Search results for education
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Posted
Nov 28 2007, 05:42 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This is frugal giving at its finest. The Happy Rock directs us to a Web site where you can play a word game for free, expand your vocabulary in the process, and provide free rice to feed the world's hungry every time you correctly choose -- or guess -- the meaning of a word. That's right. FreeRice will donate 20 grains of rice for each correct answer. The rice is paid for by companies whose advertising appears on the screen when you play the game, and will be distributed by the U.N. World Food Program. The word game apparently is designed to push your vocabulary but not make you feel stupid. It's multiple choice, and if you get one wrong, you'll move to an easier level until you get the right answer for three words in a row . According to FreeRice.com , almost 188 million grains of rice were donated Tuesday, bringing the total since the game began on Oct. 7 to almost 4.2 billion grains. The word game has 50 levels of difficulty. The Rock happily reports that he made it to level 40.
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Posted
Dec 04 2007, 09:36 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Joseph S. Enoch at partner blog ConsumerAffairs.com. After numerous complaints about Video Professor's sales tactics, ConsumerAffairs.com decided to try the lessons ourselves. For 20 years, John Scherer, otherwise known as the Video Professor, has advertised on cable TV the wonders of his educational software. "I am so confident that I'm going to give you one free disc," he says in his "limited-time- offer" advertisements. In actuality, it appears impossible to get just one free disc. Instead, it is a packaged bundle of three discs that costs $6.95 for shipping and handling. If the customer doesn't return one of the discs, at the customer's expense, within 10 days, that person will be enrolled in an automatic-renewal service that sends new three-disc bundles every month for $79.95.
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Posted
Jan 16 2008, 08:40 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Madison at My Dollar Plan is so disgusted with the illogical way contestants play "Deal or No Deal" that she's thinking about not watching it anymore. It's all mathematics, people, specifically a concept called "expected value," she says. Madison contends that if you apply the equation, you won't walk away like the lady who turned down a $5,500 offer from the "Banker" and became the first contestant to end the game with a penny. She'd earlier rejected higher offers, including one for $207,000.
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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
Feb 20 2008, 05:24 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Shana at Smart Easy Money knows it can be tiresome -- even patronizing -- to say something like "If I knew at your age what I know now." But Shana, at the ripe old age of 37, manages to explain 10 financial lessons she wishes she'd known in her 20s with humor and good grace. Lesson One: "Save early and often." Shana regrets that she didn't contribute to a 401(k) until she was 29, and then put in only 4%. She adds: "Well, I did have a 401(k) for about 15 minutes when I was 23, but I'd only contributed about $20. By the time I paid the fees for cashing it out (when I left the job), it was only about $3."
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Posted
Mar 11 2008, 06:08 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. If your employer offers tuition reimbursement and you're not taking advantage of it, you're leaving a tremendous amount of value on the table each year. In the two jobs I've had since graduating college in 2003, I've been lucky enough to be offered the opportunity to pursue higher education in return for sacrificing some of my time. At my first job, every education dollar I spent was fully reimbursed (you were allowed to take two classes a semester, or six a year) with no requirements afterward. In my second job, I was afforded $5,000 a year with some continuation-of-work requirements. Through both programs a majority of my MBA was paid for. In both cases, I took advantage of reimbursement to the fullest extent possible. If you have this opportunity, you should too.
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Posted
Mar 13 2008, 04:00 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Need to clean odd things like moldy boat carpets or that disgusting keyboard you're typing on? Check out How to Clean Anything. Traveling in a strange city and want to know where the clean public restrooms are, just in case? Yes, there's a Web site for that too (plus daily bathroom trivia questions or "looisms"). Or are you moving and need free information about school districts, housing, or simply whether your new salary is competitive for the area? Try HomeFair. We love lists of helpful Web sites, especially when they can save us money or simplify life, so we immediately bookmarked Dumb Little Man's "30-plus useful Web sites you probably didn't know about."
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Posted
Apr 07 2008, 06:25 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from J.D. Roth at partner blog Get Rich Slowly. When I was young and stupid, I became addicted to spending. I got my first credit card in college, and over the next 15 years, I accumulated $35,000 of debt. I'm debt-free now, and have even begun building a nest egg, but I didn't reach this place without making a lot of financial mistakes along the way. And I still make mistakes. Dealing with mistakes and setbacks is an important tool in your personal-finance arsenal. Preventing problems The best defense is a good offense. I used to spend a lot of time reacting to problems: bounced checks, car repairs, soccer injuries, and -- worst of all -- my own dumb choices. I never could seem to get ahead. Then I realized that the best way to defend against financial setbacks is to actually prepare for them before they arrive. Simple, I know, but it's the simple stuff like this that forms the basis of smart personal finance. Two methods in particular helped me deflect many setbacks.
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Posted
May 26 2008, 06:45 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from J.D. Roth at partner blog Get Rich Slowly. I recently gave my first-ever presentation about personal finance. I spoke to a group of about 70 graduating seniors from a nearby university. I was the fourth and final speaker of the evening. Before I talked about personal finance, the audience listened to three outstanding descriptions of life after college. Brian Reick The first speaker was Brian Reick, who described his experience of moving from job to job. He began knocking on doors right out of school and eventually found work. But the job wasn't perfect, and neither was he. He was fired after only two years. This experience taught him a couple things:
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Posted
Jun 24 2008, 05:45 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity: Do you want to know how I shaved nearly 13% off my college costs? I took Advanced Placement classes. I graduated college a semester early in part because I had loaded up on AP classes while I was in high school. Someone got it into my head that I could take AP classes for free (not counting the nominal fee for the exam) and get college credit for getting high marks on the AP tests. At the time, my brain wasn't thinking, "Oh, I can save money on college," but rather, "I can spend time now and have it count twice -- once in high school and once in college," so it was in part the bit of hustle inside of me that spurred me to action.
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