Personal Finance Advice

If you’ve been to the dentist lately, you know it isn’t cheap. Making matters worse, many employers don’t offer dental insurance to help defray the cost. Those that do rarely offer comprehensive policies. Dental policies are more likely to cover only a small portion of a treatment leaving you to pay the difference. Many peoples’ [...]

Toilet paper makes up a decent sized chunk of many people’s household budgets. It’s not cheap. When you have a big family or people who just reel it off the roll, the costs go even higher. If you want to cut some money from your budget, there are ways to do without traditional toilet paper. [...]

Your toilet is full of germs! Your tooth enamel is eroding! Your soap dispenser can give you a disease! Criminals are waiting to break into your home the second you turn your back! You could have a disease and not even know it! The germs on your countertop could wipe out your whole family! These [...]

Last week, Beer Guy wrote an entertaining article about some sage financial advice his uncle gave him when he was a boy. The advice (more colorfully phrased) was to avoid getting a girl pregnant until such time as he could be financially responsible for that action. Getting a girl pregnant too young equals financial disaster. [...]

My uncle recently passed away. This would not normally be something that I would share with others, but he also gave me the best financial advice I have ever received. This is advice I would like to share with you so that you can share it with your children. There is no question that he [...]

Sitting here at my computer, late on a Saturday night, I am thinking about one thing — frozen treats, whether ice cream or gelato or frozen yogurt. About fifteen hours ago, I told my wife that if we did nothing else today, we needed to go out for a frozen treat. If I had to [...]

It’s not news that you can make money by becoming a medical research subject. There are ads in most major papers, on TV and the Internet recruiting people with various conditions to try new drugs and therapies. These can be good ways to make money if you qualify and if you aren’t worried about the [...]

Just about every time we go on vacation, someone gets sick. I think it’s because we’re all off our normal routines and we’re exposed to a lot more people. We eat food that we don’t normally eat, we stay out later and get less sleep, we’re around large crowds of germy people, and we are [...]

If you need to make a onetime purchase and you find a way to save a few dollars, it is a good thing. At the same time, if you are going to put a lot of effort into finding ways to save money, it is almost always going to be more beneficial to focus your [...]

If you ever face a medical crisis, you’ll be amazed at how quickly the bills mount up, even with great insurance. You could argue about whether insurers are inherently evil, coldhearted, or callous, but the bottom line is that insurers are businesses that want to get the most money they can out of you. Sometimes [...]

My parents are getting older. Dad will be 83 in a few months. Mom will be 72. Dad suffered a fall a couple of months ago and, although he has recovered, a full recovery was in doubt for quite a while. He is also close to being deaf and can hear only with the help [...]

If you ever find yourself in a position where you need therapy to deal with the stresses and strains of life, your wallet is likely to experience sticker shock. Hour-long sessions usually start around $100 and go up from there. Therapy is sometimes covered by insurance, but many plans exclude it, pay only a small [...]

Women know how expensive cosmetics can be. Even the basic drugstore brands can cost anywhere from $3.00 on up per item. If you buy department store brands, you can easily drop twenty dollars or more on just one item. Given that most women use several items (lipstick, eye shadow, eye liner, foundation, blush, mascara, and [...]

A friend came to me for advice the other day regarding a big problem brewing in his house. His in-laws are getting up in years and have very little saved to cover their health care and long term needs. Health problems are starting to show up and expenses are mounting. They’ve told their daughter and [...]

Health care costs continue to skyrocket. You’ve probably noticed your health insurance premiums jumping up every year. That’s bad news, but unfortunately the hit to your wallet doesn’t stop there. If you drive a car and have auto insurance, you can expect your auto insurance premium to jump every time your health insurance goes up. [...]

Most ice cream stores shops will allow customers to sample flavors before making a purchase. It makes perfect sense for ice cream stores to do that because it lets the ice cream sell itself. The same is true in cheese shops and many other specialty stores. Free samples are great, but they are just that [...]

What do you want? I don’t mean what fantastic things do you wish you owned or could do or could be. What reasonable things do you want in life that you do not currently have? Do you want to be healthier? Do you want to spend more wisely? Do you want a nicer car or [...]

It is hard for me to believe that I have been writing here at Saving Advice for close to two years now. After about 150 columns, I am pleased to count many of you among my new friends! I’ve also developed a sense of how readers are likely to react to anything that I write. [...]

Several years ago I started looking for alternatives to commercial laundry products. I had two main reasons for doing this. First, commercial products were becoming more and more expensive and I was having trouble finding ones that worked well, or at least well enough to justify their price tags. Second, I wanted products that were [...]

By Jeff Apton In today’s healthcare debate nobody seems to be talking much about the high cost of dentistry, or the lack of insurance coverage. Maybe you’re lucky and squeak by with a few cleanings and a filling here and there. For those who are not so lucky, the cost of dentistry can be devastating, [...]