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Reader Mailbag: Confusing Foods
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. Comparing income levels
2. Driving for cheap gas
3. Finding a mentor
4. Bread or all-purpose flour?
5. Breathing room in budget
6. Week of work lunches
7. Questions about renting out room
8. Inexpensive pest solutions
9. Good Kindle books for cheap
Creating a Problem Where None Exists
Recently, I was in a doctor’s office waiting for an appointment with my youngest son (who had a strange rash that he apparently contracted during a hike in the woods). As he sat at the kid’s table and played with a few toys, I flipped through a magazine.
While browsing, I came across a brief article about toothpaste. This article lauded some new toothpaste that contained a new cleansing agent and was incredibly gentle on the teeth while getting “astounding” cleaning results. The catch was at the end of the article – it cost something like $15 per tube.
Reader Mailbag: Children’s Television
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. Home purchase question
2. Cheap non-tacky home decor?
3. Gardening for salads?
4. Car repossession question
5. Feeling guilty about spending
6. Replacing magazine subscriptions
7. Big celebration? Or wait?
8. Credit score estimates
9. Old shoes
20 Reasons Why You Need an Emergency Fund
The dreaded ‘check engine’ light is one reason you need an emergency fund. Photo: Jim Larrison
If you don’t think you need an emergency fund, think again. No matter how financially prepared you are, life has a way of throwing curve balls that you never expect. Those “unexpected expenses” are the reason many financial professionals suggest keeping three to six months of expenses tucked away in a savings account or investment that is fairly easy to access.
The Idea Behind Habits
Whenever I want to make a positive change appear in my life, I usually approach it in one of two ways.
I either try to get rid of a bad habit or I try to establish a good habit.
Habits are at the center of both of those ideas. It’s around that hinge of habits that I try to improve myself. I see some flaw in my own life and I want to get rid of it (or at least reduce it), so I turn to my habits.
It makes sense to really look at what a habit is. I tend to like Wikipedia’s definition of the word:
A habit (or wont) is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur unconsciously.
Let’s break that down a little.
A habit is a routine of behavior At its core, a habit is just a sequence of things that you do.
Little Earthquakes
As much as I enjoy parenting, there are moments when it’s quite stressful and it just leaves me feeling miserable.
As I’m writing this, a moment like this just passed. I was trying to get my three children ready for bed, but instead they chose to run in opposite directions. While focusing on my youngest child, trying to convince him to get undressed for his bath, our oldest child decided to turn on the shower in the master bathroom and use the hand-held shower head to spray water on his sister – and all over the rest of the bathroom. While dealing with all of this, my daughter decided that the smart thing to do fifteen minutes after her shower was to get out her markers and start making extensive purple, pink, and black art all over her leg.
I was frustrated. The last thing I wanted to do was to read them a bedtime story and go through the normal parts of our routine. I just wanted out of there.
Ten Pieces of Inspiration #175
Each week, I highlight ten things each week that inspired me to greater financial, personal, and professional success. Hopefully, they will inspire you as well.
1. Henry Ford on avoiding problems
“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.” – Henry Ford
It’s usually easier to drill a hole through the mountain than to build a road around it.
2. Guy Clark – My Favorite Picture of You
This manages to be both warm and haunting, not an easy trick to pull off.
3. Kurt Vonnegut on seeking true happiness
“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’” – Kurt Vonnegut
It’s those little moments that make life great.
Reflections on a Tiny House
Over the past week, I’ve been fascinated by a number of articles describing tiny homes – those measuring 100 square feet or smaller. Here’s an example:
This type of house is outside the realm of possibility of most families. It would work for many single people and some couples, but I can’t imagine the five of us living in anything so small.
The reason I find it so interesting is that it makes me think about what we would need to do to live in such a small space. How exactly could we do this if we had to do it?
I started going through my possessions and considering which of them I would actually keep in this situation. It turned out that the list was pretty short – if I kept more than that, there would be no room to turn around.
Living Life
One of the biggest arguments against being “frugal” is that it restricts you from “living life.” Whenever I hear that argument, I usually think that the person involved isn’t actually being frugal at all.
In fact, I would go so far as to argue that making frugal choices actually does the opposite – it enables you to live life more fully than before.
I think I can explain this idea simply in terms of a grocery store trip.
Let’s say you go into the grocery store and have $100 to spend to buy a week’s worth of groceries for you and your partner (we won’t talk about kids here – we’ll keep it nice and simple).
When you walk down the bread aisle, some of the breads cost $1 a loaf and others cost as much as $5 a loaf.
When you examine the cuts of meat, some of the meats cost $2 per pound and others cost $8 per pound.
The Value of Unavailability
Let’s roll the clock back to a particular weekend in the middle of 2006. Sarah and I had just begun our financial turnaround, but that’s not really what I want to talk about here.
That weekend, Sarah’s parents had come to visit – I think her youngest sister may have been there, too. We were going to spend an afternoon in Des Moines together looking for a few items for our infant son and then going out to eat at a nice restaurant that was tolerant of babies. I was looking forward to it.
At that time, I was employed in a research lab where I spent my time doing data analysis and aiding in data sharing. Most of our data was stored on two mirrored computer servers, one of which was available to the public when they wanted to access the data we shared.
That morning, a disaster happened. Within a few hours of each other, the main server ran into a software problem and the backup actually crashed.
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