Personal Finance, Tips | featured news

No one likes paying legal fees, but tax deductions can make them a lot less painful. With a 40% tax rate, $10,000 in deductible legal fees costs you only $6,000. But if your legal fees are to get divorced or because a family member sues you for slander, the legal fees are purely personal and non-deductible. See How To Make Divorce Less Taxing. Distinguish purely personal expenses from investment expenses.

My husband and I recently refinanced our mortgage, and the bank sent us our credit scores during the process. Both scores were good, but my husband’s was 30 points higher than mine. This puzzled me, because we share the same spending and bill-payment practices.

It’s easy to gripe about the rich manipulating the rules to lower their tax rates, but sometimes it’s better to simply borrow a few pages from their playbook. Although finagling a low tax rate on income — as Warren Buffett talks freely about — is difficult for regular salaried workers, there’s another area where modest taxpayers have something to learn from the wealthy: minimizing estate taxes.

Follows are nine tips that parents might want to keep in mind while toasting champagne glasses preparing for back to school.

Today's seniors can't just stay in today's low-return fixed-income products because rates on money market accounts and CDs won't even keep up with inflation. But there are options.

TODAY Money experts David Bach, Jean Chatzky, Carmen Wong-Ulrich and Allison Linn offer strategies, some from personal experience, on how to reduce tension over money in your life and avoid fighting over finances.

Cash advances are one of the sneakiest ways a bank can trap you into a cycle of debt. But there are a handful of other debt traps you should avoid at all costs. "You may think you can get in and get out, but it's financial quicksand. ...