One thing that I noticed early on when I was a young adult was that my parents were not very good at managing their money.  It really came down to my father’s need to keep up with the Joneses and irrespective of of the cost, he would buy every toy that his neighbors and friends had.

The result of this overspending put my parents deeply in debt.  I tried to explain to them how to reduce credit card debt by following debt diet plans, but they wouldn’t listen.  Part of that problem was due to the fact that my father believed that he was always right and could never be wrong.

Five years later, things took a turn for the worse.  My father’s overspending had exhausted all of their savings and they were having difficulties making the minimum payments on their credit cards.  At this point, I told him that they need to go see a poor credit debt consolidation counselor before they lost everything that they owned.

They still haven’t quite recovered from my father’s overspending, but at least they are slowly digging themselves out of the hole.

Since I’m considering setting up what is considered to be a high risk business on line, I’m researching my options for payment processors. Many US merchant account providers for credit card processing won’t work with high risk businesses such as entertainment and some travel businesses.

So, this leads me to look at offshore merchant accounts which often will work with high risk businesses without any hassles. However, the problem I’m finding is being able to determine which provider is legitimate. I’ve read about account providers who hold your money, don’t pay out or close business without sending the funds that are due.

Many of the high risk off shore merchant accounts are probably very reliable and professional, but I’d rather  not lose any money to a crooked account processor if I don’t have to. It is one thing to lose money to customers who aren’t honest, but not to be able to trust your business partners is a really worrisome thing.

From my experience, there is nothing worse than getting behind on your bills.  Sure, one month happens once in awhile, but when you get a number of months behind, you might find yourself in a real pickle.

Now, that is exactly what happened to me.  You see, I became really sick and ended up missing six weeks of work while I was in the hospital.  Unfortunately for me, the company that I work for does not have any type of compensation for hospital stays, so the loss of income was a big blow for me.

To make things worse, I was not at home to contact the companies that were looking to be paid, and before I knew it, I found myself in collections.

There was going to be no way for me to catch up on the bills, so I looked into bill consolidation loans as my way out of my problem.  Now, I am just about caught up, and I have learned that I should keep some savings around in case something like this happens again.

Now, I don’t think that a death in the family is something to celebrate, but I found myself in that situation.  You see, my great aunt passed away one week ago, and it turns out that she left me a bit of money in the will.  We had always been very close, so I will miss her, but I also think that it is even more important to do something productive with the money that she left me.

On one hand, if I were to reduce debt for myself, it would be a blessing.  Not only would it ease my financial burden, but it should leave me with some extra money each month to either spend or reduce my debts further.

But the other option available to me would be to use the money to start property investing.  In fact, there would be enough money that I could own multiple properties at the beginning and benefit from the extra monthly income.

I guess I will just have to weigh the pros and cons, and make my decision from there.

I personally feel if they don’t learn something new each and every day that my day has been wasted.  So today for me was a really good day as I learn something new about credit cards.

You see, I’ve always believed that you apply for a credit card and then you would have to wait a number of weeks before you found out whether or not you were approved.  To me, that seemed like a very frustrating way to be treated as in most cases you would be interested in using the card at the moment you apply.

While reading some reviews at a credit card reviews website, I was surprised to find out that there were a number of companies that offered instant approval credit cards.  Basically, you’d fill out your information, submit it, and find out right away whether or not your application is approved.

I hadn’t realized that things have gotten better in this respect since I applied for my credit cards many years ago.  It was definitely something interesting for me to learn today.

I once had a job where I would travel to different university and college campuses with student credit card applications, trying to promote the company and get students to sign up. It was a fun job, and since I never had the opportunity to go to college, it gave me a little taste of what campus life was like.

I had always thought that credit cards for students was a great idea because there would never be another time in their lives when they would be as broke as they were at that moment. It would give them a short term fix, but could cause a long term problem and that concerned me a little bit. But it was my job to promote, so promote I would.

I was actually really good at that job and I handed out a lot of college student credit cards. I was at the top of my team for quite awhile and I earned some great rewards. Perhaps the greatest reward of that job was the experience of fitting in with college students and pretending, if only for awhile, that I was young and carefree like they were.

