Being careless with spending on food can be a budget-buster. If there’s enough cushion in your budget that you can be a bit careless, that’s great, but when a pinch happens, careful grocery purchasing could be the difference between staying out of the hole and getting into one. Cutting the fat out of a grocery … Read more
Nothing derails well-laid-out financial plans like a giant expense. The kind of expense that consumes one or more full paychecks. Big expenses happen to everybody. Some are unplanned, like an emergency room visit, or a trip to the vet after a pet gets bitten by a copperhead. It’s for this reason that building up a … Read more
This year has been a little tighter than usual for us financially for a number of reasons. Things aren’t at the point of desperation by any means, but we have had to answer some financial wake-up calls throughout the year. Not a full-out, kidney-stone-level emergency room visit, but more like acid indigestion. This appears in … Read more
My friend J Money heartily disagrees that budgets are boring. I think that budgeting can be made palatable, but fun? If anyone can hit on the magic formula that makes budgeting fun, they’ll be very rich indeed. A blogging colleague was asking around on Facebook about budgeting presentations that weren’t “boring and irrelevant for 18-22 … Read more
Suze Orman needed to upgrade her leather jacket to a flak jacket tonight in a personal finance scrap match with personal finance bloggers over her new self-branded prepaid debit card. The Approved Card is her own personally-branded prepaid debit card with what appears to be a decent package of tools and features. The downsides, as … Read more
This Kiplinger feature on MSN has a number of good ways that we waste money. Slide 12 of this series (these aren’t my favorite ways of presenting things, but I see how it generates more ad impressions for MSN!) has the following suggestion: If you’re stashing your cash in a traditional savings account earning next … Read more
Are you graduating from college with a great job waiting for you? If so, congratulations! Not all of your peers are so fortunate. I went straight to graduate school after college and was a “poor student” for quite a while: another six years after graduating from college. I quadrupled my salary when I left to … Read more
Financial windfalls, planned or otherwise, are almost always welcome additions to the family budget. (No doubt they’re preferable to large unexpected expenses!) Whether those financial windfalls are spent or saved wisely, though, is an entirely different matter. Fortunately, it’s not that difficult to put these windfalls to effective use. Here are two simple but broad … Read more