Money Tips Network

The dollar store is only a great deal if what you’re buying is worth a dollar.

In our neck of the woods in Washington County, Ore., the nearest dollar store sits in a darkened corner of a strip-mall parking lot, sparsely populated on all but the highest-traffic holiday weekends. The nearby Costco, however, is packed to near-capacity every weekend it’s open.

The latter requires a minimum $60 membership and relies on bigger-ticket bulk purchases for its savings. The former charges just a dollar for every item it sells – as Dollar Tree and 99 Cents Only do, but Dollar General and Dollar Tree-owned Family Dollar often don’t – but is expected to grow to more than 34,000 locations by 2020.

A few days ago, I posted an article entitled Financial Success Isn’t “Impossible”. The piece argued against the common prevailing notion in our society that financial success is completely out of the reach of most people, particularly those under 40. I used my own story as a backdrop for this discussion, and went on to point out a bunch of common strategies that I see people overlooking all the time, often at the same time that they’re buying into the notion that financial success is impossible.

I received a fair amount of feedback on this article, most of which boiled down to a few key points that I felt were worth addressing.

Real estate shows like Flip or Flop, Million Dollar Listing, and Flip This House can make it seem like there’s no way to lose the game. You invest a certain amount of cash in a property, update and renovate with care, then list for an almost-immediate sale. The stars of these shows may wind up earning less than they expect, but they never seem to lose their shirts.

But according to Mindy Jensen, community manager for real estate investing website Bigger Pockets, there are a ton of issues these shows never portray. They don’t show all the problems you encounter when you first start out, for example. They don’t show just how easy it is to underestimate rehab costs, or to forget about all the smaller expenses you’ll face along the way.

When it's time to sell your home, whether due to financial necessity or another reason, it can be hard to let go. This is especially true if you have lived in a place for a long time and have a lot of memories tied to it.

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. Roth 401(k)?
2. Wedding ring help
3. From two to three kids
4. Electric toothbrush recommendation
5. Bad habits
6. Potluck ideas
7. Knowing when to retire
8. Vegetarianism and The Simple Dollar
9. “Password system”?

There's not much time to react when disaster strikes, especially when it's a life or death situation. You want to get out safely and as soon as possible with your family, and that includes your pets.

Saving your pets comes with its own set of circumstances, however.

The “Books with Impact” series takes a deeper look at specific books that have had a profound impact on my financial, professional, and personal growth by extracting specific points of advice from those books and looking at how I’ve applied them in my life with successful results. The previous entry in this series covered Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

My recent article on how to find and get the most value out of your local discount grocer led to a lot of great follow-up questions and comments from readers.

One reader, Laurie, wrote in:

What about coupons? I still clip coupons from the Sunday paper and use the Redplum and Target apps to nab coupons. What does your couponing strategy look like?

Sarah and I have tried a lot of couponing strategies over the years. We used to be very adamant about clipping coupons from the Sunday paper and even used a coupon binder for several years.

Over the years, though, I learned several things about couponing.

I grew up in a family with little money. My parents did the absolute best they could with what little money they had, but they never had a lot of money to go around. There were times when things were okay, but there were other times when the money was tight and there was never a time when I had all of the cool things that my friends had.

My car in school was a beat-up rusty rattletrap that had so many roof leaks that I literally gave up on it and drilled a hole in the front floorboards so that the rain water that inevitably collected in there during a rainstorm would leak out.

I managed to get into college and I had some scholarship help, but when I got out of school, I still had a pile of debt before me, a pretty healthy pile of subsidized and unsubsidized student loans. The balance on my student loans, according to what records I could find, was higher than my starting salary in my first real job after college.