Four ways to reuse an old shower curtain
photo by mike burns
It’s easy to keep or toss some items. You might have an idea for ways to reuse something and, if you don’t, out it goes. But it can be tough to decide what to do with some items, such as vinyl shower curtains or liners. They’re cheap to replace, so many people opt to throw them away and replace with a new liner (consider replacing with cloth). …
Continue reading Four ways to reuse an old shower curtain …
From Frugal Village.
How to buy secondhand housewares
Buying housewares at the thrift store can give your home a unique style.
Continue reading How to buy secondhand housewares …
From Frugal Village.
Meatless meals ease pressure on budget
Give flexitarianism (semi-vegetarianism) a try. Once a week, incorporate a meatless dish into your meal rotation.
Continue reading Meatless meals ease pressure on budget …
From Frugal Village.
The Simple Dollar Time Machine: October 31, 2009
Many newer readers of The Simple Dollar haven’t been exposed to the hundreds of great articles in the archives of the site, so this is a weekly series that highlights the five best posts from one year ago this week, as well as the five best posts from two years ago this week. I call it … the Time Machine.
One Year Ago (October 25 – 31, 2008)
Should an Entrepreneurial High Schooler Go to College? This discussion resulted in a lot of interesting back and forth on the question of whether or not a high schooler who starts a strong business in his spare time should immediately go to college or should focus on building that business that’s already successful.
Brand Preferences and the Two Year Old Child I wrote this as I began to notice the effect that brand recognition was having on my two year old son. Was he being unduly influenced by branding and packaging? What could I do about it?
Eight Things You Should Do Immediately to Save Money When You Buy a Car If you buy a car, there are several things worth doing immediately to maximize fuel efficiency and minimize maintenance costs. These all work no matter what kind of car you buy.
Exploring the Connection Between Time and Money I’m a big believer that time is money, at least in the sense that money is just a representation of invested time. Thus, time is an enormous consideration when choosing which option is actually the cheapest.
Two Years of The Simple Dollar: My 25 Favorite Articles of the Past Year Here’s my celebration of the second full year of The Simple Dollar. I just collected my top twenty five articles from the second year of The Simple Dollar in one place.
Two Years Ago (October 25 – 31, 2007)
Seven Tips For Avoiding Boredom During A Financial Turnaround Isn’t living cheap boring? Not at all. It’s all about just choosing the less expensive things that you enjoy doing. Take a look at the many, many inexpensive things available for you to do. The wider your horizons, the more fun you’ll have.
A Deeper Look At Dave Ramsey’s Seven Baby Steps To Financial Freedom – And How They Apply To Us Dave Ramsey’s debt recovery advice is popular because it’s so straightforward and simple. However, they’re not always a perfect match for everyone. Here, I dig deeper into his “baby steps” and see how they match my own life.
The Eternal Question: Am I Doing The Right Thing? With the complexity of life around us, it’s easy to not be entirely sure if your choice is the right thing. Is it better to spend more now or save this money? Is it better to invest in a 401(k) or a Roth IRA? How can you ever know if you’re doing the right thing?
The Ten Most Important Things I’ve Learned About Money and Life In The Last Year Here, I summarize the ten most important things I learned about money during the first year of The Simple Dollar. This article really does contain the cream of the crop of what I learned during that crucial period of my life.
One Year of The Simple Dollar: My 25 Favorite Articles As with the article above, this is merely a collection of what I consider to be the twenty five best articles I wrote during the first year of The Simple Dollar.
If you’d like to browse through more of the archives, visit the chronology, where all posts are listed in chronological order.
Nine Ways to Get More out of The Simple Dollar
This is kind of a FAQ for new readers and is posted each week along with the Time Machine. Here are nine great ways for new readers to dig deeper into The Simple Dollar.
1. Subscribe by email or RSS. Visiting The Simple Dollar’s website is great, but for many people, it’s more convenient to receive the articles in another form. It’s easy to join 60,000 other subscribers and get The Simple Dollar’s content by email or in your RSS feeder (if you’re unfamiliar with RSS, check out Google Reader.
2. Comment. Each article on The Simple Dollar has lively discussion. Just click on the green square in the upper right of each article on the website and join in!
3. Read my story of financial meltdown and recovery. The Simple Dollar isn’t based on what I’ve read in books or learned in school. I’ve made a lifetime of financial mistakes – The Simple Dollar is a record of what works for me during the process of getting my life on a better track.
