If you, like me, are a nine-to-fiver and a part-time entrepreneur, the IRS is not going to congratulate you for your hard work, but they will take their cut. Did your side-gig take a loss last year?

You may be able to deduct that loss and beef up any refund you are owed. But be careful: Deduct a business loss for more than a couple years in a row and you may be flagged for a painful audit.

The IRS has recently caught on to taxpayers utilizing self-defined business losses to reduce their total income and, subsequently, their tax liability. As a result, the IRS has instituted the so-called hobby loss rule.

There is no way to easily distinguish between a for-profit business and a not-for-profit hobby. Whether you are a photographer who shoots weddings, a musician who plays a few gigs, or a blogger with advertising revenue, whether you earn $1 a year or $100,000, your side work could be considered either: a business, or a hobby. [...]

You might wonder what Starbucks closing 7,100 stores tonight has to do with personal finance, other than the fact it might save you $4 if you happen to crave a latte this evening. Well, if you own Starbucks stock, you might be optimistic CEO Howard Schultz’s plan to reeducate 135,000 Starbucks employees on “espresso excellence,” among other topics, might reverse the stock’s recent downward spiral.

As a former Starbucks employee, however, I am personally interested in how the company is trying to return to its roots. For the uninitiated, those roots are more than just selling premium coffee and espresso. What made Starbucks so great was the focus the corporation put on being a great place to work. [...]

Americans are not saving money. Our national personal savings rate has been less than 1% since 2005, when our savings rate was actually negative; its lowest point since the Great Depression. If we are not saving, then we must be spending more than we ever have. But why?

In his new book, Going Broke: Why Americans Can’t Hold On To Their Money, Connecticut College Professor of Psychology Stuart Vyse explains our unstoppable spending. [...]

I’m no tax expert, nor do I want to be, but as my taxes get more complicated, I do want to make sure I don’t give more of my money to Uncle Sam than I legally owe. Here are some tax tips that may be especially helpful to the under-30 set. [...]

Recently I wrote about how I ran up against my American Express charge card’s mysterious spending limit. Well I did it again, and after a phone call with Amex, I can shed even more light on how theses charge cards’ limits are calculated. Despite their disadvantages (including the annual fee), I am an advocate of the American Express Gold and Green cards. I think these charge cards are what plastic should be.

These cards provide only a short-term loan (one month), and do not charge interest. They allow you to consolidate expenses and worry less about cash flow, but do not allow you to get in over your head and into mountains of debt! I only wish I had gotten one of these – and only one of these – way back when instead of my once impressive collection of other credit cards. [...]

I don’t know about you, but I have a problem. I am ambitious; I am full of great ideas. I am also, however, extremely undisciplined. But the other day I had an idea. What if I became “my own manager”? Not a bad idea. But how, exactly, do you manage yourself? [...]

Starting today, a full content RSS feed for Money Under 30 is available! I know partial content feeds are pretty much useless these days…the point of using a reader in the first place is to avoid traveling all over the web everyday to get your favorite reads.

I owe thanks to Clever Dude for pointing this out to me…last November, alas.

I would’ve done this long ago but one of the drawbacks to using the Wordpress “more” feature to provide excerpts of my articles on my homepage is that it cuts off the feed. For anybody else with the same problem, you’ll need the full feed plugin and you will need to draw your feed from /rss2 rather than /feed or /rss.

So once again, my full feed is available! Please grab it here.

Jeff writes: I’m about $5500 in credit card debt that I want to get out of before I go back to school in August. I’m thinking of taking up these offers for low interest rates on balance transfers I get in the mail from new cards. Is it worth the hassle? Will it adversely affect my credit rating? Can I know my credit limit before I apply so that I can see whether or not I can transfer a substantial amount?

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for reading, and thanks for your question. Congrats on deciding to get out of that debt so soon…I wish you all the best in getting it done.

I don’t know the interest rates you’re currently paying, but I’m going to guess the average is around 14.9% — maybe more. Since you have 6 months before school, that means it will take six monthly payments of $958. That’s a big chunk of cash each month, but if you can do it, getting debt-free is the best way you can possibly use that money. Now onto your question: Will a 0% balance transfer offer or two help? [...]

It seems like only a year ago I was lamenting the absence of innovative web-based personal budgeting tools. Today we have Mint.com and Geezeo.com, and even Quicken has launched an online budgeting product. While these sites are all long overdue ways to keep tabs on your money, one site, Shoeboxed.com, takes the cake for the most unique new financial tool: web-based receipt organization.

Shoeboxed.com offers online receipt organization and management. Basically a super simple budgeting tool, users can enter receipt information in a free section to track monthly spending. Shoeboxed.com’s uniqueness, however, comes from their premium service: mail-in receipt scanning. [...]

With the economy faltering, more Americans are paring down their spending. At the least, Americans are starting to buy only what they can afford. Could the next few years become the age of Americans saying good bye to credit cards and living within our means? And if so, is life without consumer credit a fiscal utopia?

Consumer credit is like a passionate romance that sizzles, and then fizzles. Consumers are lured to the relationship with large credit lines and promises of being able to “afford” life’s luxuries, today. For a while, life is grand. Borrowers have no need for a budget, as minimum payments are low and credit lines are always available for unexpected expenses or if ends don’t meet, as they inevitably won’t. Consumers are enamored with their credit, and creditors love their consumers, unwittingly racking up balances that will make creditors a fortune.

Sooner or later, the honeymoon ends. Borrowers max out their credit lines and minimum payments are not so minimal anymore. Life gets tough, and consumers begin to resent the credit they so recently embraced. [...]