pocketmint

Tag: spending

1. The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Your Turn

   8 February 2012

   In 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 [...]

2. The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Our Results

   27 January 2012

   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. (This is Part Two in a series. See the Introduction and Part One if you missed them.) I fully expected that for at least [...]

3. The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Our Plan

   19 January 2012

   Here’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 [...]

4. Eschewing Black Friday, embracing Small Business Saturday

   29 November 2011

   I 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 [...]

5. Spending money to save money

   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, [...]

6. A visit to the Island of Misfit Foods

   4 August 2009

   The 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 [...]

7. Parental generosity versus financial limits

   28 August 2008

   A 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, [...]