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- Money Smart Week: A Chance to Keep Up with Changing Realities
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- How will the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 affect you? Inflation Adjustments, IRAs, 529 Plans, ABLE Accounts, Student Loans, & Estate Tax
- Pay Down Debt or Invest My Money?
- Tax Rates: How Will the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 Affect You, Part 2
- Utilizing the Library to Keep Costs Down
- Singing the Credit Card Blues
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Wednesday, April 11, 2018
Money Smart Week: A Chance to Keep Up with Changing Realities
After over 20 years of teaching personal financial management, I am still looking for more ways to empower people to use money to reach their goals and dreams. As our economy, societal practices, and laws change, our approaches to financial management education need to change too . In the past few weeks, our Extension office presented "Welcome to the Real World," a finan...
Thursday, March 29, 2018
Mind Your Money
Greetings! I am so thrilled to contribute to the Plan Well Retire Well blog. My name is Camaya Wallace Bechard and I am the new Consumer Economics Educator for Livingston, McLean, and Woodford counties. I love learning about new research and approaches to improve and maintain our well-being. Recently, I read an article about using...
Friday, March 23, 2018
How will the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 affect you? Inflation Adjustments, IRAs, 529 Plans, ABLE Accounts, Student Loans, & Estate Tax
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 affected so many different parts of the tax code that it's taken us three posts to cover them (see Part 1 – a line by line comparison for 1040 and Schedule A , and Part 2 – Tax Rates ). But that's OK because these rules don't affect the taxes you're filing now for 2017. They went into e...
Monday, March 12, 2018
Pay Down Debt or Invest My Money?
Should I pay extra on my student loan or invest in a Roth IRA? Build up an emergency savings fund or pay off my credit card debt? Pay off my mortgage or put more money in my 401(k) retirement plan? In one form or another, the trending question lately has been, "Is it better to pay down debt or build up savings and investments?" Like many real-life questions, the answer is not black and...
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Tax Rates: How Will the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 Affect You, Part 2
How much income tax you owe is depends on two things: 1) how much taxable income you have and 2) the tax rate applied to that income. Taxes = Taxable Income x Tax Rate Last month , I showed you how the new tax law will impact the calculation of your taxable income, as a result of numerous changes to deductions, ex...
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Utilizing the Library to Keep Costs Down
For many people it may be obvious that by using your local library, you would save money, but many people don't even utilize their library! According to a 2016 Study on Libraries by the Pew Research Center , "just under half of all those age 16 and older (48 percent) say they have visited a public library…in person...
Monday, February 5, 2018
Singing the Credit Card Blues
Now is when the holiday bills arrive and our budgets feel stretched! It's easy to feel overwhelmed by debt payments and end up avoiding them. But when you don't take control of your debt payments, the interest charges pile up – and grow and grow! Let's consider strategies to help take control of credit card bills. First, get organized. Make a list of each credit card or...
