Here’s part three of my mini-series on saving on medical care. The article upon which this is based was writen by Sid Kirchheimer and originally published in Bottom Line/Personal. Today we’ll be covering tips #5 and #6. Here goes… [more]

Here’s a quick look at some articles that caught my eye over the past week. [more]

FiveCentNickel took part in three carnivals this week. Here they are along with links to my articles that were included in each.

The Best of Me Symphony included “Buying Home Depot 10% Discount Coupons on eBay.” Also included was “Remember the 80s?” from raising4boys.com.

The Carnival of Personal Finance included “2006 Federal Tax Rates.”

The Festival of Frugality included “Skip Lunch, Save $100k.”

Remember when I was beating myself up for missing the deadline for our Home Depot $100 gift card rebate (by a single friggin’ day)? I later noted that they had acknowledged receipt of our rebate submission. Well, I’ve been periodically checking back on the status of our rebate and today I was thrilled to see the following message:

Your gift card was mailed on 26-Sep-2006. Please allow at least 30 days for delivery.

Woohoo! Looks like we’ll be getting our $100 after all. And if you’ve ever relocated like we did this summer, then you know that $100 at Home Depot is as good as straight cash in the months following your move.

I meant to follow up on this last week, but it somehow slipped my mind… Our term life insurance applications arrived two days after we applied through Intelliquote, and we had our portamedic appointment four days later. Since we went up quite a bit in terms of coverage, my wife and I both had to have an EKG to go along with the basic blood work and urine sample. Now we’re just waiting on the underwriters. We’ve been told that because of the amount of coverage that we’re buying, this will take as long as six weeks.

Here’s part two of my mini-series on saving on medical care. The article upon which this is based was writen by Sid Kirchheimer and originally published in Bottom Line/Personal. Today we’ll be covering tips #3 and #4. Here goes… [more]

A comment on my post on saving money by packing your lunch got me to thinking. The argument went as follows:

There are better ways to save money. Focus on the big things. Saving a small percentage of high expenses is much more preferable to saving [a] high percentage on small expenses.

While this seems to make a lot of sense on the surface, I’m not sure that this is good advice for the average Joe. Rather, I’d be willing to bet (with no real data to back this up) that for many people, the most profitable (and painless) place to trim spending would be in the arena of ’small’ discretionary purchases.

That being said, I’d love to hear what you guys think. Is it more important to focus your savings efforts on big ticket items, or should you focus on trimming your small expenses?

Here’s a quick look at some of my favorite posts from a year ago this past week:

• Misguided Money Fears - Worried about dying young, or the stock market crashing, etc.? Don’t worry, be happy. You’re much more likely to experience a long-term disability or suffer from a long period of subpar returns (among other things).

• Buying a New Car, Part II - Another step on the path to our new CR-V.

• Car Buying Mistakes - A rundown of common mistakes that people make when buying a car.

I just ran across an article in Bottom Line/Personal by Sid Kirchheimer that’s chock full of tips on how to save on medical care. While it’s not available online, some of the tips are good enough that I thought I’d create a mini-series and run through them here. Here goes… [more]

Coming on the heels of numerous reports on falling gas prices, OPEC has started talking about cutting output. After all, crude prices have fallen below $60/barrel for the first time in six months, and much of the world has shown a complete willingness to pay the higher prices that we’ve been faced with, so why not? In other news, now looks to be a particularly good time to start investing in barrels. Buy low, sell high.

[Source: Financial Times]