payment plans

I'm old enough to remember when credit wasn't so easy to get. The only child of a single mother in the 1960s-1970s, things like credit cards or even apartment leases, were hard won in our experience. So when my mother qualified for a Sears' credit card, it was a pretty big day. At the time it was...

One of my good friends likens doing her taxes to playing the slot machines. She puts her financial information into her tax software, presses "Calculate" and hopes for the best. Sometimes she gets a refund; sometimes she owes. Despite my best efforts to get her to do some tax planning, she seems...