Finance

Finance Home | Foundation | Top 10

Women at desk with world map in the background.Welcome to the Financial Management Resource Group. The Financial Management Resource Group has been established to provide timely access to progressive financial services and resources on and off the Internet. You can read our documents and articles about financial topics or explore the other resources below.

Short on time? Visit Money 101 and you’ll learn just about all you’ll need. For more, continue on this page.

Simplifying Your Finances. Using online banking is probably one of the best ways to organize and automate your finances through automatic payment of bills and downloading of transactions for easily searching and sorting your expenditures. Scanning receipts and invoices is another way to organize your finances and reduce paper clutter.

Home Buying

Investing and Saving

Peer-to-Peer Lending

  • LendingClub.com – “Since 2007, we’ve been bringing borrowers and investors together, transforming the way people access credit. Over the last 10 years, we’ve helped millions of people take control of their debt, grow their small businesses, and invest for the future.”
  • Prosper.com – “Prosper is America’s first marketplace lending platform, with over $10 billion in funded loans. Prosper allows people to invest in each other in a way that is financially and socially rewarding. On Prosper, borrowers list loan requests between $2,000 and $35,000 and individual investors invest as little as $25 in each loan listing they select. Prosper handles the servicing of the loan on behalf of the matched borrowers and investors.”

Resources

General Resources. Below are general resources for financial well-being:

Featured Articles. Below are some featured articles.

  • The Reason You’re Broke by Liz Pulliam Weston. “If you’re constantly broke and can’t figure out why, the answer may be sitting in your driveway. Americans are spending more on their vehicles than ever before — more than $8,000 a year on average — and it’s driving some to the breaking point. Credit counselor Bill Thompson of Jacksonville, Fla., estimates that one out of every four clients his agency sees has overspent — sometimes dramatically — on a car. ‘They may be spending 15% to 20% of their (take-home) pay on just the car payment,’ said Thompson, who supervises credit counseling for the nonprofit Family Foundations, ‘and that doesn’t include insurance, gas, maintenance and all the other costs of owning a vehicle.’ And sometimes there’s more than one whopping payment. Sandra McGeary, a counselor at Consumer Credit Counseling Services of Western Pennsylvania, says she regularly sees middle-class families struggling with two payments in the $400 to $500 range. The burdens are so big that it doesn’t take a major disaster, like a job loss, to send them over the edge.” Read more…