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How to Keep Your Money Safe While Traveling
Photo: Garry Knight
One big treat that Sarah and I enjoy is an annual family vacation. We usually travel somewhere within the United States or Canada as a family, sometimes camping and sometimes staying in hotels. Sometimes we visit state and national parks, while other years involve visits to cities. I’ve been to most of the states in the U.S. at this point, as well as several other countries. (This summer, our family vacation involves camping in the northern woods in Wisconsin, as well as a multi-day stop in the Door County area.)
What’s the Average Cost of Car Insurance in the U.S.?
The average cost of car insurance in the United States is $1,758 per year, which works out to about $146.50 per month. In Florida, the average monthly cost is 29% higher than the national average. A car insurance policy in Alaska, on the other hand, will cost you much less on average, at just $77.88 […]
The post What’s the Average Cost of Car Insurance in the U.S.? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
Why Bother? Digging Into the Purpose of Personal, Financial, and Professional Success
To some extent, our generation lacks the clarity of purpose that came with the unifying challenges of our predecessors: There’s no Great Depression to survive, no frontier to explore, and no World War to win. Photo: Library of Congress
“We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact.” – Chuck Palahniuk
One of my favorite sayings, something I’ve held onto for my entire life, is that everyone alive was born without a real frontier. We were born too late to explore the world and we were born too early to explore the stars.
Is It Good to Have Multiple Credit Cards, or Will It Hurt My Credit Score?
Your credit score is an essential component of your overall financial health, so it’s important to make sure you don’t do anything that could damage it. If you always make your debt payments on time and keep your credit card balances low, your score will generally be in good shape.
Having multiple credit cards won’t necessarily hurt your credit score — and, in fact, it can sometimes help. But if you have more cards than you can handle or use them irresponsibly, your score could drop considerably.
How Having Multiple Credit Cards Can Impact Your Credit
To understand how carrying multiple credit cards can affect your credit score, it’s important to know how your score is determined. Your FICO score, for example, is broken down as follows:
Questions About Cheap Camping, Office Chairs, Steam, and More!
What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to five word summaries. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. Cheap camping options
2. Diabetic question
3. Water leaking from air vents
4. Handling a medical catastrophe
5. Side gigs at work?
6. Office chair suggestion
7. Struggling with life choices
8. Do bidets save money?
9. Best cheap Field Notes alternatives
Beyond eBay: Six Better Ways to Buy, Sell, and Trade Stuff Online
Photo: Yerdle via Facebook
Are you tired of the mountains of clutter around your home? Are you overwhelmed by your own “stuff?” Do you have so many belongings that you have to rent a storage unit to house them all?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you’re not alone. According to a recent survey by the National Association for Professional Organizers, or NAPO (yes, there is such a group), 54% of Americans are overwhelmed by the amount of clutter they have. What’s more, 78% complained they had no idea what to do with all of it, which is probably why the clutter built up in the first place.
Thoughts on the Parable of the Mustard Seed
Photo: Jessica Spengler
Recently, I attended the baptism of a beautiful baby girl. During the reading of the scripture, a passage from the book of Matthew was read – chapter 13, verses 31 and 32 – and it really stuck with me. Here it is, from the NIV translation:
He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”
“Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”
Some Thoughts on My Father
Photo: Giuseppe Milo
In the spirit of Father’s Day, I wanted to share some thoughts about my own father and the huge impact he’s had on my life, personally and professionally.
I grew up in a single income household. Most of the time, my father worked in a factory making construction equipment, while my mother stayed at home. We lived about a mile outside of a small town on a plot of land that was about 75% covered in woods.
Our house was very much a humble one. It was old and small, with three very small bedrooms. The largest bedroom in the house is almost completely taken up by having a twin bed in it, and the smallest? It’s basically a closet.
How to Use a Simple Pocket Notebook to Change Your Life
Photo: Mike Petrucci
A few days ago, in Monday’s Reader Mailbag, I made an off-hand reference to my own use of pocket notebooks, where I wrote a paragraph or two about how I used them and suggested that if readers wanted to know more, they should send me a note and I’d write a longer article. I received a hefty stack of requests for this – Facebook wall posts, Facebook messages, and emails – so here’s the article that so many of you requested.
Ceiling Fan Hacks to Save Energy (and Money)
Look for a switch like this one to change the direction of your ceiling fans depending on the season. Photo: The JH Photography
Summer’s just about here, and you’ve probably had to kick on the air conditioning a few times already. For some people, that’s the beginning of a series of very big electric bills.
But while a typical central air conditioning unit uses 3,500 watts of energy when running, the average ceiling fan uses only 60 watts — even when running on high. That means if running your ceiling fan all day allows you to cut down on your AC usage — even by just a half hour a day — you could feasibly save a lot of money over time.
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