Good money management is mainly about what you spend, but it’s also useful to think about how you spend your money, and what you do with it when you’re not spending it. Here we’ll take a cruise through bank accounts, cash, checks, and debit cards, and of course credit cards. Read the rest of this entry »

While the numbers on your electric or gas bills may seem like they came out of nowhere, the truth is that they are directly based on the choices that you make every day. You can’t change the price of a barrel of oil, but you can choose whether or not to turn the heat or air conditioning on (and how high). What’s even better is that the choices that let you save money on your utility bills are also healthier choices for you and your family! Read the rest of this entry »

Cookbooks are like ski runs. There are cookbooks that are the equivalent of the bunny slopes, with simple recipes using few ingredients. Then there are the intermediate ones, with a few moguls in the form of longer ingredient lists and more complicated instructions. And then there are the black-diamond cookbooks, which probably have stunning photographs accompanying them, but with recipe text that strike fear into the hearts of novice cooks everywhere. Read the rest of this entry »

Where does all your money go? Good question. Fortunately, it’s not that hard to find out… and once you find out, the ball is in your court as to what you want to do about it. Read the rest of this entry »

I just got back from two weeks in England, and as I had a great time, I thought I’d share a few tips - some of them that I learned on the spot. Some of these ideas have to do with spending wisely while traveling, but most of them focus on enjoying yourself and having a relaxed trip. I’ve used examples from my recent trip, but these suggestions are, I believe, applicable wherever you go “on holiday.” Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing some reading on femininity, exploring different perspectives on the problem of being a healthy woman in our modern culture. So far, I’ve looked at Wendy Shalit’s A Return to Modesty and Laura Sessions Stepp’s Unhooked, each of which helpfully articulate some aspects of the problem. But as I read these and other books along similar lines, I found myself thinking that we can’t understand what it means to be a woman just by examining personal relationships. We also have to look at our culture - and its rampant consumerism. To that end, Jean Kilbourne’s critique of advertising in Can’t Buy My Love gives us a valuable perspective. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve lived in enough different places in the US to realize that different regions have different names for the same phenomenon: people selling stuff they don’t need to passers-by. In Western Massachusetts they were tag sales… here in Southern California they’re yard sales… when they’re organized by a group they’re sometimes called white elephant sales… Whatever the name, I love ‘em! Yard sales are a great way to get things you need (or just happen to want) for a good price, while also helping out somebody else clear out their closet, and helping the environment by keeping perfectly good items out of the landfill. Let’s talk about how to get the best deals at these things.

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I find that while one-time expenses are the easiest to remember (unless you’re deliberately trying to forget just how much you spent at the shoe store last week… well, it was an awfully good sale…) it’s the recurring expenses that tend to add up the most in the long run. They’re also the hardest to trim down, but the payoff is usually worth the trouble. Let’s take a look at how to evaluate and slim down the day-in-and-day-out items in your budget. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever looked in your closet and despaired? “I have nothing to wear?!?” I have… and it’s not because the hangers were empty. Quite the contrary: it was because the closet was too full… of stuff I didn’t want to wear. I wasted time rummaging through clothes, I wasted money buying something new when it turns out I had what I wanted but couldn’t find it, and I wasted valuable storage space with clutter. I recently moved into a smaller place (925 square feet) with limited closet space, so that was a good opportunity for me to apply my principles of de-cluttering to my wardrobe. Read the rest of this entry »

In my last article, I confessed that it actually is harder to live the “spending wisely” life by necessity than by principle. I’ve been learning that not everything is as simple as I thought. Take cooking, for instance. Read the rest of this entry »