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. State retirement question
2. How to avoid looking “cheap”
3. Friend who invested badly
4. Mortgage payoff versus investing
5. Can we afford a child?
6. Digital assets upon death
7. Food jars and illness
8. Finding a bargain piano

Check out this video:

The key point in it:

Exercising for 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week saves you $2,500 a year.

And this is only heart health savings! If you add in all the other health-related savings, it's much higher than this.

Couple this with the fact that people who exercise more make more money and exercising is a no-brainer!

I am at the gym six times a week and am active in addition to that (I try for about 15k steps per day). I feel better by working out as well, so my quality of life is improved to boot!

How about you? Do you exercise? Why or why not?

Welcome to Wise Bread's Best Money Tips Roundup!

Yard work fills you with dread. The thought of shoveling your way through another winter is already causing your back to ache. And ever since your children moved on to college, half the rooms in your home sit unused.

You're ready to downsize from a single-family home to a condo.

If you're struggling to make ends meet, or are crushed by debt, it's not a great feeling. It's easy to feel despondent when you can't seem to get ahead financially. But don't get discouraged! If you make the right choices, things will come together for you and your money.

When it comes to value for your home-improvement dollar, few items pay off bigger than hand tools.

I learned the value of hand tools from my stepfather, who had a two-car garage filled with them, but wasn’t about to let me mangle any of them. In junior high, he gave me a claw hammer that once belonged to his father. The handle was an unshaped, varnished, round piece of wood with no grip. The head was attached to that handle through sheer force of will and would slide up and down the top of it in mid swing.

I always thought the head of that hammer would end up flying through a window or drywall. Instead, it lasted me nearly 13 years — until my stepfather took it back and gave me an $18 steel rip claw hammer from Lowe’s. I’ve used that hammer to build stairs, lay cement board, frame out walls (a nail gun came later), lay courses of cedar roof shingles, and bust up the occasional scrap wood for the burn pile.

Part of my daily routine throughout the fall, winter, and spring is to get up with my children and either make breakfast for them or aid them in making breakfast for themselves. Sarah is usually getting ready for her own workday and often leaves 30 to 45 minutes before the children do (and she doesn’t eat breakfast most mornings anyway), so I manage most of their morning routine once they’re out of bed. Most mornings, I eat breakfast with them and we talk about our game plan for the day.

My goals in doing this are very straightforward.

First of all, I want us to have a healthy, filling breakfast, one that will keep them satiated until lunchtime and able to focus on their schoolwork. I want the same thing for me – a breakfast that keeps me satiated all morning and able to focus on my work until midday. I want to serve healthy foods, meaning I try to avoid processed junk foods as much as I can.

You need more than an entry-level job to pay the bills, but you don't have the time or funds to get a four-year college degree. Or maybe you already have a college degree, but it's not helping you find work.

It seems that current financial news is laser-focused on the crisis of skyrocketing student loan and credit card debt.