Money Tips Network

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. Difficult workplace
2. Capital One 360 overseas
3. Handling fast food cravings
4. Car total cost of ownership
5. Bicycle for groceries?
6. Overpaid for consulting work
7. Wife’s smoking habit breaking us
8. Outdated books

Camping is generally considered one of the cheapest ways to vacation, but many private campsites these days charge pretty hefty fees.

Back to school shopping doesn’t have to be just for parents or kids.

For the last few years, I’ve covered back to school shopping for TheStreet.com, and while I was neither in school nor sending a child off to one, I can almost recite by heart the list of items that get discounted around this time each year. Unfortunately for both me and my wife, some technical difficulties pressed each of us into doing some back to school shopping of our own this year.

I have had my little 13-inch white MacBook for almost a decade. It fills all my writing needs, it remains largely bug-free and, until this year, it required only a new battery every now and then. However, Apple has considered it obsolete for a while now and, this year, it began running incredibly hot and, in its final days, wasn’t responding to mouse commands.

Eating at home is one of the surer ways to save money, but you can save money eating out, too. Here are a few ways to do it …

1. Order water instead of soda

Order water. Once in a while, we'll get a special drink, but more often than not we just get water because it's free. (I have to remember that it's often not free in North Carolina, which is annoying.) Paying $2 or more for a soda in a restaurant, even with unlimited refills, is a huge markup, and therefore a huge profit center for the restaurant.

2. Don't buy alcohol

Don’t buy alcohol. Like sodas, alcohol is a huge profit center for the restaurant. If the restaurant has a lot of weird beers on tap, OK, I'll bite, but if it's just the usual suspects then no. Another trick if you really like trying beers is to ask for a sampler tray, which gives a taste of five or six beers five ounces at a time.

Tim writes in:

Question for the Mailbag: how exactly does a target retirement fund actually work? Every time I read about it it makes less sense.

This did start off as a question in the mailbag, but the answer became so long that it seemed sensible to give Tim’s question its own article.

Let’s start off talking about risk and reward.

There are a ton of different investment options out there. They differentiate themselves in a bunch of different ways. Some are really low risk, but don’t offer much return, like a savings account. Even in the best online savings account, you’re going to earn only 1% to 2% a year, but there is essentially zero chance of losing money.

Tanya writes in:

I started a new job on June 1. I work in an office setting with 20-25 other people. In the year or so before I started, there was a big “conflict” where a poisonous former employee kind of dismantled the office culture and got everyone to split into factions and many of the people in the office wound up not on speaking terms. While it’s not that bad any more, the office is still a pretty frigid place. No one really talks to anyone outside of work requirements and most people seem to be either just doing their job, browsing websites, or counting the minutes until they can leave. Most people eat lunch at their desks and occasionally they eat out in pairs and that’s it. On the first day several people said hello to me but since then almost no one has spoken to me aside from work tasks.

Airport security is the bane of travelers everywhere. What should be a matter of keeping us safe has often devolved into waiting in lines that can take hours to get through.

Yesterday, I mentioned that because I grew up poor, I inherited a faulty money blueprint from my parents. They didn’t know how to handle money effectively, so they couldn’t teach me how to handle it effectively. I entered adulthood with many of the same bad habits they’d had when I was a kid.

I was a compulsive spender, for instance. I had a shopping addiction. I had no willpower, no impulse control. Even when I had no money in the bank, I still found ways to spend. I took on over $20,000 in credit card debt before I turned 25!

Nowadays, I mostly have my spending under control. I’m no longer in debt, and I force myself to make conscious decisions about what I purchase. (Conscious spending is one of the keys to overcoming emotional spending.)

The average savings account paid out a measly 0.08% in interest as of August 2018, according to the FDIC. That rate isn’t enough to help you build real wealth; it’s not even enough to keep up with inflation. Yet, that’s what the average bank account is offering now, which means some banks do offer a higher rate of return — the best online savings accounts, in particular, routinely pay out 1% to 1.5% — while others offer even less.