Money Tips Network

Tried-and-true tips for saving money, like meal planning and carpooling, really work. But when you've scrimped and saved in the obvious places and your budget is still coming up short, it's time to get creative.

What's the most extreme thing you've done to save money?

Saturday night, Kim and I joined 25,216 other soccer fans to watch the Portland Timbers defeat the Vancouver Whitecaps 3-1 during a crazy rare August rainstorm. (Portland gets a lot of rain…but not in early August.) The match was a lot of fun, with three terrific goals. Here. I'll share highlights with you…

I've owned Timbers season tickets since 2010, the year before they made the leap to the top league in the U.S. — but I've been a fan since 1975, when I was six years old. My earliest sports memories are listening to Timbers games on a transistor radio, cheering for the likes of Clive Charles, John Bain, and (especially) goalkeeper Mick Poole. I wanted to be Mick Poole.

Each year in August, I get my Timbers renewal letter. If I want season tickets again, it's time to purchase them.

Saving money and getting money for grocery receipts is pretty easy with receipt-scanning smartphone apps. To save more, use more apps …

With all of the news about companies finally being brought to light for making a mint off of your personal information without reasonable disclosure, it's a good thing when other companies pay you for it. It may not be much, but it is something.

Over 300 billion receipts are printed each year! Environmental impact aside, companies will pay for your information because marketers want it dearly.

Max writes in:

Can you explain what the difference between stocks and bonds are? Tried to read up on this on Wikipedia and other sites but it’s not clicking.

I’ve explained what a stock is in the past, but it never hurts to dig into a core idea like this again, so let’s start from the beginning.

What Are Stocks?

Stocks are tiny slivers of ownership of a company. When you own a share of stock (“stocks” is basically a short way of saying “shares of stock”), you actually own a very tiny piece of the company that stock is associated with. If you own a share of Coca-Cola, you own a very tiny sliver of the Coca-Cola Corporation.

How does that have value? There are a couple of reasons.

Every summer, my family faces the same unanswerable dilemma: should we purchase a membership to our local pool?

This may not seem like an especially difficult question to answer, but it has us scratching our heads every year.

When I was a little kid, my family really didn’t spend much money at all. We raised a lot of our own food with two huge gardens (and a lot of canning), my father’s side gig as a small-scale commercial fisherman, and a lot of chickens in a chicken pen. We didn’t have cable and just enjoyed five channels that we could pick up on the antenna (ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and Fox). We lived in a pretty small house in a rural area. Our cars were bought used and driven into oblivion, then replaced with another used car. We didn’t have cell phones or home internet or Netflix or anything like that. My mom bought almost everything in store brand form when she went grocery shopping.

In short, the actual annual expenses were pretty low. I’m willing to bet that they added up to less than $20,000 per year.

Last month, the Society of Actuaries (a group I was born to belong to!) published a mammoth (84-page) report entitled “Viability of the Spend Safely in Retirement Strategy”. Despite its opaque title, this report (written by Steve Vernon, Joe Tomlinson, and the estimable Wade Pfau) contains some interesting info about planning for retirement income.

On the surface, this report's advice seems stupid simple: To optimize retirement income, delay Social Security and make the most of required minimum distributions from tax-advantaged accounts. Isn't this pretty much what most of us plan to do? Maybe so, but I doubt that anyone else has crunched the numbers like this.

When I graduated from college, I had moderate student loan debt and a small amount of credit card debt, but I had a solid job lined up and big dreams of establishing a strong financial foundation.

Four years later, I was married with a kid, tons of credit card debt, a car loan, additional other loans, an expensive lifestyle, and a financial situation so precarious I couldn’t keep the bills paid.

What happened? I started my life in the adult world without good financial practices and principles and that quickly led to a difficult financial situation.

I don’t look back with regret, but I do look back at those days and ask myself, “What did I mess up? What do I wish I had done differently?”

I use the cashback app Ibotta to save on groceries. Here are tricks to making sure that you maximize your savings …

To date, I've earned over $160 cashback with Ibotta.

Saving money with Ibotta goes like this:

1. Install the app on your phone.
2. Select the items with cashback deals you want.
3. Go shopping and buy the items.
4. Scan your receipt.
5. Get your cash when you reach $20.

And that's it. It's a bit like couponing without the coupons.

How to do Ibotta by the book

That's how things are supposed to work, anyway.