Money Tips Network

When I published my first HelloFresh review last June, I liked the popular meal-delivery service. Kim's employer had given us a one-week free trial. The three recipes we received were fun and tasty. In the end, we chose not to sign up with HelloFresh but resolved to remember it for the future.

At the end of 2018, as I was evaluating my spending patterns, I was shocked by how much I was spending on food. It's embarrassing to show the following numbers, but facts are facts and truth is truth. I was spending over $1100 per month on food.

“Something needs to change,” I told Kim. “Maybe we should try HelloFresh again to see if it can help us cut costs.”

“Do you think so?” Kim siad. “Isn't HelloFresh kind of expensive?”

Despite a string of interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve in 2018, returns on the average savings account continue to be meager at best.

In December, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate a quarter-point to 2.5%, which was the fourth increase of 2018 and the ninth since the central bank began normalizing rates in December 2015.

Yet, interest rates on savings accounts, in many cases, have barely budged upward in response. The average national interest rate continues to hover around 0.09%, according to the FDIC.

A popular real estate website recently compiled a list of the six habits all successful homebuyers have in common.

As someone who’s approaching the one-year anniversary of owning my own home, I found the topic fascinating. Not because I possessed so many of the habits outlined. But for the opposite reason.

When I purchased my house, I winged it, for the most part. I didn’t do a lot of research about the home buying process. I also did not shop around extensively for mortgages, which was mistake number one. Nor did I shop around for real estate agents (lesson learned!), or tour a long list of houses. Though I looked at dozens of properties online, I only did two or three actual walk-throughs before settling on the home I purchased.

Erika writes in with a great question that grew beyond a normal mailbag entry:

Why do you think people get into financial problems to begin with besides the obvious “not enough income”? The easy answer is temptation to buy stuff but I think there’s more going on than that.

I’ll be honest: Erika hits on the two biggest reasons I can think of for why people get into financial problems. Insufficient income is definitely one issue, but at the same time, I think there’s a lot of spending that’s done as a result of misplaced priorities, mostly because people value the short term a lot more than the long term.

The credit card industry has been more competitive than ever the last few years, leading card issuers like Chase, American Express, and Citi to come up with new offerings and spice up old ones. The goal, as always, is to increase their market share and their profits, which none of us can blame them for.

While the Citi Prestige® Credit Card was inexplicably not available to new applicants for a good part of 2018, it’s now back on the market with a new range of perks and benefits that are easier to access. A lucrative signup bonus, exceptional earning categories, and a flexible travel credit also sweeten the pot.

Should you sign up for the new Citi Prestige® Credit Card? Keep reading to learn about this card’s new set of benefits and how it stacks up to competing cards.

Historically horseracing, in one form or another, has been around
for thousands of years. Records exist from Ancient Egypt, Greece, Babylon,
Syria, the Roman Empire and the list goes on. However, it wasn’t until the
evolution of actual thoroughbred racing in the 17th century, and
it’s highlighted profile through its popularity with British Royalty and
British Aristocracy, that it earned the title “The Sport of Kings”.

…And there has been no monarch in history that has ever embraced “The Sport of Kings” quite like The Queen, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second.

In November 2018, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper called “Saving Regret” [here's the full PDF version]. Once you wade through the study's academic language, there's some interesting stuff here about why people do and don't save for retirement.

Saving regret, the authors say, is “the wish in hindsight to have saved more earlier in life”.

Obviously, you can suffer from saving regret at any age. When I met 31-year-old Debbie for dinner last week, her issues boiled down to saving regret. She wishes she'd saved more when she was younger. But for the purposes of this paper, the authors turned their attention to folks aged 60 to 79, people of traditional retirement age.

Spend five minutes or so watching this great YouTube video, which animates a wonderful short speech by Alan Watts:

Here’s a transcript, to the best of my ability:

Existence, the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere. That is to say it doesn’t have some destination that it ought to arrive at. It is best understood by an analogy with music. Because music, as an art form, is essentially playful. You say that you “play” the piano. You don’t “work” the piano. Why?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been moving my office to another room in the house. That’s involved setting up a desk and installing shelves in the new room and then gradually moving all of the stuff from my old office into the new office space (which is actually a corner in a multi-use room). The old office also served as storage for a bunch of other things.

The process of moving isn’t urgent, as the room I’m leaving is going to be turned into a bedroom for our youngest child and there’s no deep urgency in that changeover. So, I’m taking my time with this move and actually considering all of the items as I move them.