I am the owner of more than twenty credit cards. I am not exactly sure how it happened, and most of them do not have a balance owing on them, but I have them, nonetheless. I guess I just never paid too much attention to how many I was receiving in the mail until my wallet started bulging. The ones I use most often are the gas credit cards and the rest pretty much just sit there.

I remember when I got my first gas credit card. It was my first credit card, period and I did not even have a car. I guess it was just exciting for me to get a credit card at all, that I did not even pay attention to the fact that, without a car, I could not use the card.

I quit signing up for gas cards after that, until I actually owned a car. Now, that is pretty much all I use. I never charge anything, except for gas. The reason I charge gas is because I can just pay at the pump then and not have to waste my time going inside.

I can remember as a child going to the bank with my mother.  We went down twice per month to pay the bills and deposit the paychecks.  This was a fun time for me as I was interested at an early age in money, and as I grew older I wanted to learn all I could about it.

As a child, I was able to go with my mother when she applied for a home refinance loan the year our home increased in value.  We used the money to pave our driveway (originally it was gravel) and buy some new furniture in our house.  From this experience, I learned that you could take money out of your home without selling it - which is something I used later on in my investing career.

There were a couple of years that our family struggled financially when my father lost his business.  I can remember my parents fighting about money and all the phone calls from the creditors.  Eventually, a good friend of my father helped them to get a debt consolidation loan which ended up bailing us out of a precarious financial position.

I can even remember my father purchasing his first income property.  He was approved at the bank for the mortgage he needed, but he needed to come up with the down payment.  He was able to get the money he needed from a payday loans company and he has never looked back.  Their money situation is much better now, and they just purchased their twelfth rental property.

Chances are you will make many choices when it comes to your finances throughout your life.  Whether you are trying to get out of debt, or using debt constructively there will be a financial product that meets your needs.  Just talk to a professional and they can help you out.

About two years ago, I was in some serious financial trouble.  You see, I needed some surgery at the time, and I didn’t really have the money.  So what I did was use all my credit cards and my line of credit to pay for it - it was either get the surgery or die.

After my recovery and when I returned home, I was in for a nasty surprise.  I had a big stack of bills and a pile of collection notices - and not enough money to pay them all.  I was so worried that I would have to go bankrupt - and I was embarrassed that I might have to.

It is funny how things happen when you need them to.  On the day that I was trying to find anything that I could do besides going bankrupt, an ad jumped out at me from the newspaper.  Really it was the headline that got me "Credit and Bill Consolidation Help" - I had to call.

It ends up that the company offered credit card negotiation services and helped me reduce my credit card debt in half.  Through their debt negotiation program I was able to reduce my fifteen payment into one and begin the road to recovery.

I am happy to report that it has worked.  I am only one more payment away from being debt free.  Now, I know my credit score isn’t so good, but at least I made an effort to pay off my debts.  I can’t wait until the last payment is done - it is going to be such a relief.

We recently decided to open a new shop - actually a coffee shop.  Now, I have had experience running a coffee shop, so I really wasn’t worried about figuring the operations of the business out.  What I was unsure about was the best way to equip our business - whether I should buy or lease the equipment.

I went to talk to a loan officer at the bank about equipment financing and whether or not it was a good idea.  He showed me the loans that they offered and the rates seemed reasonable.  He stressed that ownership was the better way, because leasing would just be like I was renting the equipment, and then the company would not have any assets.  After our meeting I thanked him for his time and told him I would think about it.

Later on that day, I went to a commercial leasing company to talk to one of their representatives about leasing.  Since I didn’t know a whole lot about it, I asked them to explain why equipment leasing would be good for my business.  I found out that there were tax advantages to leasing as well as all the maintenance was covered by the leasing company - that way I would know exactly what my expenses were each month.  They also stressed that a lease in no way would impair my ability to function as a business - it would not affect the amount of credit available to the company, so my line of credit would be there should I need it.

Thinking about my options when I returned to the office, it sure seemed that a lease would be a better way to equip the business.  The tax advantages intrigued me a lot - I think I will talk to my accountant and get their impartial perspective on my situation - and make my decision from there.