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All you can fly for $599 on JetBlue

If you’re like me you’re both disciplined with your cash and love to travel, which means you know that the two can be in conflict with each other. Enter JetBlue (which along with Southwest is my fav airline), which is selling the airline equivalent of a monthly bus pass: $599 gets you all you can fly between Sept. 8 and Oct. 8.

I haven’t yet read the fine print but on the surface it sounds like a great deal, provided you live in a JetBlue city and will fly more than $600 worth in the next month. It could be an even better deal if JetBlue’s competitors match them; airlines are a copycat business and usually what one does with fares, the others will do, too. If other airlines are inclined, we’ll probably know no later than Monday.

Back from hiatus

OK, so it’s not a full re-launch like I promised. But after a busy summer, I figured too much time had gone by and it’s time to get back in the groove. So while we haven’t been redesigned just yet, there are a few changes:

• From now on, I’m going to try to keep posts in one of a few categories: personal finance, work & career and consumer/spending.
• Tags: I’ll still use multiple tags for each post, but every post will include at least one of those categories from above in order to make them easier for you to find. So for example, if I’m writing about a change that will affect Visa card users, I’ll tag it “credit cards, visa, consumer/spending”.
• Also, I’m making the blog more visually appealing by using a photo next to every post.

I hope you enjoy.

On hiatus for relaunch

I’m sure you’ve noticed I haven’t posted since May 18. I have good reasons: 1) I spent the bulk of the last three weeks traveling and 2) after considerable thought, it’s time to relaunch and revamp the blog. So I’m putting things on hold until about late June. When I come back, you can expect a few things:

• a better layout, images or video with every post and just a generally better looking blog
• better topics. I’ve noticed how loud the crickets are when I post about the economy and I get more responses when I answer questions that are on people’s minds. Look forward to more chances to ask questions and also talk about career choices and other decisions on the periphery of personal finance.
• I may or may not keep the blog here or migrate it over to wordpress. Either way, the URL won’t change.

See you in late June

On the road again

I’m traveling again, y’all. Back with a fresh post on Wednesday. Email me with any suggestions or interesting money experiences from the past weekend.

How much property tax is too much?

So, partly inspired by Bobby & Aleks, I’m looking around my neighborhood at homes for sale. It’s a great time to buy if you’re ready: prices and rates are relatively low, there’s an 8,000 property tax credit available from the feds until the end of the year and there remain way more buyers than sellers. Where I live in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, there are any number houses for sale for under $100,000, which is cheap considering the median price in Shaker is nearly $200 grand and that the neighborhood has excellent public schools and other services (I don’t even have to shovel my own snow or take my trash to the curb).

But all those services come with a cost and in Shaker, that cost is high. Property taxes on places that are selling like this, a rehab job selling for less than $35,000, are more than $6,100 a year. If that doesn’t sound like much, consider this: a $6,100 a year tax bill would add more than $500 a month to your mortgage; on a house you only paid $35,000 for, that’d be more than double what you paid in principal and interest (assuming a 30-year mortgage at 6.5 percent).

So how much tax is too much? Would you pay exorbitant taxes to move into a great neighborhood with nice schools and services, or would you rather move elsewhere where you might get more house for the money?

What’s your biggest money mistake?

Short, simple question today:

What’s the biggest money mistake you’ve made in the past year?

Mine has been ignoring things that I know I should take care of, like parking tickets that I should pay but I let languish and wind up paying exorbitant fees on. What’s yours?