Money Tips Network

Let’s see if this story sounds familiar to you.

You realize your financial life is in a shambles, so you dive intensely into frugality for a while. You pay off a few bills, get your head above water, and then you realize that some of the frugal strategies you’ve adopted are pretty constricting and rubbing you the wrong way. You drop most of the frugal tactics you picked up, but not all of them – a few of them have stuck.

Then, a little later, you realize that your finances are starting to sink again. You dive back into frugality, perhaps not as deep as before, and things get better, but the progress slows down. Again, you find a few more tactics that stick even as most of the rest falls away.

It’s kind of a spiral or a zigzag, isn’t it? There’s this happy medium that you’re aiming for where you feel like you have the freedom to spend that you want but you also want to be aiming for some degree of debt freedom or financial freedom.

Most financial experts suggest reviewing a copy of your credit report at least once a year. Luckily, doing so is fairly easy thanks to an agreement the federal government has with AnnualCreditReport.com.

Earlier this month, I splurged on a luxury I have mulled over for years. I took a Nancy Noel angel print, signed and dated, and paid to have it framed professionally. I bought this print directly from the artist several years ago, and it’s my absolute favorite. But since I have never found a frame that fit its odd size, it has been stored in a closet ever since.

But this month I decided to treat myself. I had money set aside, and I finally found the perfect place to hang it. So, I packed up the print and took it to Hobby Lobby with a 50% off professional framing coupon in-hand. The entire ordeal cost me over $150, and I can pick it up in a few weeks.

But, you know what? I don’t feel bad at all. The money I used to pay was from my personal slush fund, which is made up of money my husband and I set aside for ourselves each month.

Whoever said "getting there is half the fun" certainly wasn't flying in economy class. However, that's not to say you can't have a good time on the way to your next destination.

(This is the second post in a two-part series, the counterpoint to yesterday’s article, “Seven Headwinds Threatening to Capsize Millennial Finances.”) 

The millennial generation is associated with a boatload of financial woe, including but not limited to student loans, jobs that don’t pay enough, and the threat of being replaced by robots.

Cheer up, folks. Yes, even those of you who’ve been un- or underemployed or have particularly heavy loan balances. All is not lost. Your generation has some serious advantages that could outweigh the doom and gloom.

Note: If you read yesterday’s piece, you’ll notice there is some overlap between the “liabilities” and “advantages” sides of the ledger. One person’s challenge could be another person’s asset.

While homebuyers of the early 2000s seemed to want enormous starter castles with every amenity imaginable, the last few years have brought on a renaissance in home building.

Unit pricing is helpful, but it's only useful if the comparison is apples to apples, and as long as you don't really want oranges …

Even though our $80 Keurig machine isn't ending up to be much of a bargain, we do still buy K-cups for the thing. They're convenient and decent in a pinch, and cost less than buying coffee out.

Costco regularly has good deals on K-cups. They end up being about half the price of what we'd pay in a grocery store.

Costco sells several brands. We looked at the unit pricing, and almost bought one kind based on the favorable unit pricing. But the unit prices didn't quite tell us what we needed to know.

Unit pricing usually helps

Just in case you're not familiar with unit pricing, here's a brief explanation. Consider two sizes of cans of tomato paste: an 8-ounce can, and a gallon can. The 8-ounce can is priced at $0.47, and the gallon can (128 ounces) is priced at $7.79.

Link for teaser title: 

https://www.wisebread.com/15-ways-to-make-your-home-look-amazing-for-und...

Beautifying your home doesn't have to mean building a new wing or digging...

One frequent question that readers ask me is advice on whether or not they should invest in the stock of a particular company.

“Is it a good time to buy Google?”

“Should I invest in Amazon?”

“Thinking of putting some of my retirement money into Citibank shares. Thoughts?”

Almost universally, I respond to such folks like this:

“No.”

“No.”

“No.”

Why? What do I have against investing in individual stocks?

It’s simple. Unless you are investing with money that you are literally never going to need in your life, the risk of individual stock investing is simply too high for me to recommend it, no matter how amazing the company seems. There are a lot of sources of risk in individual stock investing and they add up to too much risk for the vast majority of individuals to use as an investment strategy.

Let’s walk through some of the many issues of investing in individual stocks.