I received a complimentary copy of Michael Mihalik’s Debt is Slavery to review. It’s a short book — 123 pages soaking wet — but it was written that way on purpose according to the author. Until I read it, it had the look and feel of a dollar-store coloring book. Boy, was I fooled. Mihalik … Read more
This week saw the release of the first Presidential $1 coin. (I haven’t seen one yet because my credit union didn’t get them for the initial release. Waaah.) And, not surprisingly, there are lots of auctions for mint coin rolls on eBay. Flexo over at Consumerism Commentary got a couple of the new coin rolls … Read more
My wife was shopping at Ukrop’s one day, mostly for our daughter’s foods. Ukrop’s is one of a limited number of places that carries foods that our daughter can have because of her allergies. (Costco doesn’t carry what we need here.) When my wife goes there she will stock up on Soy Dream Enriched Original … Read more
With the official release of the first Presidential $1 coin only a week away, and with the coins already in hand and selling on eBay, there will be renewed interest in unopened mint coin rolls. Unopened mint coin rolls can bring a price above face value because there is a chance that one (or several) … Read more
The furniture stores in our area are one-upping each other on easy financing terms. One offered “no interest until 2009.” Another offered “no interest until 2011.” Still another offered “no interest until 2011 and no payments until 2008.” It’s crazy! Nearly a full year without any payments, and nearly four years to pay off the … Read more
At work recently someone had left a shoebox filled with probably tens of thousands of Betty Crocker Points. Turns out the program was cancelled on December 15th, 2006, rendering all of those points almost worthless except for a limited-time 10% discount on Cooking.com. That hurts. Also recently I went to cash in some points at … Read more
Since some folks despise me and rag on me for my cynicism at times, I took matters into my own hands and read a book on the wonderful effects of spreading sunshine around. Seriously, though, How Full Is Your Bucket? is a really easy read. I got through it in under an hour and I’m … Read more
MyMoneyBlog recently had a post on dollar cost averaging. In this post there is a reference to a paper by Knight and Mandell, the conclusion of which is that dollar cost averaging is not worth the additional effort over buy-and-hold investing or periodic rebalancing. As a brief review, dollar cost averaging is a method of … Read more