Money Tips Network

This article is by staff writer Kristin Wong.

I fight splurges less often than I used to, but the urge still pops up occasionally. Sometimes, it’s okay to splurge; but mostly, I find myself wanting to resist temptation. There are a few questions I ask when I’m mulling over a purchase:

• Do I have money saved for this?
• Do I feel like I’m stealing money from a financial goal?
• Am I simply being impulsive? Will I regret this in an hour?

Another way I decide on my spending is by considering my future self. The first time I ever came across the phrase “future self” was in a personal finance book. In the money world, the idea of “future selves” is discussed a lot. And rightfully so — a study found that, just by picturing ourselves in the future, we save more money.

Is the American dream dead? A majority of people say it is, according to the recently announced CNN Money survey, as well as several others done at academic institutions like Xavier and Youngstown universities and other private organizations. Although the samples, questions and methodologies differ from survey to survey, the results all seem to indicate that the American dream (however people define it) is dying.

While living in New Jersey and having family in the Los Angeles and Orange County area, I’ve always found that United Airlines has had the best fares. And because 75 percent of my total airline travel has been to these locations, I decided a few years ago to make my main credit card the United MileagePlus credit card (formerly Continental OnePass). While in general, cash back rewards credit cards are the best deal for most people who use rewards credit cards, because I flew United frequently enough and was happy to spend my rewards on flight upgrades, the MileagePlus card is the card that made the most sense for me.

It was a bit bittersweet for us this weekend.  Our daughter went to a friend’s birthday party sleepover, and for the first time she showed absolutely no reaction whatsoever to my wife leaving for the evening.  She was just fine, thank you very much.

It was a Frozen party.  With lots of Frozen decorations.  Think: tons of cotton.  And Frozen games, like Pin The Nose On The Olaf.

And even Frozen paper plates.

My wife commented that she was surprised that they got those, considering how ridiculously popular the movie continues to be.  The party store had apparently gotten a shipment of Frozen party gear very recently, and they still had a bit when they arrived.

Last summer, my two oldest children embarked on a summer-long project that they ended up taking a ton of pride in. In fact, we expanded that summer project and are repeating it again this summer to their great enthusiasm. (What project was it? It’s the first one on this list.)

We learned a few lessons from the project, though.

Kids won’t latch onto any project you suggest. We tried launching a bunch of larger summer project with them. Only one really took off – and another one somewhat took off. The rest floundered.

Thus, inexpensive projects work best. You don’t want to dump a lot of money into a project only to find that it didn’t click with your kids.

Share your ideas of what worked with your children. The ideas here start off with what worked best with our children, then is followed with ideas that worked for the children of friends of ours.

This post is by staff writer Honey Smith.

In my last progress report, I mentioned that I took my student loans off Kwik-pay (autodebit) until after closing on my house. The thinking was that I’d have the money just in case things didn’t go smoothly with the house and move. Originally, I thought I’d re-enable the automatic payments after closing.

Then I realized that if I kept my student loans on manual payments, I wouldn’t be at the mercy of my lender in terms of how payments were allocated. I assumed that I was no longer receiving an interest rate reduction for being on Kwik-pay. Nothing about an interest rate reduction was listed anywhere that I could see in their account interface.

In a sense, personal finance is a battle of conservation. People manage their resources in the hopes they won’t run out of the essentials — only what people find essential can differ. This centers around the fear of losing money or some other aspect of your financial life, and overcoming that fear should involve some element of minimizing the reality of it happening.

Offensive vs. defensive finance

Fundamentally, some people approach finance on the offensive, while others are on the defensive. People on the offensive are driven by acquiring more, or advancing their careers and social standing. People on the defensive care more about keeping what they already have than acquiring more. Both an offensive and a defensive mentality towards finance can come from a fear of loss — but what you fear losing determines whether your approach is offensive or defensive.

What do you fear losing?

As I’ve mentioned before, our grocery routine is pretty straightforward. I’ll just pull it straight in from our Meal Planning for Busy Families post from last fall:

Step 1: Get a Flyer
Step 2: Find Sales on Fresh Ingredients
Step 3: Do Some Recipe Research
Step 4: Create a Week-Long Meal Plan
Step 5: Make a Shopping List from the Meal Plan
Step 6: Go Grocery Shopping – And Stick to Your List

Today, I want to focus pretty hard on Step 5: Make a Shopping List from the Meal Plan.

I’m sitting there with a bunch of recipes that make up our meal plan and a fledgling grocery list that has the on-sale items on it. Obviously, I need to add more ingredients for those meals to my list, along with staples that we need for the week.

Comparison shopping has gotten much easier to do with search engines and other price alert services.  Retailers have to be more competitive now that pricing information is everywhere.

A friend I’ve had some online interactions with posted a picture of what he thought was a mistake on the unit pricing tag on a supermarket shelf.

He claimed something to the effect of:  “It’s a 13-ounce box of Wheat Thins, but they calculated the unit price based on 15 ounces, so the unit price is lower than it should be.”

Then he made some snarky comments (in good fun) and continued on with life.  The picture he uploaded is below.

As I was focusing on the price first, my first thought was that there was a grocery shrink ray that hit the box recently, and the store hadn’t caught the change yet.  No such luck.