I saw a heartening post over in the SavingAdvice.com forums this week. A couple has extra money that they want either to put toward debt (nearly $4000/month in two mortgages for their Los Angeles home) or put in savings. This kind of thinking seems very uncommon. The skinny on their loans: Mortgage one – 30 … Read more
Since our current riding lawn mower is dying a slow death and the grass is getting a little taller, we stepped up the pace looking for another one. We checked out a number of options. Do we get: an upgrade to the one we have one similar to the one we have one that will … Read more
This post at SBC really hits the mark. His view on Wal-Mart’s advertising campaign for the self-checkout line — “Fast! Easy! Fun!” — is accurate. I’ve done it only a few times (not at Wal-Mart, but at other stores like Home Depot and Giant), and self-checkout is a pain in the spleen. It isn’t fast. … Read more
After church on Sunday we drove past a garage sale. It was the tail end of it, so the sellers were packing the stuff up. They have a 2-year-old daughter and were selling some of her clothes. (The 2-year-old, not really understanding what was going on, kept taking her stuff back — especially her Dora … Read more
The AP reported on rising gas prices, saying that the average price of gasoline in the US is now $2.50. With $3 gas a possibility by summer. Between my wife and I, we go through about 25 gallons of gas a week, so $2.50 gas would be about $250/month and $3 gas would cost about … Read more
I’ll go to quite some length to be frugal. $50 worth of bathroom tissue if it’s a really good price. Picking up change off the ground. Fixing the riding lawn mower, again. I questioned this one: Those little packets of coffee that the hotel gives you? The ones that might brew four cups of coffee … Read more
We had bring-a-dish-to-share lunch at church this week. Attendance was a little thin, probably because of March Madness, so most of the spaghetti we cooked came home with us. We just refrigerated the pot that we cooked, which had a little sauce mixed in to about 1 1/2 pounds. I had bought a number of … Read more
With point-of-sale terminals just about everywhere and one-click ordering, it seems strange not paying for things with plastic. Debit cards (usually doubling as ATM cards) aren’t quite as bad as credit cards, but “it’s still plastic,” as Liz Pulliam Weston writes: Leave your ATM card at home Debit cards don’t let you spend beyond what … Read more