Tomorrow is July 4th. Independence Day. A day most often spent outdoors, with friends, playing games and having an old fashioned cookout.

My wife and I will be spending the day at our friend’s house, playing games and having an old fashioned cookout; then going up to their rooftop deck to watch the fireworks in the Baltimore harbor. Hopefully the weather holds up! My wife is a huge fan of fireworks so we’re hoping that they make them especially good this year.

I’m curious, what are your plans for this weekend?

(Photo: shan1013)

One of the first things you will hear from anyone who is helping you with your finances is about budgeting. A budget is usually the difference between someone who has their finances under control and someone who doesn’t. The problem is that budgeting is often on the to-do list right up there with “going to the dentist” and “cleaning the toilet.” You know you should do those things but really don’t want to.

If you are like me and hate budgeting, I’ve got a stupid-proof easy way to do your budget. After getting setup, it requires about 10 minutes or less per week to maintain and will help you develop a fully functional budget.

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Over two years ago, one of the first Devil’s Advocate posts I wrote was that you shouldn’t adjust with your payroll deductions. Back then, as it is now, conventional personal finance advice told you to adjust your withholding so that you don’t have too much tax withheld from your paycheck.

How do you adjust your withholdings? You adjust your withholding by submitting a W-4 to your company’s HR or payroll department with an updated number of exemptions. To determine how many exemptions you should put down, I would use the IRS Withholding Calculator because recent laws have made numerous “rules of thumb” obsolete.

Now that you know how, let’s talk about why!

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I had the great pleasure of going to traffic court this morning. Yay!

I was there to contest a ticket I received for making an improper left turn through a red light. The ticket was for $90 and I’m unsure how many points it would’ve been, but an improper turn costs 1 point and failure to stop at a red is 2 points. Do I get both? Or just the worse of the two? I wasn’t sure but I knew points usually meant my insurance would go up and I wanted to avoid that at all costs.

You just lost your job; now what?

The instinctive path is to hit the newspapers and job boards, flooding resumes out to potential employers who might give you a chance. You might follow that activity by contacting recruiting firms to enlist them in your search. If this describes you here is some friendly advice—slow down!

We’re in a recession, a very nasty one by all accounts, and as much as you need a job, it’s important to recognize that you’ve joined a hunt that’s being undertaken by millions of others. This means competition, far more than we’ve seen in the past, and you’ll need to begin thinking long term. If you’ve been out of work for a while, you already know this.

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Have you ever been curious what the average credit score is?

We know that the FICO credit score range goes from 300 to 850 with a good credit score being up above 750, but what is the average credit score? Fair Isaac shares a chart that indicates the average FICO credit score is around 700, but we don’t know when chart the was updated (see the chart here).

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Ally Bank was the first online bank to offer a no-penalty certificate of deposit and now it appears that the idea is catching on. Discover Bank will announce tomorrow that they are making their 12 month CD a no-penalty CD, where you can withdraw your funds should you involuntarily lose your job. All new and renewing account holders will get this benefit (existing account holders won’t, I assume because neither party can change the terms before maturity).

What is a No-Penalty CD? If you read my Certificate of Deposit Zoo post last week, then you’ll know that no-penalty CDs are ones where you can withdraw your deposit before the CD’s maturity date without any interest penalty. Normally a CD will charge you 3-6 months worth of interest to close it early, no-penalty CDs let you close your account.

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As you may have read in my review of The Options Playbook, I’ve started to get interested in trading stock options. As has been the case with everything I try, I do a lot of research first and then I dive right in. As my dad always said, you learn in the classroom or you learn on the street. Learning on the street is always more expensive. I prefer the classroom.

In my limited knowledge of options, it appears that there are two main discriminators: price and tools. For price, it’s a matter of comparing the cost per trade and per contract. For tools, it’s having the ability to quickly make complicated trades without having to jump through too many hoops. In my review of the Options Playbook, I talk about two types of “plays.” The more complicated plays involve several “legs,” or options trades, that hedge each other and the better options brokers let you setup those plays with one screen. In fact, most brokers make that transaction easy because it results in more trades, which means more profit, so it’s almost not even worth comparing brokers based on that (remember, I’m a total novice in this so I may be wrong).

So, it may just come down to price.

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Have you seen all the Toyota Prius commercials lately? The ones with the people dressed up as foliage and climbing on top of one another? It was to highlight how “green” the vehicles are and announce that Prius was launching another generation of the hugely popular hybrid-electric. At first, my wife didn’t even realize they were people and I, to this day, think it’s just a little bit creepy.

However, despite the creepiness of the ads and the whole slew of new hybrid-electric cars, I still would love to have a Prius (or a Tesla!). The only problem I have is that it’s not a financially sound decision. It’s an emotional one (which is fine too!).

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I can’t believe I’ve been using Credit Karma all these months and never wrote up a quick review of the service! I’ve written reviews about their credit score report card, but never about the entire service. Tsk tsk, what a bad blogger I am.

Credit Karma offers a lot of nice juicy information but the only thing I’m really pumped about is the fact that you get your TransUnion credit score absolutely free. When you sign up, you have to provide a lot of sensitive personal information because it’s needed to pull your credit score from TransUnion. Since the service is free, the only barrier to using it is your comfort level with providing this information to a third party.

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