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. Planning ahead for a child
2. Frugality and self-denial
3. 401(k) and multiple jobs
4. Work culture and telecommuting
5. Why don’t people save?
6. Figuring out credit card debt
7. Getting started with children’s haircuts
8. Picking funds in 401(k)

There’s one obvious question that usually goes unanswered despite all of the articles, podcasts, and news segments on the importance of saving for retirement: How much money should YOU be saving for retirement?

It’s easy to find benchmark percentages, like rules saying that you should save 15% of your income. But that doesn’t factor in anything personal like your age, your current retirement savings, or your retirement goals.

It’s also easy to find calculators saying that you need something like $1,000,000 by the time you retire, but that doesn’t tell you anything about how to get there.

What you really need is a specific dollar amount you should be contributing to your retirement accounts on a monthly basis. A number that takes your personal goals and information into account and gives you a personal result.

That’s exactly what you’ll get here.

As a passionate yet frugal fashion connoisseur, I'm always looking for ways to keep the peace between my inner Chic Chandra and Frugal Fran. It isn't easy. One of my favorite ways to pacify both sides and exercise a bit of creativity is by engaging in shopping challenges.

Maybe you need some money to fund the renovation of your home's 1970s-era kitchen. Or maybe you need a quick chunk of cash to pay down high-interest credit card debt or help pay for your kid's college tuition.

One of the great things about good travel credit cards is the travel-related insurance they include for free.

Being invited to a wedding or asked to be a member of a wedding party is an honor, but a costly one. No one knows this better than the serial wedding guest.

There are points when the frequency of weddings and wedding-related obligations in life increases due to factors largely beyond a serial wedding guest’s control. In my 20s, it was simply a matter of timing: Friends had finished school, met people, and opted to get hitched. Some wedding required flights and/or hotels (Las Vegas and West Palm Beach come to mind), some just required hotels and a train or bus ticket (Salem, Mass., and Long Island), and some just fell well beyond my budget (Honolulu, where I sent an off-registry garage door opener instead).

When Kim and I moved last summer from our riverfront condo to this country cottage on the outskirts of Portland, one of my primary aims was to slash our spending on both housing and food.

Although we owned our condo free and clear, living there still cost us roughly $1200 per month. Plus, there were the added costs that came from living so close to bars and restaurants. Sure, we didn’t have to eat out as often as we did — we understand that was a choice — but we enjoyed exploring what the neighborhood had to offer.

Well, I’ve now had time to gather enough data to determine whether we were able to achieve this goal, to cut our monthly costs. I’m pleased to say the answer is “yes”! But for a few years, this gain is going to be completely negated by our massive home remodeling project.

Let’s look at some numbers.

Saving on Housing

To start, here’s how my monthly housing costs have changed:

As you walk through our kitchen, one thing you can’t help but notice is that there are usually a lot of food-related projects that are almost always ongoing.

In just a cursory glance at our kitchen right now, one would find a small batch of homemade peach cider in the process of fermenting, a batch of homemade kombucha that’s also in the middle of fermenting, a jar of homemade preserved lemons, a bunch of home-canned items in the pantry, a ton of little jars of various seasoning mixes in the pantry, several full meals made in advance in the freezer, and some homemade bread dough rising in a bowl. This isn’t an unusual state of affairs.

Why do this? Why not just buy these items at the store? Doesn’t it take a lot of time and energy?

There are several reasons why we spend time and energy on food related projects, actually.

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