Getting Real Value from Budgets

Compound Interest 14

When I reached my financial bottom in April 2006, one of my first responses was to simply start reading a lot about personal finance. I checked out a pile of books from the library on personal finance and tackled a lot of different suggestions from those books, along with some of my own ideas that I came up with ...

The Flip Side: What Frugality Gets You

This past weekend, I attended GenCon 2010, a gaming convention in Indianapolis, IN, with a group of several friends. I had been saving up to attend this convention for a while, and that savings consisted largely of money saved in the way I described this morning: making lots of small choices that saved money and didn’t negatively impact my ...

The Family That Saves Together

My four year old son thinks that the way you get a new video game is by trading for it at the used video game store.

At dinner time, they both eat exactly what their parents eat – and that’s considered normal, as opposed to making them a special kid-friendly meal that racks up the extra food dollars.

My two year old ...

Putting the Simple Back In

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. - Charles Mingus

One of the biggest challenges I have in my life is balancing the simple and the complex. I tend to oscillate back and forth between the two.

What usually happens is that I’ll have a period that’s simple for a while. I’ll have ample ...

Summer Meal Series #5: Chicken-Broccoli Crepes

finished meal

This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen.

Hey, look, homemade crepes!

OK, before we get going, it should be noted that this meal is pretty much as easy to prepare as you want it to be – and at almost every turn, we chose the ...

5 Bargain Summer Rental Spots

Vacationers looking for summer-rental deals have many choices this year.

Going Up?

Today, Seth Godin (one of my favorite bloggers who usually talks about marketing) posted a great piece about consumer debt. Two great excerpts:

Here’s a simple MBA lesson: borrow money to buy things that go up in value. Borrow money if it improves your productivity and makes you more money. Leverage multiplies the power of your business because with leverage, ...

Mental Math and Good Spending Choices

Earlier today, I linked to an article at Free Money Finance that included a quote from Mary Hunt:

Get into the habit of quickly calculating the annualized cost of things and you’ll achieve an effective way to get mindless spending under control.

After reading this, a reader wrote in to me and said:

I can see how a tip like that could be ...

When Parental Money Lessons Backfire

As I’ve mentioned before, we give our children a small allowance each week. Our daughter, who is only two, puts all of her money into a single-slot piggy bank and is allowed to fully spend it as she chooses. Our son gets more money for his allowance (for now), but has a Money Savvy Pig, where he splits ...

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