Topic: Uncategorized
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The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Our Results
27 January 2012(This is Part Two in a series. See the Introduction and Part One if you missed them.) Our new budget system accomplished everything I hoped for, and then some. Still, I’ve been surprised by a thing or two about my own reactions, and even more so by Jak’s. I fully expected that for at least [...]
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The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Our Plan
19 January 2012(See the Introduction if you missed it.) First, I started with by calculating our net income from a single day job. (At the time it was me working and Jak at home; more often it’s been the other way around, but either way we’ve been on a single income since late 2008.) Then I started [...]
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The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Introduction
17 January 2012My partner Jak and I have been together for eleven years now. We blended our money fairly early in our relationship — sometime late in the second year. Ever since then we’ve had a single pool, into which all income goes, and from which all outflows are jointly approved. Our financial outlooks and spending priorities [...]
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Handmade holidays: experiment in wreath-making
27 December 2011On even-numbered years, Jak’s kids are with us for Christmas, and we often end up spending the holiday with his extended family as well. On odd-numbered years — like this one — the kids spend Christmas with their mother, and Jak and I are usually alone. I wasn’t too keen on buying a whole tree [...]
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9 December 2011
The calculations are complete. Total cost per person for our Thanksgiving meal (one generous serving each of six dishes and two desserts): $3.50. Note that I didn’t skimp on quality of ingredients — I used such expensive items as pine nuts, heavy cream, whole vanilla beans, and real maple syrup. I also did nothing different [...]
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Eschewing Black Friday, embracing Small Business Saturday
29 November 2011I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend (well, those in the States, anyway — I hope everyone else had a great ordinary weekend). We had an awesome dinner, if I do say so myself. I am almost done with the cost calculations I promised; I just need to get a few prices from Costco [...]
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On shrimp, or how to balance ethics and thrift
19 November 2011Pocketmint now spans three and a half years, and while there are certain posts I would write the same today, other things in my life have changed over that time. I think this personal evolution is often meaningful, so periodically I’ll be highlighting something I said in the past and updating it with my current [...]
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Retrospective rubbernecking at the subprime mortgage disaster
17 November 2011As I mentioned once before, I have a block on ‘formal’ book reviews, so consider this just a friendly little chat, okay? I trust Stacy’s opinions implicitly, particularly on matters of journalism, so when in passing she praised Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, the very next thing I did was hit the library web site [...]
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8 November 2011
Thanksgiving is my very favorite holiday. I hear that some people have odd Thanksgiving customs like ‘watching football’ or ‘shopping’, but for us it’s pretty much an entire holiday about cooking and eating. These are two of my favorite things, so I’m happy. This week I’ve started poking around recipe sites looking for menu-planning inspiration. [...]
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Move your money and bump your interest rate too
1 November 2011A lot of people are moving their money this week, either because of outrage at the imposition of yet another fee, or due to a general realization that customers tend to get better treatment from small not-for-profit credit unions than from gigantic banking corporations. In tangentially related news, interest rates seem to be exploring Zeno’s [...]
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22 October 2011
Three years ago, in October 2008, the stock market crashed and — not coincidentally, as I was then employed by the brokerage arm of an international bank — I promptly lost my job. The following month my partner Jak took a 10% pay cut, as the market continued dropping and layoffs and hiring freezes broke [...]
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Supper club: an alternative to potlucks and dinner parties
15 January 2010This entry started out as a comment to Kris’ potluck post on Get Rich Slowly, but it soon became too long for a mere comment, so I moved it over here. In addition to being frugal-minded, I’m also an unabashed foodie. When I was lucky enough to have three friends nearby who also liked to [...]
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Save those crusts: a yummy use for your extra bread bits
11 December 2009For the past few months, my newfound love for easy homemade bread got sidelined by my difficulties with excema. Even easy bread sort of requires being able to use both hands. So it was back to the Costco multigrain loaves for sandwiches and toast. It’s always pained my frugal soul that a certain amount of [...]
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5 November 2009
We’ve done a pretty good job of cutting back on unnecessary expenses during this period of reduced income. ‘Magazine subscriptions’ seems like an obvious category to eliminate, right? Yet I kept mine. Here’s why: they save me way more money than they cost. Consumer Reports My first-ever magazine subscription, when I was 19 years old, [...]
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25 September 2009
Alert readers may have noticed that lately the frequency of posts here at Pocketmint has been somewhat reduced. One reason is that some of my recently personal-finance writing has gone to Get Rich Slowly instead. In addition to the aforementioned discount grocery store adventure, I did a post on Discovering — and challenging — your [...]
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An unflinching look at America’s dangerous fascination with ‘cheap’
5 September 2009Even before I’d finished Ellen Ruppel Shell’s new book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, I decided I should review it on Pocketmint. I then spent two weeks artfully procrastinating on doing so. Apparently I have a block on writing formal ‘book reviews’. I have no trouble discussing books, verbally and informally, but the [...]
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Credit cards (part three): use ’em … and lose ’em anyway
7 August 2009It was a brief segment on NPR’s Marketplace last month that alerted me to the newest scary thing about credit cards: banks have begun to curtail or withdraw credit based on where you shop and what you buy. Here’s one example: consumer Kevin Johnson had his credit line slashed by two-thirds despite a stellar credit [...]
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A visit to the Island of Misfit Foods
4 August 2009The first of my two guest posts is up at Get Rich Slowly. GRS has long been my favorite personal finance blog, and was one of the main inspirations for Pocketmint. (Which is sort of a neat karmic circle, since JD credits my online personal journal of twelve years ago as the inspiration for his [...]
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Credit cards (part one): the game is changing
12 July 2009I’ve just about had it with credit cards. Like most people of my generation, I got my first card in college. Then, and for the next twenty years, getting credit was deceptively easy. I used it in all the typical foolish ways: to pay bills during periods of unemployment, to finance an unsustainable small business, [...]
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Travel ‘protection’: a predatory scam
3 July 2009Considering travel insurance? Make certain that you get terms in writing before you pay — terms that prominently include the word ‘refund’. That’s the takeaway message from the latest ‘Haggler’ column in the New York Times, where journalist David Segal goes to bat on behalf of beleaguered consumers. I was particularly appalled by the story [...]
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One more for the ‘no-knead’ bread revolution
1 July 2009I love fresh homemade bread. Once, in my early twenties, I made a loaf by hand. I had picked up the classic Tassajara Bread Book from a remainder table, and one afternoon I went at it for several hours, kneading and punching away. It made a glorious loaf which we happily devoured straight out of [...]
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Movie helps kids relate to economic woes
24 June 2009If tough economic times are causing you stress, you can bet your kids are picking up on the tension as well. Knowing how much to tell them about financial matters can be tricky; you don’t want to overburden and worry them, but neither do you want to leave them surprised and unprepared. I thought the [...]
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Downsizing appliances to save money
20 June 2009When we bought our house in December 2006, there was a surprise in the garage: the former owners had left us a huge old chest freezer. Now, Jak and I had a chest freezer already, a smaller model we’d bought at Costco about five years earlier. So this one was a bit superfluous, more than [...]
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Risk-free high-yield savings option
17 June 2009When is a CD not a CD? When it’s a savings account in disguise. Traditionally, certificates of deposit have offered a trade-off: in return for the bank’s guarantee of a fixed interest rate, you promise to leave your money with the bank for a specific term. If you renege and withdraw your funds early, you [...]