4. Download my free 49 page e-book. Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page is completely free. It summarizes all of the key lessons I’ve learned along the way about personal finance in one tidy package – in fact, all of the main principles can be found right on the cover.
5. Follow me on Twitter – or other social networks. I post tons of interesting articles, quotes, follow-up material, commentary, and other material on Twitter. Follow me! If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s essentially an open discussion forum for people to share ideas and thoughts with other like-minded folks – you just choose the people you want to listen to and their ideas and thoughts are all delivered to you on a single page.
I also participate on several other social networks. Feel free to check me out on del.icio.us (it’s where I collect links, from which I select the ones that appear in my weekly roundups), wakoopa (what software I use), GoodReads (what books I’m reading), Facebook, and FriendFeed (which aggregates everything). I also have an irregularly-updated personal site, TrentHamm.com.
6. Dig through “31 Days to Fix Your Finances.” 31 Days to Fix Your Finances is an article series that outlines how you can get a grip on your finances over the course of a month.
7. Send me your questions and suggestions. Send me an email and let me know what you’re thinking, what you’d like to see, and any questions you might have. I try to respond to as many emails as possible and I read them all. I may even use your question in a future article!
8. Become a “Friend of The Simple Dollar.” If you find the stuff on The Simple Dollar valuable and are willing to spend five minutes or so a month to help me out with small things, please consider signing up to be a “Friend of The Simple Dollar”.
9. Email a great article you find to a friend. Find an article that you think your friend would love? At the bottom of each article, you’ll find a link that says “Email this” – just click on that, type in your friend’s address, and send it right along to them!
Continue reading The Simple Dollar Time Machine: October 31, 2009 …
From The Simple Dollar.
Monroe sales fliers Oct. 31
Here are the sales fliers I found in my home-delivery edition of The Monroe Evening News today (I live in the 48162 zip code):
- Wal-Mart has girls’ and boys’ long-sleeved crew tees at $4.50 each. Selected plastic storage bins at $4. Rival 12-cup coffee maker for $9. Mainstays nonstick bakeware selections for $4.50. Green Giant canned veggies at 65 cents each.
- Busch’s Fresh Food Market (sale starts Monday) will have Angus beef roast at 33 percent off. Bananas will be 39 cents a pound. Charmin ultra bath tissue 9 rolls at $3.88. The 10 for $10 sale includes Spartan pretzels, Coke 2-liters and Rice-a-Roni.
- Rite Aid (sale starts Sunday) will have Crest on its rebate list and there will also be a coupon available tomorrow. Vick’s DayQuil and Nyquil also are a coupon + rebate match. Free after rebate + coupon match on OralB CrossAction toothbrush. Buy $30 worth of items featured on pages 6 and 7 of the flier such as Colgate, SoyJoy bars and Curel and you get a free tote bag with coupons and samples.
Continue reading Monroe sales fliers Oct. 31 …
From Monroe on a Budget.
Private school on a budget?
If you are one of my local readers in Monroe, Mich., you’ve noticed the marketing campaign that one of the local private high schools has started to recruit its incoming students for the 2010-2011 school year.
My daughter was in public school K-12. But I’m a firm believer that parents need to find the right educational fit for their children. For some families, that’s private school. For some families, that’s homeschool.
Do not dismiss private school simply for financial reasons. Talk to the school principal and staff at that campus to find out what your options are. They know where the money is coming from that their families are paying.
It is a fact that more attention and money is available for college funding than for K-12 private school.
It is also a fact that K-12 private school funding breaks are more likely to rely on a family’s fundraiser participation, volunteer efforts, financial need or active church membership than the student’s academic record. That’s just the typical criteria for such things.
One example I know about: one of my teen-age friends took on a work study assignment at her private high school to help with tuition expenses when her family ran into financial difficulties.
So if private school appeals to you, then attend the open houses and meet with the school staff. You want to first find out whether your student would fit in with that environment. Each school has its own personality and academic emphasis.
Then while you are on campus, ask about the payment plans, merit scholarships, financial need grants and fundraiser campaigns.
If you still can’t afford the tuition with whatever options are available at that campus, well, then you make other arrangements for school.
But the tuition bite may not be as significant as you think.
Continue reading Private school on a budget? …
From Monroe on a Budget.
