🏡 9 Tips to Find the Best Mortgage Lender

How to shop for mortgages and pay your mortgage off early. Noelle Asks: Hey Ben! Do you have any resources/advice for finding a good mortgage lender? Hi, Noelle. Here are 9 Tips for finding mortgage lenders 1. Compare Mortgage Options Even if you don’t use them, the AimLoan.com website will let you compare various scenarios without you … Read more

Protecting Against Inflation

The hamburger to dollar ratio is getting smaller. While one can never know the future, it appears inflation is upon us. Here are some quick ideas to protect the number of future burgers you can purchase. How Not to Beat Inflation First, some things that won’t help. Whine about inflation. It’s sort of like the … Read more

Gridcoin Mining for Science

A cryptocurrency that’s actually productive!  I came across Gridcoin (Ticker: GRC) the other day. Gridcoin helps with cancer and malaria research as well as studying astronomy and solving math problems. It caught my eye because Bitcoins and most cryptocurrencies require miners to spend a lot of computing power mining hashes that aren’t really useful.  Some argue that … Read more

TracFone on Verizon MVNO Review

We’ve been using Ting for Kris’s phone the last 3 years, it’s been great (see my Ting Review)–but at our new house Sprint’s signal isn’t that good–it can’t really pull in a 3G signal consistently.  In rural North Idaho the best coverage is indisputably Verizon, so I limited my search to Verizon MVNOs which have … Read more

Quicken 2014. Horrible.

Dear Intuit, I’ve been a long time Quicken user, my dad taught me to use Quicken for DOS to track money in my “Bank of Dad” account. My current Quicken file which I started in college after opening my bank account has data back since 2001. For the last 12-years I’ve loyally purchased a new … Read more

Meet Ting. New cell phone service challenging Virgin Mobile

We switched to Ting from Virgin Mobile… here’s my quick review: What is Ting? Ting was started by Tucows in 2012, like Virgin Mobile it’s an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) backed by Sprint wireless.  Ting’s marketing point is that most people don’t actually use all the data, texting, and voice that they pay for. … Read more