I’ve always been amused by the Berlitz commercial featuring the well-meaning but English-challenged trainee within the German Coast Guard: Intercom: “Mayday Mayday –static– Hello can you hear us can you hear us can you –static– over –static– we are sinking we are sink–“ German Coast Guard (slowly, in very thick accent): “Hallo? This is the … Read more
A colleague and his wife are extreme couponers. She spends the equivalent of nearly a full workday a week following through with sales, coupon clipping, stacking, turning in CVS Bonus Bucks, etc. They can get an entire bag of things for next to nothing, and sometimes they even walk away with money in their pocket. … Read more
Discounted gift cards are a reasonably easy way to spend less at many stores. Briefly, the market for buying gift cards under face value goes like this: A person sells an unwanted gift card to a liquidator like Cardpool or GiftCardZen for, say, a 20% discount to face value. Another person buys that gift card … Read more
User catandmouse asked this question over at the Personal Finance and Money Stack Exchange site: How should one structure a portfolio given the possibility that a Total Stock Market Index might decline and not recover for a long time? It’s a common financial advice to buy an index and hold it forever. Particularly, John Bogle … Read more
There are times of abundance, and times of scarcity. Furloughs are times of scarcity if you or someone in your family is being furloughed. A furlough is not as bad as job loss, but it’s like a partial layoff: fewer hours. Several hundred thousand Department of Defense employees stand to be furloughed for one day … Read more
When we were home-shopping a few years ago, one of the selling points of the subdivision we chose eventually was that it was going to be located close to a future Walmart store. This might not be for everybody, but we like the convenience of being so close to Walmart. They’re giving the other grocery … Read more
Let’s say that you’re one of the over half-million federal employees who has “gotten the letter” indicating that there is an administrative furlough in your future. Let’s also say that you’ve gotten yourself in the right mindset about the temporary loss of income, and have run the numbers to see how much of each paycheck … Read more
Going through a furlough — a temporary non-work, non-pay status, also known as a reduction in hours or a partial layoff — is a financial hardship. Even if you’ve gotten into the right mindset, paychecks will still be smaller for a little while if the furlough goes through. Even if you’ve fully internalized that the … Read more