less temperature differential, the furnace won’t have to run as much to bring your home back up to the temperature you want. My estimates were that by lowering the thermostat five degrees Fahrenheit on a cold night, we were saving about $ 2 for the night and it didn’t make a whole lot of difference to us as we were cuddled under warm blankets.

I shut down my PC. The only service that might be useful to have on overnight is Skype and, to be frank, I don’t want to receive business-related calls in the middle of the night.

Shutting down the PC is just a pure energy saver. I have everything in my office hooked up to a “master-slave” power strip, which means that when the PC shuts down, everything else loses power, too. No phantom energy to my printer, my monitor, my speakers or anything else like that. Over a typical overnight period, this saves about thirty cents in energy, according to my math.

Yes, it does mean that I have to wait for it to boot up the next time I want to use it. But, as before, it’s on a power supply with the master controlling everything else. I just hit the button to power on the PC, then go downstairs with the kids. Then, when my work routine starts, everything is ready to go.

All of this takes about three minutes as I’m going to bed. It saves about three dollars. This means, over the course of a month, my bedtime routine takes about an hour, all told, and it results in about $ 60 in post-tax savings.

If $ 60 post-tax isn’t worth wandering through your house a few times, you’re a far richer man than I am.

We've recently had two friends have their homes foreclosed on. One was due to a "mix up with paperwork" with the bank (I don't know the details other than the bank ended up with the house) and one was a simple foreclosure (as far as I know.) It's been pretty shocking because even though we don't know either couple closely, we do know them -- and they are the first we've known to be hit with home losses in this way.

There were 1 million foreclosures last year -- and it looks like the worst is yet to come. From WalletPop:

Popular sentiment seems to back up the latest news from Realty Trac, a company that tracks foreclosure activity, which yesterday announced that more than 5 million Americans are now two months or more behind on their mortgage payments, setting the stage for a record high foreclosure rate this year. One million homes were repossessed by mortgage lenders in 2010, but 2011 is already on track for a projected 1.2 million foreclosures. "2011 is going to be the peak," said Rick Sharga, Realty Trac Senior Vice President.

Ugh. Will there be more people that we know who face foreclosure? I'm guessing that there most likely will be.

How about you? Any of you know someone who has had their home taken from them? 

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It’s a fun game, isn’t it? Imagining you have won a million dollar windfall and trying to figure out what you would do with it. Or, a different scenario: you work your butt off for 40 years, saving and investing wisely, and eventually get to a net worth of a million dollars. Phew. Now what?

A Million Dollars Isn’t That Much!

I think we’re all very aware that a million dollars isn’t what it used to be. In either scenario, whether you have worked and accumulated a million dollars, or whether you’ve received a windfall, you absolutely cannot go crazy and start spending uncontrollably. Let’s take a look at what you CAN do with a million dollars.

Invest for Income

This applies to the second scenario – the one where your net worth, after years of hard work, is a million dollars. Assuming your investment mix can generate an annual taxable income of 8%, a million dollars can generate an admittedly nice income of $ 80,000 per year – for many this is all it takes to comfortably retire, and for those of us living in more expensive areas, in major cities along the US coast, it would still be a major boost to whatever other retirement income we might have.

Spend Wisely

If you get a million dollar windfall at some earlier point in your life, when you still have many working years ahead of you, I would advise against viewing this as your ticket out of the workforce. As we saw above, this kind of money generates a nice income – but not necessarily enough to retire on, especially if you’re young and still need to raise kids. In addition, if you start using all the income that your nest egg generates at an early age rather than reinvest, your money will be gradually eroded by inflation.

What Would I Do?

The things on my own list if I ever received a sudden windfall include non-exciting items such as paying off any credit card debt, student loans and home mortgage. I would also reserve a small percentage (anywhere from 1%-5% or up to $ 50,000) for helping close family members such as parents and siblings with repaying their own debts and give another 1%-5%  to charity.

No Splurging At All? You’re So Boring

I actually do not rule out splurging a little. It’s normal to want to splurge when you receive an unexpected, large sum of money. I guess in my case I would allocate 1%-5% for splurging – this could go towards buying a new car, renovating the house or buying new furniture or art. Whatever floats your boat, by all means splurge a little on it, but do limit that splurge. It’s very easy to waste away a million dollars.

And the Rest?

So I repaid debt, gave some to family and some to charity, even splurged a little. Let’s assume I was left with half a million dollars. Now what? Now I invest, and I treat this as any other investment, creating a mix of stocks, bonds, cash, commodities and REITs – Whatever asset allocation I’m generally comfortable with. Now I sit back, watch the money grow, rebalance once a year and resist the urge to do anything else with that money, except for enjoying the extra security I now have.

What would YOU do with a million bucks?

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Related Articles at Personal Finance Blog by Money Ning:

• Poll – Would You Spend All Your Money If You Won 1 Million Dollars Today?
• I will spend a million dollars on gas
• What If You Won the Lottery? – Money Mailbox
• The Latte Factor and Becoming a Millionaire
• List of Companies Planning to Participate in the US’s Government TARP

There’s also a link from the ad itself (go ahead and click it if you wish) which appears to automatically apply the discount when you click through. I’m not sure what happens if you pay with something other than Amex after clicking that link, but it’s worth a shot.

The discounts are as follows:

• Free Edition: Free for 1040EZ (as always)
• Deluxe: $ 29.95 –> $ 14.95
• Premier: $ 49.95 –> $ 32.45
• Home & Business: $ 74.95 –> $ 48.70

This offer is good through October 15, 2011, which is the deadline for filing returns with a filing extension. Happy filing!

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