Money Tips Network

A while back I bid on a new Keurig coffee machine at a silent auction.  I bid $80 and won.  (They went for $120 new.)

Predictably, the $40 savings went out the window in only a few weeks with the additional amount we began to spend on the little K-Cups.

It’s such a convenience to just pop one of the cups in there, listen to the little pump suck water from the reservoir, heat it up, and finally force it through the coffee grounds.  And for someone who isn’t terribly discerning when it comes to coffee, it’s not bad.

But dang, the cost of those K-cups adds up fast!  Even the large packages of K-Cups at Costco doesn’t make the things cheap; they still are over thirty cents apiece.  With as many as I would use in a day, I might as well have bought a drink every day from Starbucks!

Overcoming the inconvenience barrier

During the winter, we use a number of tactics for maximizing the effectiveness of our energy use. In Iowa, winters can get quite cold – we reached -20 F at our home several times this winter – and knowing how to maximize the energy that your furnace uses can make a huge difference when the energy bill comes.

Now that we’re heading toward summer, the goal is a little different. We want to avoid running the air conditioning and, if we can, find other ways to cut down on our energy spending by taking advantage of summer.

Here are seven things we do to keep our energy bills in check during the warmer months of the year.

This post is by staff writer Honey Smith.

Aah, procrastination. Controlling our time can be difficult, and most of us are intimately familiar with the act of delaying the act of starting or completing a task. Piers Steel, professor of human resources and organizational dynamics at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary and author of “The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done,” has made the study of procrastination into an academic specialty.

Here's an email I recently received from a reader:

I have a question to which I haven't been able to find an answer online. I'm currently 32, have about $25,000 in my retirement accounts, and contribute approximately 18 percent of my income to my employer-sponsored plan and Roth IRA. I'm wondering when, if ever, I can stop contributing to these plans. I've read articles to the effect that people who invest for 10-15 years early in their careers (and then stop) do just as good, if not better, with final balances as those who start at 35 or 40 and contribute for the remainder of their careers.

I'm just curious... what is that "tipping point" where my contributions aren't going to make a significant increase to my final retirement balance. Is there a way to easily calculate this or is this a better question for a financial planner?

What are your thoughts for him?

I recently read one of those articles debating whether a million dollars was enough to retire on these days. Mostly, the focus of the article was on the fact that a million dollars isn’t as significant as it used to be due to the impact of inflation. That’s a good point, but it also got me thinking that the size of your nest egg is just one side of the retirement equation.

When people realize how incredible the deal is for a Roth IRA, they’re often in disbelief. After all, it lets you earn tax-free income in retirement. No federal income taxes, period, on money taken out of a Roth IRA when you’re at retirement age (and at a few other life opportunities, too).

Before we head too far down this road, let’s touch on what a Roth IRA is. I spelled it out in my earlier Roth IRA basics article, but here are the key things you need to know:

A Roth IRA is a type of Individual Retirement Account (that’s the IRA abbreviation, of course) that allows most individuals to save for retirement on their own with or without a 401(k) plan at their workplace. Someone working at Home Depot could start a Roth IRA, as could a janitor or a computer programmer working for the government.

Anyone who has followed my “Pieces of Inspiration” weekly series knows that I have a big soft spot in my heart for folk and Americana/alt-country/bluegrass/whatever-you-want-to-label-it music. I find new music in those genres all the time that really excite me and when I do buy music these days for offline listening, it’s almost entirely from those genres.

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” – Jim Rohn

Excluding my children, the four people I spend the most time with are all in their mid-thirties, they all have professional careers in science and/or engineering, they’re all debt-free, and they all have a serious cheap streak.

I’m in my mid-thirties, I had a professional career in science (until I made the unorthodox decision to write for a living… but I still employ some computer programming along the way), I’m debt-free, and I have a serious cheap streak.

Of course, one might say that many of these attributes are a big part of who I am as a person, but I also think that the people I associate with have a huge influence on me and the decisions I make each day.

Whether you’re the most frequent of frequent flyers or someone who is more likely to have miles expire, understanding the real value of what you’ve earned is the key to making the right choices as a consumer.

With miles programs constantly being changed and consumers’ loyalties challenged, those with frequent flyer miles have to decide when it’s worth trying to accumulate more and when it’s time to cash in. And even when you want to use your miles for a flight, it might not be that easy.

“Miles are worth less and less all the time — that seems to be a constant,” said Jason Cochran, editor of Frommer’s and author of several travel guidebooks.