Money Tips Network

Commenting on a recent article, Carmine Red asked an excellent question:

How do you evaluate the financial advice you get from other sources? Specifically, how do you decide if some piece of advice is for you, or if you should discard some adjacent advice. Is there an amount of pick-and-choose?

GRS definitely doesn’t seem like a dogmatic 100% one-way-of-doing things site, so I’d love to hear about the critical thinking you employ, and that I’m sure we can all use a little of since we’re getting bombarded by financial “do this!” or “don’t do this” instructions from so many different dimensions.

There’s nothing better than an unexpected positive event happening purely by chance. What’s even better? Serendipity when the price tag is very small or nonexistent, or when you’re able to multiply the value of your dollar enormously.

The challenge, of course, is to put yourself in situations where serendipity is likely to occur without inherently having to spend a lot of money. For example, you might experience serendipity in the aisles of an electronics store, but the price tag is going to be steep. As a frugal person, you’re better off seeking serendipity elsewhere.

So what can you do to open yourself up to frugal serendipity? Here are eleven things you can do to widen the possibilities without emptying the wallet.

Like a lot of people, I sometimes fall into periods of melancholy. I don’t view it as anything like actual depression, which is a serious mental health condition that deserves proper treatment by professionals, but it’s a sense of feeling sad about my life. I tend to let ordinary routines and habits slide a bit in those moods, I tend to become less productive, and I also tend to be much more prone to impulse buying and the influence of advertising. I am much more prone to these feelings during the winter months, as I think it combines with mild seasonal affective disorder (basically, the winter blues). In fact, I’ve written specifically about my seasonal affective disorder and frugal strategies for beating it.

[T]he taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly; and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an abatement.
– Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth

There are some topics I don’t often delve into on The Simple Dollar, and taxes are one of them.

Yes, almost all of us pay a lot in taxes. We pay income tax each year to the federal government, sometimes to state governments, and occasionally to local governments. We pay property taxes. We pay sales taxes. We’re sometimes hit with other taxes as well, like usage taxes.

A few weeks ago, the desk lamp I use at my standing desk went on the fritz. I thought at first that it was just a bad light bulb, but I quickly figured out that there was something fundamentally wrong with the lamp.

At that point, I had some decisions to make. I could spend some time taking the lamp apart, figuring out what was wrong with it internally, and attempting to fix it. This actually wouldn’t be too bad of a task. I could probably fix the issue with an hour, a small set of tools, some solder, and maybe a brief trip to a hardware store.

On the other hand, I could simply buy a new lamp for my desk. The lamp I was using was purchased for a dollar or two at a yard sale and served its purpose well for a few years. Is another used lamp the right solution? Or, since I rely on it every day, should I look for a better model?

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. 529 for child without custody
2. Advising friends without being pushy
3. Found the furniture-selling article!
4. Notable feature of money markets
5. Never want to retire?
6. Paper journal versus Day One?
7. Dollar Shave Club or alternatives?
8. Lower APR but higher payments?

Spending money mindlessly is easy to do — not to mention fun!

The “Books with Impact” series takes a deeper look at specific books that have had a profound impact on my financial, professional, and personal growth by extracting specific points of advice from those books and looking at how I’ve applied them in my life with successful results. The previous entry in this series covered The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few years, it’s that if you want to succeed at any life improvement goal, you have to alter your normal daily routine such that every single day naturally produces some progress toward your goal.

Those ubiquitous checklists of “dorm room essentials” for college freshmen are filled with items that will be ditched by the end of first semester.

Some parents “go to the store and grab a list like they did when their kids were in elementary and high school and just go straight down the list,” says Lisa Heffernan, mother of three sons and a college-shopping veteran. Or they buy things they only wish their students will use (looking at you, cleaning products).

You can safely skip about 70% of things on those lists, estimates Asha Dornfest, the author of Parent Hacks and mother of a rising college sophomore who’s home for the summer.