Tag: family
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Obamacare and affordable health insurance
4 September 2012A couple of months ago, I bemoaned the 14% year-over-year increase in our individual health insurance premiums and expressed my fear for 2015, when both Jak and I will have moved into higher age brackets. I calculated that at the current rate of increase, our premiums would double in just four years. Since the cost […]
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The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Your Turn
8 February 2012In creating the Conflict-Free Family Budget, I was striving to accomplish two separate but interlinked goals: reduce spending and reduce conflicts. I think these work best in tandem, but that’s not to say that you wouldn’t derive some benefit by implementing just one or the other. I’ll try to tease them apart here for that […]
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The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Our Plan
19 January 2012Here’s the complete rundown of the new budget agreement I worked out and proposed to Jak last June. This post is part of a series. 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 […]
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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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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 […]