Money Tips Network

Today is Valentine’s Day, and for millions of couples around the world, it’s a day spent finding ways to share in some form of romantic bliss. It can be deeply meaningful for some and stressful for others. Sarah and I will celebrate today in a pretty low key style, not ignoring it but not going all out in any way. I stuck a note in her car and am making a dinner I’m sure she’ll like; she’ll likely come up with something similar for me.

For many couples, however, Valentine’s Day is just another day, another step on the long journey that is a long-term committed relationship. Such relationships offer a lot of challenges, especially over an extended period of time. Stresses, changes in each person, little issues that can grow over time into big ones – they all add up to major obstacles for a successful long term relationship and/or marriage.

Professional truck drivers up and down the country should be taking enhanced measures to look after their truck tires. This is according to an 18-wheeler accident attorney based in Texas. It is crucial that when a driver is beginning a long journey, or at the start of each day, that they carefully check the tires and carry out a rigorous pre-trip inspection. This may sound like overkill doing it each time you begin to drive, but it could prevent an accident from occurring later and thus save lives.

The
key is to ensure that your tires are properly inflated. This has two benefits.
The first is of course preventing accidents, but you will also notice that it
will increase your fuel efficiency, saving you on gas. You will also notice
that keeping your tires pumped up will increase the life of the tires, meaning
they will need to be replaced less frequently.

“Often our spending differs from our real values. We fritter away cash on things we don’t cherish and deny ourselves those things we do.” – Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

The Artist’s Way is a fantastic book about nurturing internal honesty and creativity that I recently found myself rereading, and when I stumbled onto the above quote, it stuck right in my head and I knew it would eventually turn into an article here because it just nails a fundamental truth about personal finance.

Cameron’s point is simple: spending money on things we don’t care about is a financial and personal misstep; denying ourselves things we do care about is also a financial and personal misstep. Both of those steps lead to misery, but in different ways.

Last week, I published an extended excerpt from Grant Sabatier's new book, Financial Freedom. Sabatier's core message is that time is more valuable than money — and that freedom is more valuable than time.

Several GRS readers took issue with the book's seemingly anti-work tone.

Megan writes in with a great question:

It seems to me that working toward financial success by spending significantly less than you earn is directly opposed toward having a life full of meaningful experiences. For most Americans spending 30-40% less than you earn puts you in a hand-to-mouth existence, cutting off opportunities for things like travel. How do you square those two things?

This is a really important topic, one that I briefly addressed a long time ago but one that I think deserves a much more thorough discussion.

So many of life’s purchases, both large and small, involve negotiations. Everything from the amount we pay for a car, to the final price tag on a home, to what we pay for a gym membership involves some level of haggling or back and forth.

Yet when it comes to college tuition — one of the largest debts many people ever take on — very few applicants consider appealing a financial aid award to obtain more money from their school of choice to cover the cost of attendance.

Perhaps it remains a little-known fact that financial aid packages can be appealed. Or perhaps incoming students are uncertain how the process works and opt not to bother. Whatever the case, the fact is you may be leaving thousands of dollars on the table if your financial aid package is less than adequate and you don’t appeal.

What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to summaries of five or fewer words. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. Is HELOC the best option?
2. UTMA and UGMA
3. Second job or career advancement?
4. Buying scissors
5. Fresh vegetables and grocery shopping
6. Financially responsible television?
7. Disposing of old financial papers
8. Realities of job applications

After a thirteen-year run, the get-paid-to (GPT) site CashCrate is closing up shop as of April 1, 2019. They're no longer accepting new accounts, and existing members have until the end of next month to earn the $20 to get paid, or else their balance for cash or free gift cards goes bye-bye.

Originally I signed up to help a fellow blogger who had run into some hard luck — I think some things were stolen or something like that. I signed up for enough things to make my payout of $10 (at the time) and he earned a little bit of commission from my “efforts” that ever-so-slightly defrayed whatever loss he had suffered.

This is the first entry in an eight part series exploring the connections between your finances and other areas of your life.

This past Monday, as I was writing the introduction to the weekly Reader Mailbag, I made the observation that a big part of my personal finance journey over the past several years has been discovering the connection between personal finance and the many other “spheres” of my life.

I tend to view life as a bunch of “spheres,” or areas of focus. I really like Michael Hyatt’s list of nine such “spheres”: physical, mental/spiritual, intellectual, social, marital, parental, avocational (hobbies), vocational, and financial – they cover much of what life is all about.