Have a student loan, home loan, or personal loan? Have you ever wondered exactly how your lender calculated your monthly payment on the day you accepted the money? Sure, there are interest calculators and other available resources online to help you figure out just how much you will be paying back at the end of a loan, but sometimes it’s useful to figure it out for yourself.

Assume you are the proud owners of a new home and you need to finance a total of $250,000 over a 30 year fixed mortgage rate of five percent. Do you know what your monthly payment will be? Do you know how much money you are going to pay over the course of the full 30 years? Sadly, the numbers are probably a lot bigger than you think, but I’m going to show you just how to calculate this information on your own.

The formula for figuring out your own monthly payment on a principal loan is as follows: [...]

When you think of gold, what comes to mind? Eighteen-karat gold jewelry? Gold bricks stacked high in a vault? Sacks of gold coins used for bartering or paying tax collectors in Robin Hood’s days? Or a sensible part of a modern investor’s asset allocation strategy?

Although global economies do not depend upon gold in the way they once did, gold is still an attractive investment. Why is that? And exactly how do you invest in gold?

The Allure of Investing in Gold

Gold can be a sound investment because, unlike currencies and securities, gold is in limited supply. (The gold supply increases as more gold is mined, but very slowly). Thanks to this scarcity, gold serves as a hedge against inflation. An ounce of gold can buy roughly the same amount of goods today as it did 50, 100, even 200 years ago. That’s not the case, of course, with a dollar bill. In fact, the value of gold typically increases as the value of a dollar falls.

For this reason, gold is a good choice for investors who want to insulate themselves somewhat from the inevitable effects of inflation. And who doesn’t?

But how do you make this happen? Believe it or not, buying gold (even physical gold coins) is doable for the average investor; you simply need to take the time to do it right. [...]

The younger we are the more we tend to think that we are invincible and do not need health insurance. Cancer, broken bones, and weird illnesses with names that we can’t pronounce are all things that happen to other people and never to us—right? Wrong! [...]

The following is a guest post by Susie Bafico, Assistant Editor of FiLife, a network of experts and community members, where people get help, advice and share opinions on family finance.

Plenty of parents help out their adult kids with cash, and it’s not just cars and trust funds. For many, the safety net is pulled on the way to college, while for others it never really ends. [...]

This is a guest post from Kat Fae, an American twentysomething living in London. Check out her blog Savings Not Shoes where she writes about trying to “…avoid the Carrie Bradshaw effect of being cash poor, shoe rich.”

Deciding to expand my life after college in another country was a big decision and one that has challenged me financially and intellectually. As I packed up and left the good old U.S. of A. for law school on the other side of the pond (where lawyers sometimes wear wigs), I attempted to put my plethora of federal student loans into in-school deference or forbearance. Five separate enterprises own a piece of my undergraduate education totaling $50,000 at the time. Four of the companies put my loans into various types of in-school and hardship forbearance. The one that wouldn’t budge, however, was my Alma matter holding tight to my $3,000 Perkins loan and those $43.23 per month payments. [...]

Imagine paying a high tax for owning a gas-guzzling SUV, enjoying six weeks of paid vacation each year, or giving half of your paycheck to the government. In this guest post, Emily Starbuck Gerson, of the CreditCards.com blog Taking Charge, describes some of the differences between the personal finances of Americans and Europeans. [...]