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Reader Mailbag: Spring Rain
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. Car loan versus mortgage
2. Childhood identity theft
3. Shopping in Wal-Mart community
4. Tax refund questions
5. Change fonts to save money?
6. Phantom energy?
7. Are CDs worthwhile?
8. “Fuel saver” programs
9. Early retirement
Rethinking Allowance: Taking Off the Training Wheels
As I mentioned recently, Sarah and I have noticed how our children’s relationship with their allowance has changed over the years.
When we first started giving them an allowance, we used a simple strategy where they split their money up among several items – investing, charity, saving for a goal, and free spending. We only required that they give a small portion to each slot, with the remainder divided up however they wanted.
They really enjoyed this at first. They got into the idea of setting goals. They enjoyed splitting their money up among different bank slots. Each week, they were really excited about their allowance.
Our goal was simple: we simply wanted them to become familiar with the basics of budgeting and saving and consider them “normal.”
Celebrating Your Achievement Without Undoing Your Progress
At one point, Sarah and I had almost $200,000 in total debt. Several years later, after a ton of hard work, we sent in the last check to pay off our final debt. We had achieved debt freedom.
It was really tempting to celebrate that achievement. We had worked so hard for so many years to get ourselves out of debt and it really felt worthy of some sort of reward.
What did we do? A neighbor watched our kids for several hours and we made a really nice romantic dinner at home. We dimmed the lights, set the table, lit some candles, put out a few flowers, and ate an amazing meal together. We then went out in the backyard and watched the stars come out while we talked about what comes next.
That was clearly a “good” celebration. It was meaningful and deeply enjoyable, but it didn’t cause us to make a financial mis-step after all of our effort to get our finances in a good place.
Heating, Cooling, and Saving
I really enjoyed this talk from Paul Wheaton on the reality of energy savings at home:
Essentially, Wheaton breaks down the various ways to heat and cool your home into three groups. He mostly focuses on heat, but these ideas apply almost the same as cooling.
The first group includes things that you touch for heat. Think of a heated blanket, for example. For cooling, you might try something like putting cold water on yourself. Those things don’t require much energy to cool you down comparatively. An electric blanket doesn’t use much energy and water probably comes out of your tap at a cool temperature.
Ten Pieces of Inspiration #173
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. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on relationships and risk
“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
All relationships contain some risk. That’s the nature of opening yourself to someone else. The reward, on the whole, makes the risk worthwhile.
2. Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly on courage
This is a short interview that’s really well worth watching.
3. Mark Twain on loneliness
Should Your Partner’s Debt Keep You Out of a Relationship?
Recently, a reader wrote to me with what would have been a stellar reader mailbag question except for the fact that it was full of personal details. I attempted to edit the email down to something that could be shared without identity concerns (as I never want material readers send me to ever come back and haunt them in any way), but I found that when I took out everything of concern, there wasn’t much left.
So, I’m just going to summarize his story.
Jeff told me that he had been dating a woman for about two years. Jeff is in his mid-twenties, as is his girlfriend, and both had been graduated from college for at least three years.
Price Per Unit Isn’t Always Useful
The idea of “price per unit” is a pretty useful one to have when you’re shopping for goods. It’s a simple idea that many of us know about, but it never hurts to break it down again for new readers.
When you’re at the grocery store and you’re considering items, you’ll compare a lot of things – the item’s brand, the price, and the number of items in the package. Often, you’ll settle on a particular brand or two pretty quickly, which leaves you worrying only about variations between price and number of items in the package. Which one should you buy?
The best bargain in this situation is (usually) the one with the lowest “price per unit.” In other words, you figure out how many “units” are in each package, then divide the price of the package by the number of units.
When Your Spouse Passes Away
A few days ago, I received an utterly heartbreaking email from a reader whose husband had passed away a week ago. She is in her fifties and has two grown children who are fully independent. One of them lives nearby and is helping her get her life back in order, but it’s going to be a long process.
Mostly, this reader wanted to know what information I had found in my many years of writing about personal finances that relates to handling this situation. What does she do now? How does she put her life back together, financially and otherwise?
This is not a situation I have any personal familiarity with, nor do I want to for a very, very long time. I have seen relatives and friends struggle with this very situation, however, and there are some standard financial and personal steps people should take in this situation.
Reader Mailbag: Little Steps
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. Help disputing bill
2. Requesting credit increase
3. Most valuable thing you’ve learned
4. Finances and dating
5. Buying electronics for life?
6. Frugal social circle
7. Next step after college illness?
8. After school games
9. Frugal options for hair detangler
Experiments with Homemade Dishwashing Detergent: What Works Best?
A few weeks ago, I was greatly inspired by this HouseLogic article where several different homemade dishwasher soap recipes are compared. I have struggled in the past with finding a homemade dishwashing detergent recipe that worked well, so I had high hopes for these recipes.
Note: I took several pictures for this post, but most of them just depicted essentially identical clean plates or depicted rather disgusting dirty plates. The two points where photographs might have actually been relevant (noted below) were really hard to clearly identify with photography.
The first thing I did was try out the recipe that was most highly recommended from that post. Here’s that recipe:
1 cup borax
1 cup washing soda
½ cup kosher salt
5 packets unsweetened lemonade mix
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