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Posted
May 07 2009, 04:51 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar.
I love to cook. Along the way, I often discover excellent shortcuts and money-saving tactics for home food preparation. I get excited, and I immediately want to share the idea, but it's simply not enough to warrant a full article on its own.
So, I usually save it. I jot down the idea somewhere in my notes and move on with things.
Recently, I decided to dig through my notes and pull together several of those useful frugal cooking tactics. Hopefully, these tactics will find use in your own kitchen.
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Posted
Sep 19 2008, 05:35 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. Not long ago a friend of mine lost one of his parents very suddenly. It came out of nowhere and felt like a punch in the gut to him. He spent a few weeks almost in a daze lamenting the loss of his father, with whom he was very close, and when he finally came out of that daze, he discovered a few things. He'd racked up quite a bit of credit card debt. He was deeply behind on his work. He had let some important personal things slide. In short, he now had some serious catching up to do in his day-to-day life.
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Posted
Dec 12 2008, 06:43 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. When you're entrenched in a pattern of bad habits and you're challenged to escape those habits, it's very easy to fall back on an excuse of some kind to explain away and justify your poor choices. I know this from experience. I used many excuses to continue my poor spending habits, and I still use them sometimes to talk myself out of exercise or other tasks I know I need to do. Excuses are the epitome of failure. Every time you come up with a weak or unjustifiable reason for not doing something you know you should be doing, you're choosing failure over success. You're choosing to be broke instead of financially healthy.
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Posted
Feb 01 2008, 07:39 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. Quite often at The Simple Dollar, I'll suggest a frugal idea, like rewashing Ziploc bags, and inevitably someone will complain that I'm a "cheapskate" and that I should "get a life." I usually find such comments amusing, simply because those individuals aren't looking at the bigger picture. One instance of frugality doesn't save you very much, but when that instance doesn't take much time, the effective "hourly rate" for frugality can be impressive. Let's take a look at that Ziploc issue to show you what I mean. Let's say that a new Ziploc bag costs 20 cents, roughly appropriate based on the many varieties and quantities you can buy. (We like two-gallon freezer Ziplocs for meal storage, and those are far more than 20 cents, but the sandwich bags are much less.) Now, let's say I need one of those bags. It takes me about six seconds to dig a new one out of the box and about 12 to grab a used one and clean it. That means the time cost of washing and reusing a Ziploc bag is six seconds. That six seconds saves me 20 cents.
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Posted
May 21 2009, 08:57 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar.
Like many families, the schedule of our family changes drastically during the summer. My wife goes on hiatus from her job for a few months, our children are constantly at home, and I strive to rearrange my own work so that I can spend more time with them. Plus, the weather is beautiful, encouraging us to be outside.
We load our summer schedule with all kinds of activities -- camping trips and visits to state parks, community festivals and lots of other things.
But how do you find all of these things. Here are 10 resources we use for finding great free/cheap things to do during the summer.
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Posted
Jul 02 2009, 05:23 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar:
An acquaintance from my previous career wrote to me recently asking about the steps I took when I made the switch to working at home:
It's official: I'm ready to get out of here. I'm tired of working here and I have a lot of people lined up to hire me for home catering and cooking. I'm sure you did a bunch of planning before you made the leap. What exactly did you plan?
I know at least one other former co-worker who is contemplating a similar move into a freelancing gig, though his plans are decidedly less clear at this point.
What exactly did I do during that transition period? I started making a list and soon realized that there were several things I wish I had done. Before I knew it, the e-mail had ballooned into a guide that I thought might be useful to other people.
Here are 15 things I did (or wish I had done) during the months leading up to my transition to working for myself.
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Posted
Nov 16 2007, 08:20 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar . Recently, one of my friends quit his job as an actuary for a large insurance company. He’s single, has a Ph.D. in mathematics, and has no debt. He quit for one reason and one reason alone. I’ll let him tell it to you: I got tired of going home every night mentally exhausted and sitting in front of the TV playing Xbox. It’s what I did almost every night, without a weekend. I made a lot of money, but I had no life to do anything at all. My job ate all of my energy. What’s he doing now? He works the night shift at a local factory, driving a forklift. Half the time he sits on the forklift waiting for a new load, so he has started reading a lot of the classics. He makes $11 an hour, far less than he earned as an actuary, but enough to live on, because he banked most of his income from his actuarial work. You know what? I applaud him. I think it was an excellent response to what I call professional exhaustion. Here’s why I think
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Posted
Feb 15 2008, 07:11 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar. A while back, I reviewed in detail the excellent book "The Path of Least Resistance" by Robert Fritz. He posits that most of the time our lives take the path of least resistance around and through the obstacles of life, both those dealt to us by others and those within our own minds. An extension of that is the idea of a fundamental choice, as opposed to a primary or a secondary choice. A fundamental choice is one that actually affects the definition of who you are as a person. The others are merely suggestions about how to act. For example, a fundamental choice would be to define yourself as a frugal person, whereas a primary choice might be to decide to try to make frugal choices, and a secondary choice would be an individual frugal decision. For a lot of people, this seems like mere wordplay, but there's something deeper at work here. A person who makes the fundamental choice to be a frugal person is a person whose default choice is the frugal one. A primary choice to be frugal doesn't change that; you're merely deciding in harmony with your default choice whenever you can think about it.
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Posted
Mar 28 2008, 06:59 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
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
Apr 03 2009, 08:07 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog The Simple Dollar.
In recent weeks, at least three longtime readers of The Simple Dollar plus a close friend of our family had new babies enter their lives. Congratulations are in order.
The addition of a baby is a major change, to put it lightly. Your life changes in countless little ways because of this new responsibility -- often in ways you do not expect. Your expenses change as well. You spend more on some things and less on others.
Here are eight little thoughts/pieces of advice for all of you new parents out there.
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