Money Tips Network

There is a tendency on personal finance websites, in personal finance books and personal finance magazines, to get into great detail about the specifics of various personal finance decisions and strategies. You’ll find long articles about specific tax loopholes (like “backdoor Roths” and so on). You’ll find long calculations that seem to indicate that one move is strictly better than another one. You’ll find lots and lots of arcane writing about taxes.

For someone who just wants to achieve some level of financial security in life, it can be simply overwhelming. Even something as simple as putting money in a savings account can turn into pages and pages of details and information that can cause most people’s eyes to glaze over.

If that sounds like you, my advice is really straightforward: don’t sweat all the details and just keep things super simple. Most of that advice isn’t particularly useful anyway.

Let me get into why I say that.

You may be a treasure-hunter at heart, constantly on the lookout for the extraordinary amongst the ordinary.

If you are, then you needn't look any farther than your local bank or credit union.

They are caretakers for various kinds of coin and currency goodness — all hidden in plain sight, ready to be found by anyone looking.

The great things about coin and currency hunting

Some hobbies require startup costs. I've had friends that were into metal detecting. The better metal detectors aren't cheap.

With currency hunting, though, there don't have to be any extra startup costs. All you need is money in the bank to withdraw.

Also, even if you withdraw some bills or some coins, and end up finding nothing special, you still have all of your money.

A cent is worth at least a cent, and a dollar is worth at least a dollar. There's no downside, only upside!

Last week, I shared a lengthy article on how to make meal prep more efficient. Over the weekend, however, I started to look ahead at the coming months and recognized that the late fall and winter holidays are coming up quick on the calendar, with Thanksgiving just a few weeks away and the December holidays right on their heels.

I realized, based on my past experiences with holiday cooking, that the big meals that many families prepare for holiday gatherings are prime examples of the value and practice of meal prepping. Most of the strategies that I discussed in the article last week apply perfectly to Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and other winter holiday meals. Wherever families gather for a big meal, these strategies are valuable to employ.

Discover customers, rejoice — your bank just added the extremely popular Zelle, a digital payment network similar to Venmo that lets you send money directly from a Discover checking, savings or money market account. Best of all, the person on the receiving end doesn’t have to bank with Discover to receive the funds: Zelle lets you to send funds to almost any U.S.-based bank. All you need is an email address or a phone number.

Several months ago, I had a handful of users in rapid succession contact me and ask whether or not I had used castile soap as a multipurpose hygiene soap and household cleaner. They recommended all kinds of uses for it: bath soap, hand soap, window washing, dish washing, laundry soap, even toothpaste.

Before we get too far into this, let’s back up and talk about what castile soap actually is.

Castile soap is a particular type of soap made strictly from vegetable oils. Soap of all kinds is made from various fats – often animal fat, but almost any kind of fat or oil will work – mixed with some kind of alkali metal, usually lye. Castile soap, then, is just a sub-type of soap that uses vegetable oils for the fat – olive oil, canola oil, and so on.

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.

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