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. Prioritizing bills in emergency
2. Pantry clean-out advice
3. Furthering education without eating weekends?
4. Adult children still taking
5. “No buy” November
6. Water bottle smell
7. Rice cooker recommendation?
8. Pension plan frozen; now what?

This article is going to start out pretty far astray from money issues, so bear with me for a bit. Don’t worry, we’ll come back to dollars and cents.

Think about a time in your life where you did something that you quickly realized was the wrong thing to do. Perhaps it really hurt someone else. Perhaps it was something that just feels wrong to you to think about it. Maybe you did it just to impress someone that you shouldn’t have bothered to try to impress (at least not in that way), or maybe it was just a bad choice in the moment.

You probably felt awful about it afterwards, probably for quite a while. You likely regret it even now.

Ever since our first child was born and Sarah and I went through a financial turnaround, preparing meals at home has bene a big part of our daily routine. Even with three kids and with both of us having busy professional and community schedules, we make a concerted effort to prepare almost all of our meals at home and to have family dinners together as often as possible, probably six days a week on average. It saves money, ensures at least a somewhat healthy diet, and also gives us a chance to come together as a family pretty much every day.

The thing is, as our children have grown up and their schedules have become more convoluted and also as our own lives have become more challenging in different ways, we’ve had to develop a lot of different techniques to be able to continue to pull this off. There are many evenings where we are utterly threading the needle to have a family dinner together simply because of all of the time constraints.

Join our Tweetchat this Thursday at 12:00 pm Pacific for lively conversation and a chance to win one of two $10 Amazon GCs! Use #WBChat to participate.

This week's topic: Having a Frugal Halloween! Learn about saving on decorations, candy, costumes, and more!

About seven months ago, Sarah and I picked up a set of six wool dryer balls. We found them quite inexpensively — about $1 each, while I’ve been unable to consistently find them online for much below $3 apiece – and we had heard from several places that they were effective at reducing drying time and were a substitute for dryer sheets as they resulted in softer clothes out of the dryer than drying without dryer sheets and without fabric softener in the wash.

I decided to put these claims to the test as carefully as possible by doing a bunch of loads of laundry with and without dryer balls to see if I noticed a difference in drying time and softness of clothes. Do they actually replace dryer sheets? Do they actually save energy?

To summarize, my answer is dryer balls save a little bit of energy per load, but only if you’re paying attention and shorten your drying time accordingly and it’s not life changing.

We’ve heard it time and time again — climate change will determine the fate of our future and of generations to come. And, it’s no secret that we’ve witnessed an increase in natural disasters not only in our lifetime, but in the past few years. 

Remember the 2018 California wildfires that destroyed over 1.6 million acres and 23,314 buildings? Or, Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which damaged over 135,000 homes? That’s not to mention the devastation that natural disasters have caused worldwide. 

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Years ago, I worked in an office environment where I was expected to dress reasonably nice. The office was about a 25 minute commute from my house. A few times a year, I had to travel for work, usually for most of a week, and the travel usually wasn’t to anywhere interesting, usually just to the same remote location I’d been to several times before so that I could work there instead. I often went out for lunch with coworkers, usually because we were interviewing or hosting people and it was kind of expected that we would go out to lunch with them without reimbursement. There were times when my job was really stressful and I would just go home, flop on the couch, and either play a mindless video game or watch something unplanned on TV just to unwind.

At the time, I didn’t really think too much of those things. I thought of them as part of what it meant to be a professional in my field.

Hello! I have returned from my final big trip of the year, and I've resumed working behind the scenes here at Get Rich Slowly. Soon, new articles will begin to appear on this site.

Oh, wait. Here's a new article now!

On my most recent trip, I happened to tell the same story twice to two different groups. In doing so, I realized that it's a story I've never told here. That's unfortunate. It's about an event that had a profound impact on the course of my life — and my finances.

To bide the time while I work on longer articles, today I'd like to share how my fate was decided by the literal toss of a coin.