Three Retirement Questions for People in Their Twenties
“Shane” writes in:
I’m twenty three years old. I just got a really great job with a 401k that’s matched 100% by my employer up to 10%, which I’ve heard from others is a really great deal that I need to take advantage of. So I started investing 10% of my paycheck so I can get the matching funds.
The only problem I have with this is that I have no idea about retirement. It’s more than forty years away. I just put my money into the investment the person told me to put it into so I have no idea if it’s a good one for my retirement. I don’t even know where to start.
I get emails like this quite often from young professionals who are completely clueless about retirement – and for good reason. When you’re forty years away from retirement age, the thought of retirement seems incredibly distant. It feels more than a lifetime away – that’s because it is more than a lifetime away.
The one piece of knowledge that many young professionals do have, though, is a solid sense of self. They have a good basic understanding of who they are, even if they haven’t pieced through the details yet. And, quite often, this basic understanding is more than enough to make some sound retirement decisions.
Here are three questions I’d encourage any twentysomething to ask themselves.
If money were no object, what would you do with your time?
Some people would choose to be idle with their time, enjoying all of the freedom that comes with it. They’d party. They’d go on trips. They’d goof off. They’d play on their Xbox all day long.
Other people would want to work for something or build something. They’d spend their time with a volunteer project – or maybe even start their own. They need to have a big productive project in their lives in order to feel fulfilled and happy.
Most retirement advice is written for people in the first group. They’re the ones who, when they reach retirement age, will want to travel and spend their later years enjoying themselves with leisure as much as possible.
The other group gets personal enjoyment out of working and being productive. With the many opportunities already available for people to work as late as they’d like in life, such people will probably work at something – whether it’s gainful employment or a big volunteer project or some mix of the two – until they drop dead with a tool in their hand.
If you’re in the first group, you need to be saving as much for retirement as possible. While it’s fine to put money into riskier investments when you’re young, you should start moving into more conservative investments – like bonds or treasuries or cash – pretty early on, even as much as twenty years before retiring.
If you’re in the second group, saving for “retirement” basically means saving for the last year or two of life when you’re unable to work and also saving for some supplemental income for the last few decades of your life. You likely don’t need to kick the savings into high gear and can afford risk a little later than the other group, sliding the money into conservative investments five or ten years before you begin to withdraw it.
Are you frugal?
Do you carefully watch your pennies? Do you spend time seeking out the best deal on an item? Are you find with eating beans and rice a few evenings a week because it’s a dirt-cheap meal that’s still pretty healthy? Do you buy – or at least try – generic versions of products?
If such choices come naturally to you, to put it simply, financial life as an adult is going to be easier for you. After all, if you’re careful with your pennies, the dollars will follow. Because of this, you’re likely to have built up significant assets before you reach retirement age – in which case, pushing your retirement savings to the hilt might stand in the way of your other goals in life.
If such choices seem completely alien to you, you’ll have a more challenging road ahead of you. Almost always, you’re better off financially if you minimize the number of financial mistakes you’ll make along the way. In that case, you’re probably better off pushing your savings up a bit.
Are you interested in having children?
When you picture yourself twenty years in the future, does that vision involve children? For some people, it does – I know it certainly always did for me. For others, it does not – some of my closest friends are wonderful around my kids, but they can’t imagine having children of their own.
Parenting is not for everyone. It can be infinitely rewarding to the right person, but infinitely frustrating to others. On top of that, it’s incredibly costly – little people are unquestionably expensive. They rely on you for everything – their food, their clothes, their space, their education. If you don’t relish in this thought, parenting might not be right for you – and that’s fine.
If you do envision children in your future, kick start that retirement. The more you save now means that later on you’ll be substantially ahead of the savings curve and you can pull back on your contributions in order to devote more resources to raising your children. Even if you end up not having children, you can still pull back later on in order to enjoy travel and other adult endeavors. Also important is the fact that a well-funded retirement means that you’ll never wind up being a financial burden to your kids.
On the other hand, if you are doing everything you can to avoid the remote possibility of children, it makes sense to save for retirement at a slower rate now, allowing you extra money to enjoy the more adult-oriented things you want out of life.
Just worry about the saving for now – don’t sweat the details.
Many people get overly wrought about making sure that their money is in the “perfect” investment. To put it simply, your investment choice is secondary – by a long shot – to simply saving your money as soon as possible and as much as possible.
