Financial and Lifestyle Resources for Vermont

If you’re like me, you love to give gifts during the holiday season. Nothing quite compares to the joy on a loved one’s face as they open a surprise present. Unfortunately giving gifts is not cheap, and it can be easy to lose track of your budget and slip into debt. If you’ve found yourself in this situation, here are some things you shouldn’t do when trying to eliminate holiday debt.

Winter in Vermont can be difficult even for the toughest of Vermonters. It’s dark, cold, and often isolating, which is probably why seasonal affective disorder (a type of depression) hits between nine and ten percent of Vermonters each year. Depression doesn’t just make you feel crummy. It can affect your financial health. And those effects can stretch well into the future.

Are you one of the 92 million Americans likely making a financial New Year’s resolution for 2022? There are many financial resolutions that you can make, depending on your situation. But making them is easy; it’s keeping them that is hard. Don’t give up already, though. There are a few universal ways to make this year different (really!). No matter what your financial goals are, here are six tips for following through in 2022.

Is your credit score stopping you from being approved for a vehicle loan, mortgage, or credit card? Are you wondering what mistakes you may be making that are damaging your credit? Have you moved this question to the bottom of your to-do list because it is simply too stressful? If you have answered yes to any of these questions, you are not alone. Millions of people struggle with building or fixing their credit. Using a credit card correctly is essential to increase your credit score and stay out of debt. By avoiding the following mistakes, you can maintain your credit and save money in the long run.

Do you feel like your finances are a mess? What exactly qualifies your finances as a ‘mess,’ anyway? There are lots of rules of thumb and general advice out there—you should have two months’ worth of wages saved as an emergency fund, you should have three times your salary saved for retirement by age 40, and the like. What if you don’t; are your finances a mess? If you’re like most Americans, that may be the case. The truth is that about 63% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and 30% of Americans struggle to come up with $400 to pay for an emergency expense. Regardless of your personal circumstances, here are five steps to consider taking to improve your financial situation.

Prior to entering the adult world, personal finance was not a topic I had learned much about. More recently, it has become a topic of conversation among family and friends out of both necessity and curiosity. I get the sense that there are a lot of people out there, like me, who would love to learn more about how the world of finance works, and more specifically the implications for their own personal finances. There is a myriad of options for your listening pleasure out there, some that tackle the financial world in broad strokes and others focused on personal finance. Here are a few of my favorites.

April is Financial Literacy Month, and I’m taking the concept very literally with some finance book recommendations. There are many books on finance out there, of course, but here are a few of the best books about personal finance, money management, and our financial system that I’ve read.

People have been lending for thousands of years, even before money. The grain banks of ancient Egypt bought and sold commodities based on their value in grain. It feels natural for the concept of a “loan,” something that is so integral to modern everyday life, to be almost as old as civilization itself. Surprisingly, some aspects of lending that we take for granted today are relatively new. Although lending itself has been around longer than written history, the first credit bureaus were created less than 300 years ago, and credit scores are only about 30 years old.