Pecuniarities

By giving up chocolate and ice cream for one month as part of our “Financial Lent”, we will save $14, which could potentially add up to 140 servings of one of our frugal recipes.

Hold a “Financial Lent” or fast to see what luxuries you can live without and how much money you can save by cutting back or giving it up altogether.

Our cousin, aunt and uncle are a loyal patrons of the Taiwan lottery. (Or at least my cousin was until a recent tarot reading convinced her to cut back on the lottery purchases.) But when she first arrived in April, she purchased 2 or 3 California Mega Millions lottery tickets and convinced me to do [...]

I know this seems strange considering that I am currently holding a 2009 Financial Resolutions Blog Contest, but I don’t do new year’s resolutions anymore. Sure I still make general decisions/goals/plans/etc. for my life, but I no longer pin them down to specific years.
In years past I have set new years resolutions only to forget [...]

I received the following comment today from a reader about my earlier post Simple Solutions to Staying Out of Debt:
“All good advice – sadly, it is harder than it sounds. But then again, the more you make the more you can spend, so figuring out how to live within your means is a lesson we [...]

How showing respect and being polite when dealing with authority figures could save you from disciplinary actions. Story of my encounter with a police officer who pulled me over concluded with him giving me a benevolent warning to slow down and wishing me a nice day.

While cold weather has it charms – pretty white snow (for some of us), excuse to drink lots of hot chocolate, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. – with it comes some less charming side effects: colds, flus, etc. Not only is it no fun to get sick, it can be expensive. When one is not feeling well, [...]