hahaha nice joke

I am a partial beneficiary to a recently deceased parent’s retirement plan. I have 2 choices: a $9000 lump sum or a $225 monthly benefit for life. I am 29 so I am likely to live for a long time (hopefully). I’m not sure that I could invest the $9000 and acheive a return that would match the monthly benefit, but on the other hand, I don’t want the hassle of receiving a check monthly 30 years from now (when $225 will likely be pocket change). If you were in my situation, which would you choose and why?

I was telling my DH about all the cool tricks (waiting for the item to go on sale) and he pointed out that the coupons (at least the ones we’ve had) almost always say something like they can’t be used in conjunction with other sales. Well, something like that. How do you get around that, or is that not what it means? I’d love to start using coupons. Anything to save a few bucks!

Adding to the FlyLady chorus here! She addresses every point you mentioned:
- cleaning the house,
- laundry,
- finances,
- cooking at home,
- a reasonable amount of exercise, and
- time with loved ones.

She also covers frustration and that awful “I’m always behind” feeling. Her advice might seem silly at first when you go to her website and read what she has to say (you might think, How can this help??), but TRUST HER… just take the first step and the others will follow. :)
http://www.flylady.net/pages/begin_babysteps.asp

Best wishes!

“If you’re really concerned about higher quality foods with lower environmental impact, your best bet is to buy local, not organic. Hit the local farmer’s market, especially local farmers that do small scale farming. Your purchase from these folks will do far more for the environment than buying produce that’s been shipped in from Chile.”

The environmental savings of local foods may be overblown. From Ezra Klein: “{T]wo Carnegie Mellon researchers recently broke down the carbon footprint of foods, and their findings were a bit surprising. 83 percent of emissions came from the growth and production of the food itself. Only 11 percent came from transportation, and even then, only 4 percent came from the transportation between grower and seller (which is the part that eating local helps cut). Additionally, food shipped from far off may be better for the environment than food shipped within the country — ocean travel is much more efficient than trucking.”

Also, because most of the emissions come from the growth and production of the food, you want that production to be as efficient as possible. To really help the environment you should tend to favor large scale farming (everything else being equal), because you can take advantage of the efficiency of scale. This is not to say that there are not other good reasons for buying local or from small-scale farms, but helping the environment doesn’t seem to be one of them.

Here is what the Carnegie Mellon researchers suggest: “[D]ietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.” (From the abstract.)

The Ezra Klein article is here: http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=06&year=2008&base_name=its_the_food_stupid
The research can be found here: http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/esthag/2008/42/i10/abs/es702969f.html

I for one would have been offended if Trent had had the gall to suggest that any self-respecting UNIX hacker wasn’t already perfectly familiar with how /etc/hosts works :-)

Thanks for the tip on Efficient Market Theory.

Best Wishes
Whirl-Mind

New question……
How do you face the loss of a job from the main wage earner in the family. We have a four month emergency fund, but once it hit us – I am very worried. Four months is not a long time. We have auto pay on most bills and investments. Do we automatically stop the investments until a pay check starts flowing – or try to keep up with investments out of the emergency fund. Once a new job is obtained, do you rebuild the emergency fund first – or keep up with investments. We are mid 40’s and took a while to get out of debt. We are behind in retirement savings, but were catching up at a quick pace until this hit. This whole mess is causing many sleepless nights!! With the economy the way it is – I hope things can get better soon, but know that is unlikely!

I’d like to add my own few cents worth.

I would suggest teaching (then you can delegate when needed) the kids/husband to do laundry, cook, etc while you’re doing it. Yes – many husbands need to learn basic housekeeping tasks. I remember some statistic which stated that getting married forced women to do an extra 8 hours of housework (maybe from the book The Second Shift). Anyway, teaching your kids to set the dinner table or sort laundry with you not only allows you to later delegate the task to them, it provides some togetherness with loved one. Some people talk better when their hands are busy.

Ask for help (and expect grudging, slow assistance) but don’t nag and don’t do it yourself. Just say thank you when its done — you don’t care if its grudging, you just care that it gets done.

Do some of your work together – i.e. exercise and time with loved ones (an evening walk), cooking and time with loved ones (little ones tear apart lettuce, big ones chop tomatoes), mowing the yard and time with loved ones (big ones mow, little ones rake).

Block out a chunk of time for yourself. Maybe as little as a 15 minute bath (buy a timer, its the most useful thing in the world for teaching children to learn to wait) late in the evening. Or get up a few minutes earlier and DON’T do anything resembling work for those few minutes.

Finally – this, I believe, is one of Trent’s most useful traits for work which he didn’t mention. Wake up early on a consistant basis. So much work can be done before anyone else is awake.

Just add the same line to /etc/hosts/. That’s easier to remember than the solution in either Windows or OS X.

Now, granted, not many people run UNIX on the desktop (or even the OS it spawned, GNU/Linux), but there are still some of us out here.

The beauty of building routines the Flylady way is that it puts so many basic maintenance tasks on mental autopilot, such that they no longer require much thinking to accomplish. Using my experience as an example, I no longer wonder when I’m going to get the dishes done each day, because it’s now a habit for me to do them right after the kids go to bed at night.

What is the story behind the art element (your logo) at the top of The Simple Dollar?
Did you design it or did you find someone to design it for you and how did that happen?
Does the design at the top of a blog have to be any certain dimension?
Just wondering. You may have addressed it in an earlier post but I haven’t been able to find it.
Thanks!