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Streaming was supposed to be the cheap alternative to cable, and for a few glorious years it was. Then every network launched its own service, prices climbed, and the average household quietly ended up paying more for streaming than it ever paid for cable. The good news is that the same flexibility that created the …
Grocery prices have a way of creeping up until the monthly total becomes a shock. The extreme couponing shows on television make cutting the bill look like a full-time hobby involving binders and stockpiles, but the truth is that most of the savings come from a handful of unglamorous habits. For a typical family, food …
Food is the budget line most people can actually control, and it is often the biggest one after housing. The average household spends thousands a year on groceries and restaurant meals, and a meaningful slice of that is waste: produce that goes bad, takeout ordered because there was nothing planned, and impulse buys at the …
Statistically, you are more likely to get a divorce than change your bank account. That is a genuinely depressing fact I read once, and after spending a decade dealing with the absolute state of UK banking, I can see why. Most people would rather navigate a messy legal separation than sit through another three-hour phone …
You stand in the grocery aisle, a $5.99 carton of organic strawberries in one hand and a $3.49 conventional carton in the other. Your budget says pick the cheaper one. Your health anxiety says spend the extra $2.50. Your friend from yoga class told you organic is a scam. Your sister said it’s the only …
If you’ve spent any amount of time reading personal finance advice, you’ve surely come across gurus or opinionated individuals with an unwavering faith in the power of income to cure all financial ills. “Don’t worry about the little things – just focus on boosting your income and that will cure everything”, they say. They say …
I think we can all agree that having time, money, and energy are good things to have (and the more, the better). Well, there’s a wise old adage about the 3 stages of life as it relates to time, energy, and money that is just as telling now as ever: 1.In your child/teen-age (pre-work) years: …
You know that feeling. You check your bank account on a Tuesday and wonder where $400 went. You didn’t buy anything big. Just coffee, lunch out, a streaming subscription you forgot about, and that “emergency” Amazon order at 11 PM. This is the budget version of eating an entire bag of chips because the bag …
Money, when used effectively as a tool, can help you achieve some pretty phenomenal goals in life. Just to name a few: Get you out of debt. Get you out of a bad job situation and put you in a good one. Improve your relationships/marriage. Give you the opportunity to take time off for extended …
Trying to frugally navigate our lives through a consumer-driven culture is not easy. We are presented with choices about if and what we should purchase multiple times per day. And we are so bad at saying “no” that the average U.S. household now has over 300,000 items. How do we even begin to deal with …
