Archive for 'Spending' Category
What’s the Single Best Thing to Do to Lower Your Energy Costs?
Think you know the single best thing you can do to save energy? A recent survey shows that most people don’t. The single best thing you can do to conserve energy and save money on your power bill is to swap out all of your light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs. While you can certainly [...]
Calculating a 10% Discount
There are only a few things in life that are as easy as calculating a 10% discount. I think I grasped the concept at about age 7. Look at the total and move the decimal point one digit to the left to figure out what a 10% discount would be. For example a $10.00 [...]
Our Budget – A Look Back
I was browsing through my “Personal Finance” folder on my computer a couple of days ago and stumbled upon an old copy of my master budget/net worth spreadsheet from about 4 years ago. I’ve always enjoyed looking back at old copies of our finances because it reminds me of how far we’ve come. As I [...]
Calculating My Daily Costs
I was sitting around one day when I started wondering how much my property taxes cost me each day. I had absolutely no idea, although I knew that I pay over $4000 a year in property taxes. After a quick check, I found I’m actually paying $4450 in property taxes each year. Ugh. So, what [...]
We Avoided an Expensive Visit to the Mechanic
About a week ago I was driving my 2000 Toyota Tacoma truck with my seven year old daughter riding shotgun. We were heading over to my mom’s house for a short visit, which required us to drive across a valley, up a pretty steep, long hill and then along the Puget Sound for a bit. [...]
What Will Happen to My Family if I Die?
Seems like kind of a harsh question to ask, but I think it’s a necessary one. A number of years ago my wife and I purchased a $100,000 term life insurance policy on me. My rationale was that we were young and didn’t have much debt and that was enough to get my wife back [...]
Cost is All Relative
As I posted earlier, I was recently shopping for a clothes dryer after ours decided to quit working. I have to say, it was not an enjoyable experience. In the end, I managed to avoid the purchase and pick up a used one for nearly nothing from a neighbor, but the process that I went [...]
Dryer Drama
It never fails. We renew our commitment to build our savings to a higher level and things start breaking. In this case, our dryer decided to stop working. Knowing that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work on a dryer, I did some testing and discovered that the main control board in [...]
Being Satisfied With What You Have
I found myself over at Get Rich Slowly today reading his post called: “Bigger Isn’t Always Better: Remembering to Appreciate What I Already Have” and a number of things came to mind. First the synopsis. JD took the long route home yesterday which included walking past a number of large “mansion” type houses. As he [...]
The Summer of Not Spending Major Money
It’s finally summer around here and I’m thrilled. The months of cold blustery weather seemed to go on forever and I can easily recall longing for the days of warmth. While the weather hasn’t exactly been “epic” heat or anything so far (in fact it’s been uncharacteristically cooler in May and June in the Pacific [...]