A friend whose daughter is turning 13 asked me what I, as a banker, would recommend he and his wife could do to make sure she had solid “money/finance” confidence before she legally becomes an adult at 18. It’s a great question. Community bankers helping customers (of all ages!) work their way out of a […]
All the pre-holiday heavy emphasis on buying-buying-buying got me thinking about a gift people can give themselves and their families — something precious, rare, and very, very valuable. Being debt-free. Does that mean being some sort of Grinch and not buying any gifts? Does that mean never using credit cards again and always paying cash? […]
Right now, we are seeing one of the country’s largest banks in the news on a regular basis for all the wrong reasons: government investigations; a disastrously failed acquisition; higher and higher fees; foreclosure litigation; branches possibly closing; monster layoffs. Does this mean that the bank is in trouble? Absolutely not! What does it all […]
A woman from Canton came in looking for advice. She’d bought a condo in 2008 and was living there happily, but seeing the deals that her friends were getting on nicer properties, she wanted to trade up. She could easily afford the mortgage on the properties she liked. All she had to do was sell […]
Although the real estate market here in eastern Massachusetts has generally held up better than in other parts of the country, there are still plenty of people who are struggling with mortgages and many who are underwater on their loans — meaning they owe more than they could currently hope to sell their home for. […]
Media reports tend to highlight the tragic reasons why people run through their life savings, usually involving a catastrophic accident or other sadly life-changing event. Bankers know that those cases are extremely rare. Most of the people we see who have money trouble actually have a much more common problem. Specifically, they spend too much. […]
How come everyone else can refinance … and you can’t? If you read the news reports or listen to ads, you might think that every homeowner in the entire United States has recently refinanced into a mortgage rate so low that it practically amounts to a complete giveaway. That idea is making a lot of […]
A customer was buying a new car, and she could either take a zero percent loan from the dealer for 72 months or get a $9,000 rebate on the purchase price. She didn’t know how to make up her mind as to which would be the better deal for her, and actually called her bank […]
A married couple came to see me at the bank. They were deeply concerned about the wife’s father, a beloved and very proud gentleman who was spending about $2,500 a month responding to direct mail requests from charities both well-known and completely obscure. He could afford the donations and seemed to enjoy making them. But […]
