How To Defend Against 7 Sneaky Sales Tactics

Today we have a guest post from the Car Negotiation Coach who takes a break from discussing car negotiation strategies and reveals how to combat common sales ploys.   Whether you’re buying a car,  jewelry, mattresses, or a big screen TV, you’ll most certainly be going head to head with a professional salesman.  Unfortunately for you, these folks practice selling every day.  In order to get...

Seven Financial New Year’s Resolutions for 2010

Hello everyone.  I am away travelling on some very important business for a couple days and thought this would be a perfect opportunity to share a guest post from the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE). While I tend to spend less time with basic financial concepts, (which is a real sweet spot for NEFE), I am a firm believer in Financial Education and want to share their message with...

Social Experiments

The idea of social experiments is something I find interesting.  That we can engineer a setting and personal interactions to drive a particular result from others or even ourselves is compelling and a tool we should consider leveraging in our daily experiences. I once read about a grad student studying psychology who decided to conduct her own social experiment on a tenant in an apartment unit she...

Black Friday, Yours or Theirs?

The Friday after Thanksgiving has long been called the single largest shopping day of the year.  It is a perfect storm of availability, as many American’s enjoy the day away from work, and transition into the Christmas season. Retailers have hyped us into believing that today is itself a shopping holiday.  Early morning door busting openings and sales that once started at 7 or 8am are now launching...

Crap On A Bun Is Still A Bad Sandwich

  A couple months ago I wrote an article asking if your money likes you.  In a transitive way, I was really asking if you like your money.  Of course you may think that you like your money, but your actions are often the final arbiter. I’ll let you have the morsel for free, because today I want to spend some time talking about a group that I know who does love your money – Retailers. Of course...

You Are What Your Record Says You Are

The title is a quote from Super Bowl winning coach Bill Parcells. The idea is that a team is as good or as bad as its record indicate.  Fans, commentators, and even players like to interpret – or rationalize – circumstances and game events so as to suggest that a team is better, or sometimes worse, than its record might suggest.  A lucky bounce here or a bad call there and those close losses...

Consumptive Footprint

I remember a day in the late 90’s.  More precisely, I remember a particular episode of self talk back in the summer of 1998.  At the time I was living in St. Louis and was only a couple short years out of grad school.  I don’t know exactly what prompted this specific contemplation but it was about money.  It was often about money in those days.  I was learning about money but in a...