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• 'I.O.U.S.A.' -- some inconvenient financial truths

  Posted Oct 01 2008, 08:04 AM by Donna Freedman
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  Filed under: debt, banking, spending, taxes, Donna Freedman
  Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money

  I got a massive headache at a screening of "I.O.U.S.A." on Monday night. As I left the theater I noticed that a lot of moviegoers looked a bit queasy. "They didn't tell me it was going to be a horror film," I joked to one woman. She nodded, and shuddered. Actually shuddered.
  

  Not enough people are going to see this movie, I think, because it deals with a subject we're all really tired of hearing about: America's fiscal improvidence.   Read More...

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• Pushing the envelope -- by reusing it

  Posted Dec 21 2007, 09:36 AM by Donna Freedman
  Rating:
  Filed under: extreme savings, spending, taxes, Donna Freedman
  Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money

  When I was a kid, I’d see my elders consulting tattered envelopes with words like DISH LIQUID, FLOUR and CINNAMON written on the backs. None of the frugal folks I knew would waste a perfectly good piece of paper just for a list of what to buy at the Food Fair.
  

  As an adult, I used a lot of Post-its. The little yellow squares festooned just about every flat surface I owned, from dining table to car dashboard to the inside of my wallet (where, as a bonus, they obscured my highly unflattering driver’s license photo).
  

  One day my supply of stickies ran out. I plucked a utility-bill envelope from the top of the wastebasket -- no mixed-paper recycling in our town back then -- and scribbled the next day’s to-do list on the back. One of the first things I wrote was "TAKE OUT TRASH."   Read More...

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