Pecuniarities

Welcome to the 16th Edition of the Finance Fiesta! If this is your first time here, please be sure to have a look around and consider subscribing to our RSS feed. This week’s edition was particularly challenging for me to put together, because to tell the truth, of all the submissions received only 60% made [...]

This month’s Group Writing Project is about Personal Experiences with Loans, so we’ll tell the story of our first, somewhat disastrous experience with loans, of how we got in trouble and rectified the situation. In May 2003, when we moved from Hawaii, we lived in a tiny garage apartment in Hayward, CA (more about this [...]

Madoline and I lived in Los Angeles (in the San Fernando Valley) for a year and a half, during which time we went through a shopaholic phase followed by a phase of extreme frugality (described in Our Family Financial History). When we decided to be frugal, I learned a lot about free and low cost [...]

While browsing the WiseBread Forums today, I came across an interesting thread in which a member asks: Is “Simple Living” Just Another Term for “Giving Up”? Several members responded with various opinions: There is a difference between simple living and forced poverty. Not everyone enjoys the rat race. It’s a choice. It’s a form of [...]

Happy 5th of July, everyone! I hope you had a nice 4th. We just relaxed at home and ate yummy food (pizza with garlic, olives & feta cheese and Taiwanese style fried chicken, the recipe of which I plan to post here some time soon) and watched the Lost Episodes of the Lucy Show on [...]

Expansion difficulty/complexity level: Easy This is a basic savings account add-on for the Monopoly game to teach the principles of personal savings. The rules are few, with easy to calculate interest rates and a simple form to keep track of each player’s individual savings. While the interest rates are higher (for easy calculation) than they [...]

A few days ago, I came across a thread on a forum where a member wrote about something dishonest she had done in order to save money. This individual was cleaning out her kitchen pantry and came across some jars of pasta sauce that she had gotten in a Buy One Get One Free sale [...]