Giving Money to Friends and Family without Exchanging Cash

If you’re like me, you don’t carry around cash. Any spare change I find or accumulate in my wallet from the sporadic cash purchase immediately goes into this cute cow bank we bought in Salzburg, Austria on our honeymoon. Our paychecks are automatically deposited into our checking account, and we use credit cards almost exclusively [...]

Laundromat Economics: Our Broken Washer

It started in late September during the final load of “my-mom’s-coming-to-visit-better-get-things-clean-including-rugs” laundry. I put the last load of wash in and headed into the shower. When I came out I was met with a pile of drenched, semi-cleaned rugs and an inch of water on the laundry room floor. By rerunning the load I immediately [...]

What Will $5 Buy You on a Flight?

Ever since I boarded a plane for the first time as a sixteen year old foreign exchange student headed to Burgos, Spain I have been in love with flying. Perhaps it is because there is nothing else to do once you board the cabin but to sleep, read, write, or relax. I get to turn [...]

A Trade Secret of Frugality

Much of personal finance is really quite simple. Earn money. Spend less than you earn. Save the extra. However, mastering these seemingly easy concepts is difficult for many people. You know you should set a budget, but it seems so complicated and limiting that you never quite sit down to do it. You have a [...]

RecycleBank: The Creation of a Black Market for Trash

Commodity prices, such as gold and steel, are on the rise. Unfortunately I do not own any of these commodities. What other commodity value is on the rise that I do own? My trash.             Well, not trash exactly. But recyclable trash. It’s like Houston opened up a scrap metal shop with roadside service. I [...]

Added Value Convenience Foods that are Not Worth It

I was watching a show on Saturday night, ‘Til Debt Do us Part’, and was utterly shocked that one couple (no kids) had managed to spend over thirteen hundred dollars in one month on just eating. How could any couple manage to do that? If Paul and I ate to satiate our wildest gastronomical dreams for [...]

One of the Luxuries Money Can Buy: Sanity

For those of you who have never had a wedding, let me explain the mindset that I am in. Our wedding is less than two weeks away, and while all of the large details are taken cared of, there are about 30 smaller details still left. These details include anything from tux pickup, marriage license, [...]

The 7 Deadly Purchase Sins: You’ll Never Get Rich if you Practice These

In no particular order, here is a list of what I deem to be the 7 deadly purchase sins that will surely keep money out of your pocket. Ideal Self Purchases:  Do you ever purchase things because the type of person whom you ideally want to be, or the person who you see yourself as, [...]

Frugal Living

All things considered—we were living in a foreign country that we only marginally spoke the language of and it was past midnight—we should have taken a taxi after missing the last train home from a late night in Tokyo. But with the promise of a $50 bill looming over our heads, the dark night sky [...]