One side effect of the Great Recession is the return of the layaway. A layaway is a low-cost finance method for a customer to make a purchase in installments prior to buying the item. For example, a customer who is eying a $100 jacket might not have enough money to buy it at once, but under a layaway plan, she can put away $20 a week for 5 weeks until the jacket is paid in full. Usually there is also a fee associated with the program to compensate the store for putting the item on hold until the customer makes the final payment.

'Tis the season for those of us whose children tromp off to school two or three or five times a week to start thinking about the dreaded holiday teacher gifts. Why dreaded? Do we not appreciate our teachers? I know I can't speak for every parent, but I feel pretty confident speaking for most of us when I say it's really, really difficult to come up just the right teacher gift.

Amazon's new PayPhrase technology promises to speed up the buying process on Amazon. But it isn't only for Amazon. It also works for Amazon partner sites DKNY, Jockey, Patagonia, Buy.com, and J&R Electronics. I already had One-Click buying enabled on Amazon, and using PayPhrase on Amazon isn't much different. Instead of buying with the One-Click button, you buy with the PayPhrase button, and then enter a PIN to go with the PayPhrase.

According to a recent article in the Washington Post, Single living is the wave of the present. To put that in perspective, census data shows that in Alexandria, Va (my current city) and Washington, DC (the nearby city I'd like to move to), half of all households are made up of just one person. HALF.

Credit card use can inspire many passionate opinions. There are followers of the Dave Ramsey camp, who aspire to a lifestyle free of any credit card use. Other people see credit cards as one of the tools in their financial toolbox - a short-term liquidity instrument or a convenient method of payment.

Halloween is just around the corner. This year, October 31st falls on a Saturday, so there are sure to be even more events to celebrate this spooky holiday. Dressing up is probably the most fun part of the Halloween for me (even though I love candy, I’ve bypassed the trick-or-treating age range by a decade).

California First Lady Maria Shriver says we're now living in a Woman's Nation -- women make up half the work force, the majority of mothers are the main breadwinners or co-breadwinners of their families and women are in charge of 80% of the high ticket item household spending. That, says Shriver, is some power we need to grab by the horns!

E-books, man. They're infiltrating schools. Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Conn., got rid of the 20,000 books in its school library, trading up to flatscreens, Kindles and computers only. And now that Google has paired with On Demand Books (the company that invented a book vending machine), schools could potentially serve up printed e-books in the public domain like cotton candy.

As I prepare to move from my home but not having yet identified my new one, I am seriously contemplating what I will place into storage and what I will let go of rather than pay to house in anticipation of future use and enjoyment. A number of thoughts and factors are guiding my decision making and leading me to possibly a somewhat radical place.

Many people, no matter what their age, think that personal finance is a boring subject. Parents might find this topic difficult to discuss with their kids. But good personal financial skills has become as vital as they ever are in today’s new economic reality – where most employment are at-will, credit is tightened, and college graduates leave school with $20,000 in average student loans.

When I chose the self-employment route, I had already owned my current home. Yet I am looking to the future toward a home that meets my desires for what I most want now (versus 11 years ago when I purchased this place). I'm not even in the analysis stage yet because the time is not right financially or otherwise for me to make the move. I had heard that it can be more challenging for the self-employed to qualify for a mortgage and that was before the debacle in the banking system. Now I wonder just how much more difficult it may be when the time comes.

My daughter started kindergarten this year, and because we wanted to ease her transition, we left her in her normal daycare for before-and-after-school care instead of putting her in the program run by the public school system. Even though it cost $200 a month more.