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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. Small business advice
2. Cost-effective couponing strategy
3. Living paycheck to paycheck?
4. 401(k) withdrawal advice
5. Husband cheating – what now?
6. Old toothbrushes
7. Roth versus Traditional IRAs
8. Nervous about food pantry
9. What does “frugality” mean?

The Internet has equipped banks with the ability to offer a free checking account online to almost anyone who qualifies. Fortunately, the government mandates that a checking account can’t be marketed as “free” if the consumer could potentially be charged a maintenance or activity fee.

So what does “free” actually entail?

The term “free” is debatable since any checking account will charge some fees for certain activities, like if you overdraft the account. What isn’t debatable, however, is the key to getting a truly free checking account is understanding when these fees are charged and how to avoid them. So does free really make the best checking accounts?

The best checking accounts in 2015 give you free cash for signing up, have plenty of access to no-fee ATMs, and do not charge additional fees for things like foreign transactions.

Spring is here! (At least, according to the calendar. We received about an inch of snow overnight, which I hope will be the last snow until the late fall.)

For the five of us in central Iowa, spring means that it’s time to get outdoors again after a long winter. We usually gorge on the outdoors on the first nice days of spring, doing things like going to state parks and enjoying the neighborhood.

Of course, the warm weather of the spring means that you’re going to have tons of little opportunities to fix up things that didn’t make sense a few months ago. Typically, outdoor tasks are a lot less appealing when the weather is freezing, but give yourself a nice day and there are a lot of tasks that seem appealing. Give yourself a few nice days and it’s clear that there are indoor changes to be made as well.

Here are eight tasks that you should strongly consider taking on over the next few weeks as spring blooms.

A few days ago, I was working on an article where I referred to dividends. Since I didn’t really provide any sort of explanation of what dividends were, I went looking for an article where I explained in detail what a dividend actually is and, to my amazement, I never found a good, thorough explanation of dividends! (I ended up sticking a brief explanation into the article.)

Since dividends are a pretty big part of personal finance planning (they affect retirement savings significantly and also play a role in many other investment choices), it’s incredibly useful to know what exactly a dividend is, how they work, and how they put money in your pocket.

As always with explanations like this, I’m choosing to use simple language and simple examples. Business schools offer entire classes on these topics, so this is just a brief introduction.

Let’s dig in.