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Eight Strategies for Buying Clothes Without Destroying Your Budget
At our house, I’m the lucky one. I work from home so it doesn’t really matter too much what I wear most days, so I dress for comfort. Almost every day, you’ll find me in blue jeans and a t-shirt. I have some nicer clothes for social occasions and presentations, but those mostly just stay in the closet and are rarely worn.
The rest of my family… is a different story. My wife works outside the home and has to dress professionally every day. My children are all in school and while they’re not too picky about clothes, they do have some preferences and we want them to attend school in well-made and properly fitting clothes items.
How to Become Your Own Life Coach with Fourteen Simple Strategies
Over the last few weeks, several readers have written to me asking about the value of hiring a life coach. Usually, these people are struggling with a major life decision or finding it hard to break free of a steady grind that they wish to escape.
Life coaches can be incredibly useful if you find yourself in that kind of state. However, much of what a life coach can provide for you are things you can do for yourself.
Before we dig into this, let’s take a look at what a life coach actually provides. From Wikipedia:
Life coaching draws upon a variety of tools and techniques from other disciplines such as sociology, psychology, positive adult development and career counseling with an aim towards helping people identify and achieve personal goals.
You can pull two useful and clear statements out of that.
Questions About Goodwill, Emergency Funds, Library Openings, Cheese, 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. Roth IRA withdrawal question
2. Buy it for life: Goodwill
3. Year away from down payment
4. Retirement and disability
5. Having “a life”?
6. Making cheese at home
7. Can I afford this house?
8. Ames Public Library opening?
9. How to keep leftovers?
Questions About Goodwill, Emergency Funds, Library Openings, Cheese, 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. Roth IRA withdrawal question
2. Buy it for life: Goodwill
3. Year away from down payment
4. Retirement and disability
5. Having “a life”?
6. Making cheese at home
7. Can I afford this house?
8. Ames Public Library opening?
9. How to keep leftovers?
Best Cheap and Easy Dinner Recipes
If you’ve got a busy family, or are constantly on the go, you’re probably looking for easy recipes to make high quality yet cheap meals your family will love. At The Simple Dollar, we’re not only looking out for your pocketbook, but also your other precious resource – time. That’s why we put together a list of cheap meals that are also easy to put together. Not only are these recipes easy, almost all of them can be prepared vegetarian or vegan. If you need a few quick tips to make your meal prep easier, look for the additional resources towards the bottom.
Easy Dinner Recipes
Dinner is often the most rushed time for a busy family. Family members get home at different times from work, school or social activities. So, dinner is especially difficult to get the whole family together. Next time you want the whole family at the dinner table, tempt them with one of these great meals. Just don’t let them know how easy it was to throw it all together!
Our Path to Living Off Our Own Investments
The big financial goal that Sarah and I have in front of us is to reach a point where we can live off of the proceeds of our investments, allowing us to walk away from work.
In essence, that’s what retirement is. Between Social Security (which one can see as an investment built up over a lifetime of working) and additional retirement plans and pensions, people often live out their later years by using the proceeds of their earlier working years.
Our goal, however, is early retirement. We want to do it as quickly as possible. I thought it might be interesting to walk you through our game plan.
Why?
Why do we feel the need to do this?
Simply put, Sarah and I both feel called to do things with our life that don’t necessarily earn any sort of income. We both have some big dreams about volunteerism. I’d like to write novels (which is a pretty poor guarantee of income).
Stuff Won’t Fill the Hole in Your Life
It’s a weird connection on the surface.
The more time I spend reading, the fewer books I buy or even think about buying.
The more time I spend actually playing games, the fewer games I buy or even think about buying.
This phenomenon repeats itself over and over again. When I pay more attention to an activity that I care about in my life, I tend to spend less money on it (to a certain point, of course).
(I’m going to use board games and books as examples for this post because they’re straightforward, but all of this could be true of any hobby that I’m deeply passionate about – or any hobby that you’re passionate about.)
How to Stop Making Excuses for Bad Financial Choices
Each year, I go to Gencon, a tabletop gaming convention in Indianapolis held every August. Among the major events are two that make it very tempting to open my wallet: a “dealer hall” where various game manufacturers show off their latest wares and an auction house where unusual items are auctioned off to the highest bidder (as well as some more common items that will often go for a very low price).
During my first two years there, I spent more money than I should have. There were many, many games and bargains there and I found myself opening my wallet much more often than I intended to.
Each year, after the convention, I’d try really hard to justify the spending to myself.
It’s just once a year.
It’s a special event.
You’ll enjoy all of the stuff.
Some of those items were major bargains!
You can make up for it by cutting back next month.
Using Opportunity Cost to Your Advantage
I’m tempted by a lot of purchases. Books. Food. Board games. Gadgets.
For me, the best single tool for controlling those kinds of temptations is to give myself a monthly allotment from which I can spend freely. For example, I might cap my personal hobby and entertainment spending at $100 a month and we might have a monthly cap on food eaten outside the home set at $150.
The challenge comes out when I realize that I have more than $100 worth of hobby temptations in a month. How do I figure out the best method for spending that money?
To solve that problem, I’ve been taking advantage of a little bit of economic theory.
What Is Opportunity Cost?
Wikipedia gives a wordy definition of opportunity cost:
Ten Strategies for Staying Motivated Toward Your Financial (and Other) Goals
Goal-setting plays a pretty major role in my life. Over the last several years, setting and sticking with goals eliminated all of our debts, bought a home, and enabled a career switch – and those are just the financial goals.
At the same time, I’ve failed at more goals than I’ve ever achieved. I’ve tried to achieve countless things over the years but found myself falling short. Exercise goals. Writing goals. Weight loss goals. Personal growth goals. All of these have fallen by the wayside over the years.
This mixture of success and failure has taught me a few things about what it takes to actually achieve a big goal, and one lesson rises above all of them.
Goals are won or lost during the “dog days.”
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