One of the most expensive financial decisions many of us make is having a wedding.

While my wedding was pretty modest (coming in at right around $3,000), the average cost of a wedding as of this writing is a little more than $28,000!

Who has $28,000 to spend on a wedding — especially if you have student debt and you are hoping to save up for a house?

One way to pay for your wedding is to obtain sponsorships to help you take care of the costs. This is the approach Donnie Gallagher and his fiancee Jennifer are taking. They hope to raise $25,000 in services and and cash to pay for their dream wedding on February 14, 2014 (yes, that’s Valentine’s Day). If they manage to raise more than $25,000, everything extra will be donated to charity.

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Every few months, I receive coupons for baby formula in my mailbox — despite the fact that my only child is now 10 years old. I also receive the random copy of America Baby. And, until recently, I had no idea why Family Circle started showing up at my house monthly.

Now, though, after reading stories on CNN Money and NBC News, I suspect that these are attempts at marketing based on my ZIP code.

You probably already know that information in your credit report is used to market items to you. Credit card issuers, personal lenders, and insurance companies all use information garnered from your credit report to send you marketing mail. But your ZIP code can also provide information to marketers that use “big data” to get information about you and your habits.

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One of the most frustrating things in life is being unemployed. This is especially true if you want to work, but you are unable to find a job. Even though the unemployment rate is falling, many people still find it difficult to land a job.

Many states administer unemployment benefits to help support those who can’t find work. If you don’t have a job, it might be worth it to see if you qualify for unemployment benefits.

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One of the great things about technology is that you have the opportunity to make money in new and different ways. You can even find work at home jobs that pay reasonably well. At the very least, you can start a home business as a freelancer, or doing some other type of work.

Since the dream of working from home is so strong, you need to watch out for scams. Whenever something seems very attractive to a wide swath of the population, there are scammers out there trying to take advantage. If you’re not careful, you might find that the dream job advertised online at places like Craig’s List is actually scam. Here are 5 signs your dream job is probably a scam:

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There is a battle raging right now about the usefulness of a graduate degree, or even of any college degree at all. Joining the fray right now is the online degree space.

A number of colleges and universities offer online degree programs, and there are online schools completely in the Internet education space. My husband teaches online classes for Utah State University, and one of them is a graduate-level course mostly aimed at teachers working on their master’s degrees.

While my husband’s students find it useful to continue their educations online, since the master’s degree will come with a pay increase, not everyone is in the same boat.

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I’m not a big fan of moving. Every year for the first six years of my marriage, I moved. We moved across the country twice, and we moved houses in town. It was not pleasant. However, we’ve been in our current home for almost six years, and mu husband is applying for university jobs.

This means we might be moving. Even though we’ve tried not to get weighed down with too much stuff, the reality is that we’ve got more stuff now than we had when we schlepped it to Syracuse, New York for grad school.

So, I’m digging deep, and trying to remember the things we did to save money during our several moves earlier during marriage. Here are 4 of the frugal ways I came up with to move:

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With the Federal Reserve engaged in an asset purchase program designed to increase the money supply in an effort to stimulate the economy, many are starting to worry about inflation.

Inflation represents a decline in the purchasing power of your dollar. Essentially, it is a rise in prices. However, not only are many consumers starting to worry about protecting themselves against inflation, but they are also concerned about hyperinflation.

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One of the more controversial (at least in financial circles) items to come out of the budget recently proposed by the Obama Administration is a cap on retirement accounts.

The idea is to cap retirement accounts, preventing further contributions to tax-advantaged accounts. The reasoning is that, at a certain level, enough is saved up for a “reasonable” retirement and there is no more need for the tax advantage.

Presumably, instead of contributing to tax-deferred accounts, those who reached the cap would no longer be able to take advantage of the savings, and pay taxes on that income, instead of getting a tax deduction. (Of course, there are issues surrounding the fact that, eventually, taxes would have been collected on the money if it were withdrawn from a tax-deferred account down the road.)

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