Start saving now. If you don’t know what to invest in, just ask for suggestions from the representative there. Since it’s a tax-deferred retirement account, you can make investment changes later on without any tax issues.
One good default choice is a “Target Retirement” plan, which basically means that the fund manager will put you in aggressive investments when you’re young, then gradually make the investments more conservative as you grow older. This is a great choice if you’re unsure.
Later on, when you’ve gained some experience in the world and perhaps learned more about investing, you can take a more direct hand in your choices.
For now, though, the best decision you can make is to simply start saving.
Good luck.
Continue reading Three Retirement Questions for People in Their Twenties …
From The Simple Dollar.
Do you get just the Sunday papers? It’s time to rethink that
My “day job” is that of a reporter at The Monroe Evening News, which is an employee-owned, independent, daily newspaper in Monroe, Mich.
So feel free to consider this tip as coming from a biased source.
But it’s also fact.
If you get only the Sunday edition of your local or regional newspaper, and newspaper circulation numbers across the country prove that many people do that, then you are missing the sales fliers that the advertisers deliberately schedule for other days.
Did you see the Toys R Us ad that was in the Friday newspaper? I didn’t blog about it because I didn’t have time – we had a family gathering last night. But the sale was only good last night and until 1 p.m. today.
Some of the Monroe, Mich., drugstore and grocery fliers also are distributed in my newspaper on Saturdays and Mondays – rather than in the big stack on Sundays.
The advertisers request their ads run on specific days for a variety of reasons. The newspapers accommodate the schedules as best as possible for their market. (Some newspapers have recently dropped publication days or delivery days, some newspapers don’t have their own Sunday editions, and my newspaper has long observed four holidays during the year when there is no print edition).
Now we are coming up on the Christmas shopping season and you’ll want to be able to reference those sales fliers as you make your holiday purchases decisions.
What can you do about that?
Get a home delivery subscription to a 7-day (or whatever is a full week for your local newspaper) as soon as possible. And then every day, you want to take a quick glance at the newspaper headlines and sales flier packets, even if you have to wait until later to read the content in detail.
Like I said, take this tip with a grain of salt if you want. A large part of any newspaper employee’s paycheck is based on paid subscription / newsstand circulation numbers — and the print advertising purchases that are based on those statistics. I don’t get extra money for page views on this blog.
Yes, you can look up the store sites on the web, and I do from time to time. But it takes a horrendous amount of time to look up every store you might shop at.
Yes, you can sign up for e-mail alerts, and I do have a few coming to my mailbox. But honestly, I’m looking for e-mails from my friends and family when I have the email on. (Delete, delete, delete. …)
And while I do post sales and deals on this blog, that is not my primary purpose for existing. In fact, I held off doing that for several months because I wanted my readers to be thinking about other ways to stretch their money. I was also annoyed at seeing how many web site forum members and bloggers post retail sales without saying which city or region that promotion is good for, or who “leak” unverified information.
But it’s a pretty quick task to pull apart a local newspaper’s ad sections and see what the sales of the day are in your community.
And when you have that newspaper arriving to your home on a daily basis, maybe you’ll notice the money-saving tips and public service announcements that reporters and columnists have been listing all along in the news, feature and community / neighbor sections.
Where do you think I get the local PSAs from that I post on this blog?
Continue reading Do you get just the Sunday papers? It’s time to rethink that …
From Monroe on a Budget.
Time Change This Weekend~Don’t Forget!
© Karenr | Dreamstime.com
Don’t forget about setting your clocks back one hour tonight! The easiest way to remember which way is this:
Spring Forward= Set your clocks up one hour
Fall Back= Set your clocks back one hour
Happy Fall!
Continue reading Time Change This Weekend~Don’t Forget! …
From Econobusters.
FREE Holiday Digital Supplement from The Old Schoolhouse
It’s finally here! Have you seen or heard about this jewel yet?
The Old Schoolhouse has put together this fabulous FREE holiday digital supplement full of recipes, activities, stories and more! In fact, to help with your organization for the holidays, they have nestled in the pages of this magazine two calendars to help better organize your holidays so that you can be stress free!
Just click the picture to be taken to the download page and you can browse through this wonderful magazine all day! If you would like to share this link with your friends, have them go here:
http://thehomeschoolmagazine.com/Digital-Supplement/Thanksgiving&Christmas.html
Continue reading FREE Holiday Digital Supplement from The Old Schoolhouse …
From Econobusters.