In my review of Jeff Yeager’s The Cheapskate Next Door, one of the points in that book that hit me squarely in the eyes was his distinction between “cheapskate” (meaning someone who’s frugal, and proud of it) with “bargain hunter” (people who enjoy ferreting out deals and buying for less). He claims that there’s a … Read more
Just in case there was any doubt, your home mortgage is very much 100% a liability and not an asset. Here are some ways to get rid of it … There’s a place for spin, and then there’s a place for silliness. A Forbes.com article on MSN (no longer available *sniff*) gives six reasons that … Read more
This book caught my eye at Borders, so I flipped through the pages a bit and bought the book off of Amazon when I got home. (I’m probably not doing my part to help Borders out of bankruptcy, but oh well.) Jeff Yeager’s The Cheapskate Next Door is a well-researched 231-page tale of his trip … Read more
When we moved from our old house to the new one, we left a house with a septic tank and went to one that was served by our county’s sewer service. Having one over the other isn’t that much different, I suppose. They both do the job. Having a septic system requires maintenance (regular pumping) … Read more
Food and drinks out of vending machines are sold at ridiculous mark-ups, but sometimes that extra bit of concentration that a snack or a soda is what’s needed to get through the mid-afternoon slump — that time when the brain is screaming “nap” and the stomach is yelling “feed me.” Unfortunately, the cooking facilities at … Read more
If you have at least one website going that has any kind of user interaction whatsoever — heck, if you have an e-mail address — then you’ve had the pleasure of dealing with spammers. It’s always going to be a cat-and-mouse game with spam comments, e-mail, user registrations, trackbacks, etc. I’ve had to extricate this … Read more
In my ten months of owning an investment property, things have run very smoothly. The mortgage is the same one that we had when we were living there; we had refinanced the loan in 2005 to cut 11 years off of our loan for only about $150 extra per month (we did a mortgage refinance … Read more
J. Money culled ten web domain names from his portfolio in an effort to clean out some of the mental financial clutter from his life. He had a bit of a domain-buying binge last year so there was room for culling. I have thirty-two domains in my Namecheap account. Some are for my wife’s projects … Read more