How to keep the house clean with a long-haired cat.
I know someone who’s grandma apparently VACUUMS her cats - with the attachment - to keep them from shedding.
As appealing as this may sound, my cat is having none of it. (We actually tried it, for the sake of science.) Here are a few things that have worked for me…
How to refinance a HELOC without involving the bank.
OK, so the obvious answer here is to pay off the balance. Not all of us have $20,000 or so just sitting around to do that with, however. When I refinanced my house a few years ago, I put 80% on a fixed rate mortgage, and the remaining $20,000 on a Home Equity Line of Credit. I didn’t realize that the rate was adjustable until I was at the closing (thank you to the mortgage broker for giving me all of the facts). But at the time, the rate was only 4%, I was paying interest-only for the first 5 years, and my payments were pretty low.
Adjustable rates will adjust, though, and adjust they did. Within less than a year, my 4% had gone up to 10%, and my payments had doubled, and I wasn’t even touching the principle. I looked into doing another refinance, but it hardly seemed worth it, to pay for several thousand dollars worth of closing costs all over again. I could refinance just the HELOC to a fixed Home Equity loan, but the rates weren’t significantly better than what I was paying on my HELOC.
Then, one day, when I was about to shred some balance transfer checks from one of my many credit cards, I had an idea. And I turned off the shredder.
How to get an 800 credit score.
I didn’t think it existed. Well, ok, I thought that if you were 80 years old or so, had no debt, and owned several mansions, perhaps you could have a credit score of 800. I felt pretty good about my score of 764 — until I found out that my friend Brian, age 32 HAS A CREDIT SCORE OF 800. Seriously? Seriously.
How did he do it?
It’s pretty simple, really. It didn’t involve any sort of complicated “piggybacking” strategies, or transferring balances from one card to another one with a higher credit limit. Here’s what he did..
How to become rich?
If you walk around acting like you’re worth a million bucks, will it get you ahead in life?
According to Steve Pavlina and his very popular blog, part of becoming wealthy is in your mindset. And he takes this quite literally — walking around with $400 in your wallet or purse will make you feel like you have plenty of money. If you feel like you have plenty of money, you probably won’t be making a big deal out of things that don’t really matter much anyway — like not ordering the most expensive thing on the menu at lunch to save a whopping $2. That $2 won’t matter much whether you’re rich or poor, so you might as well just order what you really wanted to eat.
