Search results for family
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Posted
Sep 27 2007, 09:33 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Your daughter is a "late-bloomer." She's 28 and still living at home. What's your obligation to her, particularly when supporting her is delaying your retirement? A young blogger examines the ethics involved in this situation.
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Posted
Oct 02 2007, 09:45 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
An admirer of America's cheapest family recounts the lessons he's learned from the Economides clan, a married couple and five children who live on $35,000 a year (and paid off their house in nine years) in Arizona. Teamwork, organization and an unwavering commitment to make frugality a lifestyle (these folks don't use credit cards) work, and even the smallest savings add up.
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Posted
Oct 10 2007, 09:23 AM
by
Donna Freedman
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Seattle is loaded with blackberry vines. The sight of all that free fruit makes me want to forage each summer. My arms get so thorn-raked it looks like I’ve tried to exorcise a cat, but I fill the freezer, make jam, and eat blackberries almost every day for weeks.
On my way to pick berries one end-of-summer day, I saw a dark-purple blob in the dust. A plum had fallen from a tree in a nearby yard. I broke open the windfall and took a tentative nibble from its golden interior. Sweet as the memory of first love.
Peeking through the fence, I could see the tree was loaded. I asked the homeowners if I could trade them a jar of jam for the fruit I’d need to make some. They told me to help myself: “We’re glad someone wants it.”
Two batches of jam later, I posted a thread on the Smart Spending message board: Who else out there “puts food by” each year? Do you grow it? Buy it from a farm? Scrounge and scavenge like me?
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Posted
Oct 22 2007, 09:31 AM
by
Donna Freedman
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
When life hands you flank steak, make hamburgers. At least that was the tip offered recently by Mary Hunt of Debt-Proof Living: Pick up loss-leader cuts of beef and ask the store butcher to grind them.
Hunt found, and ground, London broil for $1.47. When was the last time you saw ground beef for $1.47 a pound?
But I wondered whether she just had a particularly friendly butcher. So I went shopping.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that all four supermarkets I visited were willing to do special meat orders. Chop meat as a special order -- yep, it made me laugh, too.
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Posted
Oct 25 2007, 06:47 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Sarah Winfrey at partner blog Wise Bread . Most of us have ideas we think might sell, and most of us think we'd love to work for ourselves. Is that really a good idea? Here are 10 things to consider if you're thinking about starting your own business. Do you care? You have a good idea that might make some money, and you envision yourself conducting business by cell phone while watching the waves in Fiji. But do you actually care? Do you want to make people's lives better, easier or more fulfilling through your new business? If you don't care, you'll run out of steam before the long haul of building a business even gets started. Do you have what it takes? The reality of an entrepreneur's life is, well ... craziness. Long hours. Disappointments. Patience even when the bills are piling up. You are investing all of yourself and much of your future in the public's response to a product. If you don't have the persistence, the blasted stick-with-it-ness to keep going no matter
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Posted
Oct 29 2007, 05:40 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
A post by The Baglady about a former boyfriend makes for a lighthearted Monday morning read about how not to save money . He lives with his parents and rationalizes not paying rent because he serves as their ex officio "marriage counselor, system administrator and financial adviser." He eats cheap spaghetti every night (unless he was taking Baglady out to dine for free at a company party). He also is one of those nonflushers . (Don't want to waste any water, do we?) Baglady has no regrets about ending this relationship: "Looking back, I am pretty glad that I broke up with him because if I married him I would have had no wedding, and right now I would probably be living with his parents and eating 50-cent spaghetti." (BL is no bag lady, by the way. Her first job out of college came with a $60,000 salary.)
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Posted
Oct 29 2007, 09:19 AM
by
Donna Freedman
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
If the Toys “R” Us Big Toy Book is here, can Christmas be far behind?
Well, yeah. Fifty-eight days behind. But face it: No matter how much we whine about too-early holiday marketing, retailers aren't going to change their ways. We're the ones who have to change, i.e. adjust our reactions to the hype.
"Beebegurl," a Smart Spending message board reader, pays no attention to the retail calendar. In a thread called “Christmas Gifts,” she wrote that she shops for her grandkids long before holiday hysteria sets in. This allows her to look around "without pressure and at my own leisure and make a rational decision."
The most rational decision of all? Once she finds the perfect gift, she waits for it to go on sale. "I never ever pay retail for any toy."
Clearly, Beebegurl rocks.
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Posted
Oct 30 2007, 05:12 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
We love a fun quiz, so we decided to go along when Lynnae at beingfrugal asked readers to play " Frugal or cheap? How would you rate each of the following situations? " Some of the 11 are easy, like reusing margarine containers to store food in the fridge. (We picked frugal.) How about these: "Leaving no tip for a waitress, because you can’t afford to tip." (Tacky. We picked cheap.) Or "serving leftovers when you have people over for dinner." (Tasty? It's frugal.) Is it frugal or cheap to regift a wedding present (it depends), or to ask "family members to chip in for Thanksgiving Dinner"? ( They're bordering on cheap if they haven't already asked.) Join the fun and play along with Lynnae, who writes, "The bottom line is, when your 'frugality' begins to impact other people in a negative way , it becomes cheap."
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Posted
Nov 02 2007, 12:05 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Blogger Meredith H. Kaiser describes her education about the power of advertising in a wonderfully entertaining post called " You're ugly, poorly dressed and uncool -- basically a loser " at SavingAdvice . It seems that Meredith was always cognizant of advertising's potential. As a teenager, she was convinced that subliminal messages to buy popcorn were flashing on the movie screen. Several years later, she got the real lowdown from an ad executive stranded with her on a grounded plane: He schooled her about product- placement pollution in movies. "I’m sad to see the opportunity that artists have to inspire wasted on one more explosive chase scene in a certain brand of car whose logo gets as much screen time as the lead actor," she writes. Now she's acutely aware of the prompts to purchase all around us (we hope her cynicism about TV news is misplaced) and their not-so-hidden message: If you don't own this, you're a loser.
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Posted
Nov 02 2007, 03:33 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
The Dough Roller 's financial assets weren't inherited. What he got from his upbringing was an appreciation for a dollar and what life is like without a sufficient supply of them. His candid account his stepfather's bad financial decisions (DR lived with his mother and stepfather) and their impact on the family contains many stark lessons about money and life . We'll share this detail from his post: The death of his father in a car crash entitled DR to Social Security benefits, which were used to pay his stepfather's bills and avoid bankruptcy. The post ends with DR's summary of insights he gained. Among them: "We are the sum of our circumstances multiplied by our choices. Each of our circumstances differs but they almost always involve struggles. From those struggles, we can learn and we can choose."
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