Search results for spending
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Posted
Sep 28 2009, 06:23 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.
An anonymous GRS reader submitted a question last week that hits close to home:
I have a family member who this past year has been in serious financial trouble. He is one of the most ambitious and intelligent people I know and I would have never imagined him getting in this kind of trouble. His ambition may have been his downfall as he keeps shooting for the stars and has fallen short on some of his business ideas, which may have put him in a more vulnerable position when the economy turned south.
He is now living in debt and struggling to put food on the table for his wife and four young boys. He has had to live on credit cards for several months and they are all maxed out. I have never seen firsthand anyone in this much trouble.
My question to you is: When faced with job loss and depleted savings, how can you avoid going into credit red? To what lengths would you go to avoid living on credit cards and missing payments on just about everything? In the situation, is credit rating even worth anything?
As I say, this situation hits close to home. Last year, I wrote about my little brother, Tony. (I say "little brother," but he's 36 now.) Tony's family got caught up in the mortgage mess, buying a home in Bend, Ore., at the height of the bubble -- and before their home in Portland, Ore., had sold. Six months earlier and things would have been fine. But things weren't fine. They couldn't sell either house. The market went to hell and they lost both homes to foreclosure.
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Posted
Sep 25 2009, 10:33 AM
by
Donna Freedman
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Inside a neighborhood newspaper recently I found a coupon section with the headline, "Frugal is hip. It's OK to clip."
Hip? Suddenly I'm hip? For years people debated my sanity, sometimes openly, because I shopped thrift stores, used coupons, made soup stock from chicken bones. Turns out I was just a bit early to a party that others have finally deemed cool enough to attend.
At various times in recent history it has also been hip to wear shoulder pads, cook with oat bran and turn rocks into pets. I don't want frugality to be hip. I want it to last.
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Posted
Sep 24 2009, 05:50 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar.
We have little kids. Kids are messy. Our daughter spills milk or juice on almost a nightly basis. Our son, who's a bit older, doesn't make messes as often, but when he does, they tend to be even more disastrous, such as a full jar of salsa knocked off the counter and shattered all over the floor.
For years, our solution to this problem has been a big roll of paper towels. It's simply what we're familiar with and, like many simple and familiar things in life, it's almost an automatic thing to have on hand. We simply have paper towels in the kitchen.
A few weeks ago, though, after we bought another batch of them at Sam's Club, I began to really question that purchase. Sure, we have a lot of messes, but did we really need to be dropping $5 or more a month on paper that we wind up throwing into the landfill? Probably not.
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Posted
Sep 17 2009, 04:37 PM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Here's good news for many sports and concert fans: Ticketmaster has found a way to sidestep the scalpers and control the price of ticket resales.
How does it work? It's made possible by Ticketmaster's paperless ticket option. Limited now in application, you can expect that more and more ticket sales will become paper-free.
Our Smart Spending colleague Teresa Mears explained how paperless ticketing worked when she did a most unfrugal thing by attending a concert by the Boss, who likes the paper-free approach. (I am extremely jealous.) Teresa said:
To get into Sunday's Bruce Springsteen concert in South Florida, concertgoers had to swipe the credit cards with which they had bought the tickets. The handheld machine then printed out paper tickets with their seat numbers on them. If one person had bought the tickets for a group, they all had to enter at once.
Venues also require a separate photo ID.
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Posted
Sep 17 2009, 11:55 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Ashley Baxter has good cause to be worried about her friend. The woman has gone on a major plastic spending spree since she became unemployed five months ago.
We'd heard that such people exist but hadn't run across a case quite like this. It's one thing to maintain your normal standard of living for appearance's sake when you're jobless. That's bad. But this seems worse. Along with the $40 lunches, $300 eyelash extensions and extremely expensive handbags, the friend is now committed to an extra $300 in monthly payments on debt that she didn't have when she was working, Ashley writes at SpendOnLife.
Those aren't living expenses, folks. Is a credit card intervention in order?
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Posted
Sep 16 2009, 02:09 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This guest post comes from Baker at Man vs. Debt.
I think I'm going to enjoy writing this much more than you enjoy reading it.
For those of you who aren't familiar with Tyler Durden, he is an essential character in "Fight Club," which is both a novel and movie. While the novel came a few years before, the movie escalated into a cult classic in the years following its DVD release. If you aren't familiar with the character, well ... we should probably part ways here.
For those who are still with me, let's get some things out of the way. We aren't going to be talking about masculinity, violence, mental disorders, religion, or even politics. Those themes run rampant through the movie and have been discussed in great length and detail by individuals much smarter and more witty than me.
Instead, we are going to have fun. We are going to dive into some of Tyler's most famous quotes (from the movie) and attempt to pull any applicable personal-finance wisdom from them. The movie's strong anti-consumerism message will make some of these very easy, while others may seem like more of a stretch. I'll let you decide.
Here are Tyler's thought on a wide variety of personal-finance themes:
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Posted
Sep 11 2009, 01:06 PM
by
Donna Freedman
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
A few weeks ago I went out to gather blackberries. Something told me to leave by the back door rather than the front. I've learned to listen to these impulses, so into the alley I went.
Half a block away, I found the reason why.
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Posted
Sep 11 2009, 07:13 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog The Dough Roller.
I can still remember my first ATM card. I was a teenager in high school when ATM and debit cards first arrived on the scene. I had a passbook savings account with our local bank, and they issued a debit card that I could use to make deposits and withdrawals to and from my account.
Taking money out of my account when the bank was closed was nothing short of amazing. But my ATM card of the 1980s was a lot different from debit and prepaid cards for teens today.
The most important difference was that it was not part of the Visa or MasterCard debit network. When ATM cards first came out, they could be used only at a bank automatic teller machine. I couldn't use the card at a store. And of course there was no Internet, so we couldn't check our account online, either. On top of that, the debit card didn't work with all ATM machines. You had to make sure that the ATM was on the same network as your bank, or the card wouldn't work.
With the advent of the Internet and the Visa and MasterCard debit networks, a whole new generation of financial products was born. And recently, companies have begun using those tools to market debit and prepaid cards and other financial products to teens.
Let's look at a few of those new financial products (some recently reviewed by Smart Money), and then I'd like to hear your view on these products.
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Posted
Sep 10 2009, 05:08 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'm often tempted to spend money that I shouldn't.
I'm good at restraining my impulsive nature. I don't simply go into stores and then emerge later with a hefty bag, a credit card bill, and a dazed look on my face. Still, in certain places, I am strongly tempted to spend. I look around and see tons of items that I'd like to have.
Here are seven places that really fuel my spending desires.
Bookstores. What can I say? I love to read. I read about 10 books a month for my own enjoyment and probably five more for The Simple Dollar and other professional purposes. The smell and feel and sight of a new book are like manna to me. I usually resist most of my impulses by arguing to myself that I can get those books at the library or at PaperBackSwap, but it's definitely a struggle -- one I don't always win.
Williams-Sonoma. As I get more and more adept in the kitchen, I'm slowly upgrading my kitchen equipment to superior versions of the cheap (and sometimes problematic) equipment I have on hand. Williams-Sonoma does an extremely good job of convincing me to accelerate this upgrade process, enticing me with better knives, a wide array of very nice pots and pans, and lots of other items.
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Posted
Sep 03 2009, 09:00 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
One of the pleasures of reading Sports Illustrated is the brief weekly feature called "Sign of the Apocalypse."
We think SI nailed it with this "sign": "A Long Island company is offering insurance to fantasy football owners that allows them to recoup their league fees if a player on their team gets hurt."
Could anyone possibly think this is a good idea? Let's see.
Bing: Fantasy football rankings
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