Last year I became a charter member of our county’s Toastmasters Club. Toastmasters is an international organization for public speaking and leadership. I wrote about how Toastmasters is the biggest public speaking training bargain on the planet. Financially, it is a huge bargain. The international dues are $6 per month: one cheese pizza. Our club … Read more
(That’s the course that follows Unit Pricing 101, of course!) Unit pricing (for the uninitiated) is the calculation that grocery stores put on the shelf price tags that tell you how much an item costs per pound, per ounce, per 100 count, etc. It’s arrived at by dividing the price of the whole package by … Read more
Software as a product is a strangely complex beast. Freeware, commercial software, open-source, closed source, crippleware, nagware, bloatware, software as a service, tiered usage, service contracts, upgrades — software comes in all kinds of flavors and reasons for disdain. And as someone who lived during the rise of Microsoft, we sure loved to hate Bill … Read more
Convenience costs a lot of money over time. To start saving money again, you have to get inconvenient again. Easier said than done …. A while back I bid on a new Keurig coffee machine at a silent auction. I bid $80 and won. (They went for $120 new.) Predictably, the $40 savings went out … Read more
The credit union my family belongs to had their annual meeting a couple of weeks ago. During the question and answer session, one of the members asked that the credit union look for ways to increase the rate of interest earned on savings accounts. “They’re not paying a whole lot these days,” the member lamented. … Read more
One of my friends in college purportedly had racked up dozens of parking tickets courtesy of the campus police. He graduated, so either he took care of them before he left, or he never had to worry about them in the first place. A woman in Pennsylvania, however, lost her home over an amount less … Read more
I’ll be one of the first to admit that I’m a pack rat. I come from a proud line of pack rats. Not quite hoarding-level, but that’s just one floor up from where I am. 🙂 My wife, talented woman that she is, has a lot of materials and tools that she uses to create … Read more
Tax time. It’s just around the corner. Yay. But there’s a bright spot in figuring taxes for most of us: deductions. Those subtractions that pare down the adjusted gross income (AGI) that is the primary benchmark that determines your tax rate, and ultimately your tax. There are a number of kinds of deductions. One kind … Read more