This is a lighthearted response to JD Roth’s laundry agreement that he has with his wife. The sound-bite version of this fascinating agreement goes something like this: JD and his wife, Kris, have kept their finances separate throughout their marriage. JD despises doing laundry and would do it only if there were nothing clean left … Read more
My wife’s laptop is showing signs of getting ready to fail, so I’ve been looking around for the past couple of days for replacement options. Since “buy used when it makes sense” is one of the very best money-saving tips I can give, part of my research involved looking for quality used options. We’ve bought “open-box” … Read more
In Part 1 of this series, I explained the motivation for cracking out Quicken to get a handle on our family’s finances for this year’s tax season and beyond. I began by entering our primary checking account’s transactions for 2010. Along the way, I created accounts in Quicken for the other financial vehicles we have … Read more
I’m a tad late to the party on this one, but if you act within the next nine hours or so, you can snag a $20 Amazon.com gift card for only $10 at LivingSocial.com! This is pretty rare. Unlike most other online merchants, Amazon.com usually doesn’t have a lot of coupons floating around. Even rebate … Read more
One big advantage of tracking the categories of personal spending is that you can see where the weak spots are — categories that have grown a little too big for their britches and are ripe for cutting down to size. As I pile through a year’s worth of financial statements in time for taxes, in … Read more
This weekend I told my newsletter subscribers that I was starting up on my taxes. Since I have about three months left, there’s plenty of time to try to do it right, and set up an organized set of financial records in the process. I’m starting with a lot of financial statements, a whole box … Read more
Kimberly Palmer, senior editor for US News and World Report and author of Generation Earn (see my review) posted on the smart way to pay kids an allowance. (article is gone) She drew on statements from several experts who had researched the way children responded to different kinds of exposure to money from their parents. … Read more
Think Your Way to Wealth is noticing the same thing that I’ve noticed: Gas prices are sneaking back up. For a while they were down in the low-$2 range here (yeah that qualifies for low now) and now they’re testing $3 again. “RC” caught that the former president of Shell Oil, John Hofmeister, predicts $5 … Read more