Tag: spending
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Gasoline spending: the problem
21 December 2012This is the first of two posts about how I adapted our budget system to control our gasoline expenses. When I set up our budget in July 2011, Jak and I both had contract jobs. That meant two things with regard to transportation: a long commute several days per week, and free transit passes. Mostly, […]
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To give great gifts, think like a behavioral economist
13 December 2012For Jak’s last birthday, I gave him peace of mind. Also, sushi. Our mutual favorite restaurant in the area is Mashiko Sushi, way down in West Seattle. These days we eat out very rarely — a bit less than once per month — but we spend more time at Mashiko than anywhere else, in no […]
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Now Read This — what you really want, house happiness, and the fiscal cliff
30 November 2012Erica Strauss on getting what you really want Remember ‘miswanting’? Erica at Northwest Edible Life offers a another way to rethink your tangible purchases with Occupy Your Brain (Why You Don’t Really Want What You Want). She lays out a nice little chart to help you dig down past the initial desire-reflex and examine the […]
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The credit card rewards system is gaming you
8 October 2012Warnings against credit cards, while common, are almost always of the ‘don’t carry a balance’ variety. Over and over, we are told that as long as we pay off your balance each month and avoid fees and interest charges, we’ll come out ahead. I’ve noticed that bloggers in particular love to trumpet the advantages of […]
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The secret to the new iPhone’s popularity
14 September 2012So the iPhone 5 goes on sale in just one week. Here’s an early look at what people think of the improvements over last year’s 4S model: This cracked me the hell up. You’ve probably heard of ‘planned obsolescence’, where products are deliberately designed with a limited lifespan. There’s a bit of that with the […]
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1 June 2012
Our month in Mexico was all the travel we planned for this year. But then we were invited to attend a wedding in Jak’s family. In Texas and … Costa Rica. With round-trip airfare generously paid. Well, gosh. Touring a Costa Rican rainforest has been high on my bucket list for nearly two decades, ever […]
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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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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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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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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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Parental generosity versus financial limits
28 August 2008A recent conversation on the Get Rich Slowly forum about finances and children caught my eye — specifically, how do you balance the desire to give your children everything they want (or everything you did or didn’t have) with the practical need to limit expenses? This is an issue that Jak and I negotiate regularly, […]