Earlier this year I had an opportunity to visit the World of Coca-Cola, which is essentially a shrine to all things Coke. Having been a child of the 1970s and 1980s, it was pretty interesting to walk back in time through the commercials of my childhood. Of course, the memorabilia housed there reached back far [...]

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We moved into our current house not quite two years ago. While we love nearly everything about it, including our relatively isolated location. The big downside to all of this is that we get spotty cell phone service. This isn’t a huge deal, as we also have landline phone service, but it can be a [...]

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I spent some time over the weekend getting caught up in Quicken. While updating our accounts, I discovered something interesting about the way in which Vanguard debits your bank account when processing automatic investments. Instead of making a single withdrawal and then partitioning it up into the various funds that you’re investing in, they make [...]

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Jim over at the Journal of Healthy Living (yes, that Jim) tagged me for a meme about six word memoirs. While I don’t usually do memes, I’ll make an exception in this case.
Without further ado, here’s my six word memoir:
“Family comes first, everything else second.”
And since I’m an overachiever, I’m going to start by tagging [...]

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Over the weekend, I ran across an article that talked about the social acceptability of frugality. The primary example used in the article was that of a clothesline and what impact it might have on your neighbors. The underlying concern was that frugal moves such as hanging out your clothes might negatively impact property values [...]

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FiveCentNickel participated in five carnivals this week. Here they are along with links to my articles that were included in each.
The Carnival of Personal Finance included “Our Investment Portfolio: Asset Allocation and Location.” Also included was “The Three Best Credit Cards” from creditaddict.com.
The Festival of Frugality included “Saving Money With Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs.”
The Carnival of [...]

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I just ran across an interesting article that talks about a lawsuit against Wal-Mart over their 401(k) investment selections. The suit claims that Wal-Mart harmed their employees by offering high-cost retail funds instead of the cheaper institutional funds for which they surely qualify, and by only offering actively-managed (and thus costly) fund options rather than [...]

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After a couple years of stability, we recently decided to tweak our allowance system (again).
For background, our original allowance system involved paying the kids $0.50/week for each year of age, broken down as follows:
30% spending money
30% short term savings (e.g., a video game, pricey toy, etc.)
30% long term savings (e.g., a car, college, retirement, or [...]

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Just over a week ago, USA Today ran an interesting piece on where consumers plan on spending their economic stimulus tax rebate. They also compared it to how people actually spent their rebates back in 2001.
For starters, this is how people say they’ll be spending their current rebate:
23.3% – Keep in savings account
21.4% – Apply [...]

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After having written about the upcoming stamp price increase way in back in February, I almost forgot about it myself. In case you missed it, stamp prices went up from $0.41 to $0.42 this past Monday. Hopefully you have “Forever” stamps. If not, you’ll need those pesky little penny stamps to round things out.
Whatever you [...]

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