Personal Finance Advice

With New Year’s just past and most people still in the honeymoon phase of their resolutions, it’s worth a brief look at how many self-improvement activities benefit your finances, and how studying one area can have a positive impact on the other. I’ll confess to being something of a self-improvement junkie. Not because my life [...]

Everyone would like to save money on food if it means they can still get the same quality for a better price. One are where most people can save on their food bill is to reduce the amount of food they waste. Americans through out as much as 40% of their food according to a [...]

Over the years I’ve grown wary of using plastic containers for food storage and cooking. Concerns over BPA and other chemicals that leach from plastics have made me shift from plastic to glass or ceramic cookware for most of my cooking and storage needs. That leaves me with a cabinet full of plastic ware that [...]

I stupidly volunteered to help a friend move this month. While I’m out of the heavy lifting business, I did offer to help her pack. In the process of getting her stuff together, we needed to excavate a coffee table. My friend is a “piler.” She has piles of stuff everywhere. In the kitchen, in [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece about how to best organize a pantry. One of the tips in that article was to make sure that you can see everything that you have so that you always know what’s on hand and when it expires. This makes it easy to plan and prepare [...]

Chances are that you’ve had at least one disgusting experience with food that’s been lost in the back of the pantry or in the bottom of the freezer. Mine was the time I excavated the pantry to discover that a can of pineapple had gone so far beyond its expiration date that the can had [...]

One of the things that keeps a lot of people from beginning to get their finances in order is the fear that it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to do so. While it’s certainly true that certain aspects can be time consuming, there are a lot of little steps that anyone [...]

It’s no secret that removing clutter from your home makes for a more pleasant, healthier environment. Less mess makes for easier living and better entertaining, too. What may not be quite so obvious is the fact that eliminating disorder from your home may have financial advantages. Is an untidy living space having a negative impact [...]

One of the best things you can do if you want to achieve financial success is to know yourself and be honest with yourself. Many people don’t know what they want, what their tendencies are, and how their behavior affects their finances. It reminds me of the movie, “Runaway Bride” where Julia Roberts’ character likes [...]

The other day, a friend and I were having a general conversation about personal finance. My friend began by complaining about some debt he has and then he mentioned how he had no idea what he had in his checking account and how he kept getting hit with overdraft fees. He kept railing at the [...]