Money Tips Network

I want to start off by telling you a story, one that I’ve brought up in bits and pieces in the past on The Simple Dollar, but on the event of this most recent switch from Daylight Savings Time to regular time, I woke up one morning this week feeling the first real whispers of the winter blues, and I felt like it was time to discuss it in full. So, let’s start there.

My Winter Blues

Ever since I was a kid, I would go through periods of mild melancholy in the winter months. I didn’t want to go outside if at all possible and barely wanted to get out of bed on winter weekends, preferring to camp out with books. My parents – particularly my father – responded to this by making me go outside, practically doing everything short of dragging me outside. At the time, it just felt like a hoop I was jumping through.

Over the last several months, we’ve been gradually transitioning from a “recipes first” methodology of cooking to an “ingredients first” methodology. Our goal is to make our home cooking much more flexible so we can rely even more on bulk buying of key ingredients and just buying loss leaders from the produce aisle of the grocery store. I’ve written a little about this shift before and I thought a thorough update might be in order.

Let’s walk through what this is all about in detail.

How We’ve Done Things in the Past

In the past, our meal planning and grocery buying and cooking strategy was simple. It was a five step process:

Link for teaser title: 

https://www.wisebread.com/3-ideas-for-maximizing-financial-rewards-durin......

We often don’t consider the reliability of a car when it’s running properly. Instead, we just expect our car to continue working, and the more it does, the less we think about the possibility of a breakdown. 

If your car has a history of breaking down, perhaps you are a little more cognizant of what constitutes a reliable vehicle. Does your car start smoothly or sputter? Does your engine overheat? How many miles has your car traveled without an issue?

Your answer to these questions may impact your perception of how reliable your own make and model is, but we wanted to take a more analytical approach. 

Bank of America is a multinational investment and financial services company (bank) headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s the second-largest banking institution in the U.S. after JPMorgan Chase, and was formed in 1998 with the $62 billion acquisition of BankAmerica by NationsBank. As one of the largest banks in the U.S., Bank of America has both a huge physical and digital presence. The bank has about 4,500 branches, including branches in the country’s 30 top urban markets. They also have a mobile app that has a lot of capabilities and is easy to use.

Ever since I started my financial turnaround many years ago, one of my favorite things to do has been to calculate my net worth and compare it to my balance from a month before or from a year before, just to see that I’m still going in the right direction.

Often, it’s hard to see financial improvement in my day to day life because, well, I’m still working every day and my wife is as well. We don’t have enough to retire. At the same time, we have enough put aside that we can handle almost any emergency life might throw at is, including a big job loss. Our money stress is low and there’s not much that could change to make it lower.

So, looking at numbers is often the only way I have to make sure we’re still marching toward our biggest goals – retiring early, paying for a significant part of our children’s educations, and so on.

Are we still moving toward our goals?

One of my favorite simple ways to save money is to just repurpose things that I might otherwise throw out. There are many things that seem to have lived out their primary purpose that, rather than tossing them in the trash, I’d far rather find a second use for them.

This past weekend, while puttering around the house doing a lot of little tasks, I kept noticing all of these different things I had repurposed over time and I started making a list of them. Here are 14 of those things. I hope you’ll find some of them useful.

Use old t-shirts for household cleaning and window washing. If a t-shirt starts to get too beat up to wear, I like to toss it in a rag bag that we keep in the laundry room. Then, whenever we’re doing household cleaning, like washing windows or cleaning the walls, I’ll go there first.

Can’t remember the last time you went into a physical bank branch? That might mean Chime, or a bank like it, is for you. Designed originally as a bank for millennials, Chime can be a good bank for nearly anyone interested in mobile banking.

The bank was created in 2013 by Chris Britt and Ryan King. It’s completely online, so there are no branches or ATMs of its own, but it does offer a large fee-free ATM network through partner banks. For most users, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Accounts are protected by the FDIC just like the branch on the corner, so you still have all the security of a traditional bank without all the fees and fluff.

And that’s really where Chime shines: banking there is as fee-free as you can get. Here’s a bit more about the bank and how it works.

The following is a guest post from Kevin at Just Start Investing.

Today we have a title fight between robo-advisors and online brokers.

In one corner, we have the fresh rookie looking to shake up the investing world. Their speciality is automation and giving you an end to end experience to save you time and stress. Put your hands together for… Robo-advisors!

In the other corner, we have a seasoned verteran. They’ve been around a few years and know how to deliver a customizable portfolio for cheap. That is, if you’re willing to put in the work. Give it up for… online brokers!

Stick with us to see who will win this evenly matched fight. But first, a quick backstory on each competitor is below.

What is an Online Broker?