Parental generosity versus financial limits
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...
View ArticleA visit to the Island of Misfit Foods
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...
View ArticleSpending money to save money
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....
View ArticleEschewing Black Friday, embracing Small Business Saturday
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...
View ArticleThe Conflict-Free Family Budget: Our Plan
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...
View ArticleThe Conflict-Free Family Budget: Our Results
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....
View ArticleThe Conflict-Free Family Budget: Your Turn
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...
View ArticleAccidental tourists
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,...
View ArticleUnpackrat
Here’s some of what I’ve been doing since getting back from our various trips: Cleaned out the refrigerator, including the usually-ignored door shelves. Discarded a crazy amount of half-used...
View ArticleThe secret to the new iPhone’s popularity
So 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...
View ArticleThe credit card rewards system is gaming you
Warnings 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...
View ArticleSetting up the Great Cash Experiment
Having been convinced by numerous psychological studies that credit cards are causing us to spend more, on October first Jak and I began our Great Cash Experiment, in which we try to replace plastic...
View ArticleNow Read This — what you really want, house happiness, and the fiscal cliff
Erica 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...
View ArticleTo give great gifts, think like a behavioral economist
For 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...
View ArticleGasoline spending: the problem
This 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...
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