Earlier this week, I ran across an excellent talk on time management by Randy Pausch. If you’re not familiar with Pausch, he’s a former Carnegie Mellon computer science professor who died of pancreatic cancer this past summer at the age of 47, leaving behind a wife and three young children.
Pausch delivered this talk just over [...]

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A little over a year ago, I ran across an article in a local parenting magazine about paying kids for their performance at school. At the time, I thought it would be a great topic to discuss, so I cut it out and filed it away (by which I mean I threw it on my [...]

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Where were you (financially) ten years ago?
Ten years is a long time, and sometimes it’s hard to believe just how far we’ve come.
Looking back…
It was the spring of 1998, and I was still in graduate school. We had just one child, and he was only 7.5 months old. After his birth in the fall [...]

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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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This past weekend, I had an interesting interaction with our six year old. For background, we’ve been extremely busy lately and had gotten behind on their allowance. So when we finally sat down to get caught up, he was absolutely thrilled to find that he finally had enough money to buy the Nintendo DS game [...]

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As of yesterday, my wife and I have been married for ten years. This got me to thinking about all of the things we’ve experienced together during that time. I actually started this list over on raising4boys.com, but thought that I’d flesh it out here. We’ve been married for:
10 years
9 surgeries (4 C-sections, 2 carpal [...]

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Every year my parents give our kids a variety of Christmas gifts including money for their bank accounts, some clothes, and a toy of some sort. But this year they decided to forego the latter, and give the kids gift cards instead, such that they could pick out their own fun stuff. Out of [...]

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Happiness is having a video-capable cellphone in your pocket when your three and five year old sons discover a rack of auto-inflating Whoopie Cushions in the toy aisle at Walgreens. The beauty of these ‘next-generation’ Whoopie Cushions is that, as their name suggests, there’s no need to reinflate them between uses — just get up [...]

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It’s that time of year again. The kids are back in school and it’s time to once again start packing lunches. This is actually a good thing for me, as it gets me back into the habit of packing a lunch for myself every day — I tend to backslide on this during the summer, [...]

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I’ve written previously about the allowance system that we implemented for our kids, and I just thought I’d post a quick update as to how it’s been working, as well as how we’ve tweaked the system since we started. First off, I’d have to say that the system that we created is working quite well. [...]

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