Money Tips Network

If you’re like me, you hold the firm belief that a personal finance site like the one you’re currently visiting should occasionally offer more than the usual advice.

Oh, it’s fine if these posts primarily advance ways to track down the best savings account, how to save on life insurance or find the best zero percent APR credit cards. It’s just peachy if most offer timely tips on how to stage a profitable yard sale, get the best deal on pro sports memorabilia, save money on trips to the dry cleaner and earn a mint recycling common household items over online auction sites.

And of course, it’s terrific if they remind us of practices we’ve long known we should get going on but can’t often rouse ourselves to actually undertake, like investing for our kids’ college educations and our own secure retirement.

Summer is approaching (though from the unseasonably cool temperatures here, you could have fooled me) and with the approach of summer means summer cooling bills. Many, many households across the United States will be trying to maximize the cooling they can get from their central air units, window air conditioning, and fans in order to minimize their energy bills.

There are a number of steps that are often tossed out there as “standard” advice, such as installing a programmable thermostat, finding the upper limit of what you can tolerate inside, opening windows in the night time to let in cooler air, closing the curtains and/or blinds to block direct sunlight, and so on.

In fact, I listed several of these tips in a recent article, Seven Simple Tactics We Use to Keep Summer Energy Bills Low.

Volunteering is one of the most rewarding — and frugal — ways to make a difference in community. And with nearly 65 million Americans reporting having volunteered last year, chances are you’ve made it a point to give of your time to support a worthy cause. From volunteering at a school or food bank to participating in a walk for charity, we want to hear what volunteer experience impacted you the most!

What volunteer experience had the deepest impact on you? What made it so impactful? Did you share the experience with someone else?

Welcome to Wise Bread's Best Money Tips Roundup! Today we found some stellar articles on ways to make your mornings better, increasing your chances of home business success, and protecting your wallet and energy bill.

Top 5 Articles

14 Ways to Make Your Mornings Better — To make your mornings better, fuel up and don't cram too much into the mornings. [PopSugar Smart Living]

5 Tips to Increase Your Chances of Home Business Success — Increase your chances of home business success by getting the right business insurance. [Cash Money Life]

Stretched for time? Nowadays, who isn't?! Successful time management isn't as elusive as it might seem. Creating a "time budget" can help.

Why a time budget? Just like a regular budget helps us track and manage a limited resource — our money — a time budget can help us track an even more precious resource — our time. If we go over one of our spending categories in our money budget, we borrow from another account, such as entertainment or food (or from a credit card). And if we go over a time budget account — such as spending too much time at work, we have to borrow some time from elsewhere, like family time, or sleep time. (Fortunately, so far, there's no credit card for time.)

Many people write wills for their physical property, but few even think about creating a plan for their digital estates. Without such a plan, your loved ones might be unable to access your digital files or the accounts could be deleted before they see them.

A digital estate plan can help ensure that every online account will be accessed or transferred to the right person. And for those with networks of online-only friends and work colleagues, a digital estate plan can help inform those virtual friends of one's actual demise.

Let's start with a look at the nature of the problem, and then we'll look at some solutions.

Naked With Cash is an ongoing series at Consumerism Commentary in which readers share their households’ finances with other readers. These participants benefit from the accountability that comes from tracking their finances publicly and the feedback of the four expert Certified Financial Planners (CFPs).

For more information, read this introduction.

Whenever a person makes a significant change in their life, some things are gained and some things are lost. Ideally, the things that are gained outweigh the things that are lost, but that doesn’t mean that the exchange was purely positive.

When changing one’s life, there are some things that are left behind. During the process of changing our financial direction, we lost several things in our lives.

We lost friends. I was pretty tight with a circle of young professionals that would sometimes drink after work and sometimes engage in other expensive activities. Once I became aware of my finances, I was astounded as to how much this group was really costing me, so I inched away from it. I still stay in touch with a few people from those days, but most of the rest are lost to the mists of time.

This article is by staff writer Lisa Aberle.

As far as I know, only one reader of Get Rich Slowly knows me personally. And last week, I was having lunch with my one-person fan club. (Actually, I am not sure she’s even a fan, but she did buy my lunch. Thanks, Lisa!)

“You really stirred up some controversy with one of your recent posts,” Lisa said, a forkful of salad in hand.

“You must mean the one about not paying for our kids’ college, right?” I said.

“Yes, that’s the one. You know, it really made me think.” Without telling me her opinion on the subject, she said, “What do parents really owe their kids? Financially speaking, of course.”

“I actually wanted to write a blog post on that.”