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Posted
Jul 02 2008, 07:57 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. You are going to be fired from your job this Friday. Read that statement again. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine if that sentence were true in your own life. Would you be ready?
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Posted
Jun 20 2008, 06:08 AM
by
Karen Datko
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. Almost every day, people write to me with intimate details about their debt situations. Some of them are pretty mild and can be taken care of easily with a little bit of elbow grease. Others are horrifying and will take some very serious attention to manage. In either situation, the principles for getting rid of debt are much the same. Similar tactics can be applied whether the debt is a $200 credit card balance or a mountain of $250,000 worth of various forms of debt.
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Posted
Jun 13 2008, 06:26 AM
by
Karen Datko
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. Last month, I was sorely tempted to pick up Mario Kart Wii. Mario Kart has been my favorite video game series. I played it for hours and hours with my friends in high school on the Super Nintendo, then burned countless hours in the college dorms playing it on an N64. Even as recently as last Christmas, I stayed up most of the night playing Mario Kart DS wirelessly against my wife's family at their Christmas celebration (one person had a cartridge and several of us had DS units.)
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Posted
Jun 05 2008, 09:29 PM
by
Karen Datko
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This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. Prior to our financial meltdown, my wife and I never sat down and talked about our finances. Right after the meltdown, we talked about things almost every day. Through our recovery, the number of meetings slowly declined to a monthly family financial meeting. The meetings have become a big part of the financial glue of our marriage.
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Posted
May 30 2008, 07:31 AM
by
Karen Datko
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This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. Recently, my wife and I kicked around the idea of installing a clothesline in our backyard. We both grew up in the country and we both had clotheslines for drying clothes in the spring, summer and fall. A quick cost analysis. An average dryer load costs about 30 to 40 cents to dry, so we'll give it an average of 35 cents a load. Given the installation cost of the clothesline we investigated (about $30, all told), we could recoup the cost of drying the clothes with about 89 loads, and after that it's gravy.
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Posted
Apr 25 2008, 08:04 AM
by
Karen Datko
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This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. My big, overarching dream is to achieve true financial independence. By that, I mean that I have enough money saved and invested that I can live off the interest and investment income -- a point that I've discussed before as the crossover point. This is a huge goal, one that I won't achieve for many years no matter what path I choose. I dream about achieving this goal about the time my final child graduates from high school -- roughly 25 years from now.
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Posted
Apr 04 2008, 06:54 AM
by
Karen Datko
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This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. Recently I was leafing through Jonathan Pond's very good personal-finance book, "Grow Your Money," which I had reviewed a while back. In it, he makes the astute statement that everyone puts their money into three basic groups: necessities, luxuries and saving for the future. The more I thought about that statement, the more profound I thought it was, because it provides a framework for the financial problems ailing many Americans. Obviously, the pile that will get you in the best shape over the long term is the "saving for the future" pile, but people's failure to do that is only part of the problem. The reason so many Americans are in poor financial shape is that they put more than they should into one of these areas to the detriment of others. Let me show you what I mean.
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Posted
Mar 28 2008, 06:59 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. Just this morning, I was leafing through my favorite personal-finance book of all, "Your Money or Your Life," when I came across the idea of the "purge-and-splurge" cycle. From page 148, discussing what happens after you start buckling down and paying serious attention to your financial state: "In the first month of recording your figures you might confront one of our national foibles. Your income entry might well be lower than your expense entry. You may have spent more than you earned. (It is, after all, the American way.) Seeing this reality might come as a bit of a shock. Chances are you'll want things to change -- and change now. Accustomed to budgets, diets, and New Year's resolutions, you swear on a stack of bank statements and credit cards that next month will be better.
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Posted
Mar 07 2008, 07:47 AM
by
Karen Datko
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This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. Many people don't bother to clip coupons, mostly because they believe that a 50-cent coupon isn't worth the effort. On the surface, I agree. Without a clever coupon strategy, it's probably not worth the effort. About two months ago, I was talking about this with a friend who works for Hy-Vee, a grocery store chain here in Iowa. He gave me a tip: Take the coupon section out of the Sunday paper and put it aside for four weeks. Then open it up and clip everything that's even remotely of interest, whether you'd normally buy it or not. Take the coupons to the store and look at the shelves. Magically, most of the coupons will sync up with stuff that's on sale. When you combine the sale price and the coupon, you'll usually be able to get items for next to nothing. I tried this myself. I saved the fliers from a month ago, cut them up and took them to the store. What did I find? About 40% of the coupons I cut out matched up with items on sale. I wound up getting salad dressing for less than a dollar, a package of diapers at the cheapest price I've ever bought them for, and a container of good vanilla ice cream for 19 cents. And those are just the ones I remember.
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Posted
Feb 29 2008, 08:02 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. Look at these 12 little hacks and think about how simple they are. Switch your savings account from your local bank to ING Direct. That's the bank I switched to about a year and a half ago in order to get a higher interest rate (then more than 4%). They made the whole thing easy as pie -- it took about five minutes -- and I've never had anything but stellar customer service. Drink one less coffee a week. Let's say you stop at Starbucks -- or your preferred coffeehouse -- three times a week. Just trim it back to two. That's it. Call one credit card company and ask for a rate reduction. Just flip over your card and call that number on the back. Ask to speak to a supervisor if the first human you get won't reduce your rate.
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