Get your receipts lined up. Rip open the W-2s. Sharpen those pencils and make sure you have plenty of erasers. It’s tax time, the season for crunching numbers and squeezing blood from a turnip. It’s a chore not many of us relish unless we expect a big return (and if you do, for shame, you’re giving the government an interest-free loan, but more about that at another time).

It’s not that we don’t receive breaks from Uncle Sam. Last year, nearly 46 million citizens itemized their taxes via the 1040 form and claimed nearly $1 trillion in deductions. Those using standard deductions claimed half a trillion dollars. Yet when you take us as individuals, who doesn’t want to pay as few taxes as possible, whether it involves getting a bigger return or owing less?

Here’s a fun idea for your Valentine’s Day, treat yourselves to a “money date”! Okay, this may not seem quite as exciting as a night on the town, but it does provide a great opportunity to step back and discuss big-picture financial issues you don’t ordinarily give much time and thought to.

Start with the fun things — what are your dreams and goals for the future? Before your date, each of you should make a list of your financial goals, and then compare them over dinner as points of discussion. This is your chance to look beyond your daily financial needs and think big. Would you like to start a business? Go back to school? Own a vacation home? Take time off to be with young children? Travel in retirement?

Have you ever wondered why you use money in a particular way? For example, maybe you’re the type of person who overanalyzes every purchase even though you have plenty in savings. Or maybe you can’t seem to say no to your teenager’s request for a new computer when you’re losing sleep over the amount of your credit card debt. Many people find themselves stuck in an illogical pattern with money, but why?

It’s what’s known as your money personality, or a powerful set of ideas formed early in a person’s life that govern spending, giving and investment decisions.

As you may have heard, The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009 was passed in May to provide additional credit protection for consumers. While many of the new provisions will go into effect in February 2010, there are some changes you’ll notice before then.

Part of this new legislation specifies that creditors, including Vantage, must give consumers clear disclosures of account terms before the opening of an account, and clear statements of account activity afterwards.

The highly successful Cash for Clunkers program has run its course and run out of funds. The program will end Monday, August 24, 2009.

As of Thursday, August 20, 2009, over 457,000 dealer transactions had been linked to this popular program.

_____________________________________________________________

Do you have duct tape holding your vehicle’s cassette deck to the dash? Does your odometer read 1,235 miles only because you’ve turned it over … twice? Do you wince every time you look at your gas gauge? Well, help is here in the form of a new bill signed into law June 24, officially known as H.R. 2346, the Consumer Assistance Recycle and Save Act of 2009 (CARS Act). Unofficially, the new legislation is known as Cash for Clunkers.

The basic idea here is that the government is offering a monetary incentive to trade in your old, inefficient vehicle (the clunker) for a new, more fuel-efficient model. In theory, this will help both the economy, by driving vehicle sales, and the environment, by taking gas guzzlers off the road and replacing them with more fuel-efficient vehicles.

O.K., nobody likes to admit it, but we all age. It’s part of life. We can deny it all we like, but the truth is, time takes its toll on our ability to get around. We can’t bounce up those steps like we did in our younger days. We can’t grip or push or pull like we used to either. The problem is, many homes have features that don’t take these types of limitations into account.

Fortunately, there’s a new trend called, “aging in place.” Many seniors are now choosing to remain in their homes longer rather than move to retirement communities. This means homes occupied by older residents many times need updates to help offset the effects of aging.