Personal Finance Advice

If you’re a patient person with a lot of time on your hands, you can make some extra money by waiting in line. Whenever a high demand product is released, people wait in line for hours, sometimes days, to be the first to get their hands on it. There are also long lines for concert [...]

Last week Netflix raised their rates, increasing the price of some plans by as much as sixty percent. Where before a plan with one DVD out at a time and unlimited streaming was $9.99 per month, the same service will now cost $15.98. Ouch. The outrage online was swift and furious. Customers were losing a [...]

A coworker of mine recently decided to get her finances in order. She admitted her debt troubles and her concerns that they don’t have anything saved for the future, let alone emergencies. While I applaud her desire to fix things, I question the method and the seriousness of her effort. I had to hide a [...]

Working with the dead typically appeals to two types of people.Those who don’t like a lot of personal interaction in their work (the dead aren’t going to complain or engage in office politics, after all) and those who are compassionate and derive satisfaction from helping others through their grief. Either way, working in the funeral [...]

Most people get many offers for various memberships. Health clubs, warehouse clubs, hobby groups, country clubs, alumni groups, auto clubs, and professional organizations all want us to be members. Unfortunately, very few clubs are free to join. Many come with hefty dues. While you’ll probably get some benefits from joining the organization, the main question [...]

Chik-Fil-A hosted their annual “Cow Appreciation Day” last week. If you went to the restaurant fully dressed as a cow, you got a free meal. If you wore just a little cow gear, you got a free entree. We decided that it would be fun so we made some simple costumes from white clothes we [...]

It’s July and time to start thinking about Christmas. Seriously. If you want to work as Santa Claus this Christmas, now is the time to start training and looking for work. Santa work isn’t hard to come by. Many stores, malls, civic groups, and party companies hire Santas. Santa is needed for parades and private [...]

We live in a chronically sleep deprived society and many products exist to make things easier and keep us going. However, nothing is a true substitute for just getting some extra sleep. We all know that a lack of sleep can cost you physically, mentally, and emotionally. It can make you grumpy, slow your reactions, [...]

In amongst the usual depressing crime and war stories, our local paper recently carried an article about a couple who has been married for seventy years. That’s such a rare feat that the U.S. Census doesn’t even track the number of couples that make it that far. The census stops counting at fifty years of [...]

This may not seem strange to those who have embraced the technological age, but many people still haven’t fully grasped how much they can save on postage in the electronic age. Even those who have embraced technology often overlook postage as an area for savings. It’s such a little thing but when you add in [...]

Many people think that becoming wealthy means that they no longer have to budget. The logic goes that if you have enough money, it’s no longer important how much is spent on various categories. When you have extra money, you don’t have to track where it all goes, right? Wrong. Those who want to remain [...]

While watching the train wreck that is “Extreme Couponing” the other day, I was struck by how so many of these people seemed to have become confused about the difference between saving money and not spending money. One woman was claiming that she’d saved $40,000 on her family’s grocery bill in one year. But would [...]