SoFi Blog

You may have missed Small Business Saturday, but you really don’t need an excuse to shop at locally owned businesses. The fact is, supporting small businesses is a great thing to do. It stimulates your local economy. If you’re spending money at your local coffee shop, your money is benefitting someone in your community. What’s more, your money is going to a business that might need to make a sale more than the department store down the street.

In the age of Amazon, it can be easier to click and purchase things online, but it’s also important to support your local community. Who wants their downtown to be tumbleweeds? Supporting your local businesses can help reinvigorate your city or keep your town thriving. Well, here’s a list of great products to pick up at your favorite small business, as well as a few ways to finance those purchases.

Maintaining a budget is hard at any time of year, but when the winter holiday season is on the horizon, and the time has come for gifts to be purchased, decorations to be pulled out and updated, and parties to be thrown and attended, budgeting can easily and quickly fall by the wayside.

While it’s no big deal to swap a restaurant meal for a home-cooked dinner during the year, it can feel like your best laid plans go to waste once Thanksgiving hits. Between holiday celebrations, extra treats for coworkers, travel plans, and more, it’s easy to see how, for Americans, the average Christmas debt is around $1,054.

The scariest part? While more than half of the respondents to a MagnifyMoney survey said they would pay down the debt in three months or less, around 30% said they would need five months or more to pay off the holiday debt on their credit card.

In order to avoid being part of that statistic—and avoid interest rates that could haunt you well into 2019—here are some budgeting tips as well as tips for how to manage credit card debt.

As the end of the year approaches, many of us find ourselves staring at our annual “to-do” list and wondering how none of it got done. Resolutions and to-dos have a funny way of building up at year-end like that, don’t they?

Luckily, there’s hope for us procrastinators. There is still plenty of time left in the year to take some action and feel accomplished by the ringing in of the new year. Cue the victory champagne (or hot chocolate, if that’s more your thing).

Below, we’ll cover some ideas for DIY projects for home that you can work on before the year comes to a close. Hopefully, this will help get the juices flowing on end-of-year projects so that you can finish the year on a high.

Maybe you love sports. If so, transforming your basement into a rec room where you can, say, shoot pool and watch football games on a big screen with your best friends may feel like a dream come true. Or, maybe you just need an extra bedroom and/or more bathrooms for your growing family. Either way, read on.

No matter what extra room you want in your home, basement remodeling makes good sense because you can handle the renovations without needing to add an addition onto your house. “Sure,” you might think, “but you haven’t seen MY basement. The floors and walls are concrete, and we store all of our extra stuff down there.”

Well, that sounds just like a normal basement, pre-remodel. And in this post, we’ll share steps to help you turn that cold concrete into a livable (and even lovable!) living space, as well as providing information about a typical basement remodel cost. We’ll start out by sharing inspirational remodeling ideas, so you can solidify what you want your finished basement to look like, and then we’ll do some reverse engineering for you, including an excellent way to finance your remodeling project.

There are few things as exhilarating as finally finding the right person and deciding to commit to a life with each other. If you’re basking in the warm glow of a recent engagement, enjoy every minute of hazy happiness before the realities of planning a wedding sink in. Planning can be exciting, full of cake tastings, dress fittings, and venue visits. But all of those price tags can really add up. As you begin planning your wedding, it’s important to know what to expect.

The average cost of a wedding in the United States in 2017 was $33,391. According to the Knot, who polled 13,000 couples in their annual wedding study , this number is actually on the decline, down from about $35,000 in 2016. And this doesn’t even include the honeymoon!