Talking to a Reader

A few days ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop (my once-every-two-months-or-so visit) reading some of the comments on The Simple Dollar with my laptop. Out of the corner of my eye, I could tell that someone was looking over my shoulder at the screen, so I glanced over at this fortysomething lady. She smiled at me ...

The Freelance Diaries: The Caffeinated Project Manager

coffee The Freelance Diaries: The Caffeinated Project Manager

18 comments — written on January 14th, 2010

As part of the series on earning more money, today’s Money Diaries — actually, today’s Freelance Diaries — is from a project manager who left his fulltime job to work as a freelancer.

Below, you’ll notice:

He now makes 3 times what he made at his fulltime job — ...

The Money Diaries: The 27-year-old product designer who tracks her finances a little TOO closely

iStock_000009726477XSmall The Money Diaries: The 27-year-old product designer who tracks her finances a little TOO closely

10 comments — written on December 10th, 2009 (6 hours ago)

Today is another post in the Money Diaries series, which is based off New York Magazine’s Sex Diaries. We’ve collected stories from real people about their spending habits over seven days, anonymized them, and posted them ...

How to Justify a $3,000 Coffee Maker

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Photo: CoffeeGeek

Are you a coffee snob? Do you sniff at drip? Are you willing to endure a day of caffeine headaches and jitters rather than sip a subpar brew? And most importantly, is this addiction/affliction costing you more money than you can afford? These days a lot of people are telling you to get your caffeine fix ...

Price Targeting, Coffee Shops, and Supermarket Secrets

I recently started reading The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford. So far, it’s a little like Freakonomics but a bit more economics and with slightly less controversial topics.

One interesting concept explained was price-targeting. Let’s say a coffee shop has to spend 50 cents to make a cup of coffee, including labor and materials but not rent. ...