Since my financial armageddon, I’ve become very good at calculating the cost of various services, the time it would take me to do it myself, and using that data to determine if it is an efficient use of time. As we’re about to move, one of the big decisions for us was whether it was

I’m a big believer in the idea that buying a quality product (by quality, I don’t necessarily mean the most expensive – keep reading) is worth the extra money you put in versus finding the absolute cheapest deal. A couple months ago, I discussed looking at the total cost of ownership when buying an appliance.

Typically, I’m a “do it myself and save money” type of person, but I think I may have just run into a situation where I may actually hire someone to complete a task that I could do myself instead. Here’s the deal: when we move out of our apartment, we’ll have about a week during

Who says web surfing can’t directly save you money? First of all, here are five websites I use on a very frequent basis that have directly saved me significant money. Remember The Milk http://www.rememberthemilk.com I wrote ecstatically about this site before, but the same still holds true: I use it to manage my grocery list,

For those of you unaware, I am a big fan of buying in bulk, even though I live in a relatively small space (hint: don’t look in my closet). Why? If I buy in bulk, the cost per unit is often so much cheaper than buying “normal” packages that I end up saving a boatload.

Please note that the Borders Rewards program has changed significantly since this was written. I leave this post up as a primer to demonstrate that customer rewards programs can be quite financially lucrative. It has been repeatedly shown that purchasing books online is substantially cheaper than buying books in brick and mortar bookstores, and for

This morning, I went grocery shopping with my son and took my digital camera along to record the experience of grocery shopping with a penny-pincher. Let’s see how it went – maybe we’ll both learn something. Welcome to Hy Vee! I went shopping at the Hy-Vee grocery store in Ankeny, Iowa, a northern suburb of

I enjoy listening to music as I write (especially this album, the greatest thing I’ve ever heard). I love listening to complete albums, cohesive pieces by artists that can go on for an hour or more. I’ll listen to pretty much everything, too, from electronic to pop to jazz to rock. For a long time,

Before our son was born, we had a baby shower in which we asked everyone to bring a small package of a different kind of diaper in newborn and stage one sizes. We actually made a list of them, giving the harder to find ones to closer relatives and the easier ones to more distant

Now that the Christmas shopping season is upon us, many of us are wondering what on earth we should get for people in our family. “What do I buy for my ultra-trendy teenage niece?” you might be wondering, or “How can I get something that will wow Uncle Ron without breaking the bank?” Interestingly enough,

When I compared ING and HSBC, I discussed how HSBC’s annual percentage yield of 5.05% is significantly better than ING’s annual percentage yield of 4.4%, but I felt that ING’s service was significantly better. One of the comments, from Boston Gal, made the astute observation that ING’s current “signing bonus” of $25 did a good

For those of you out there who are still using Internet Explorer, there is another option that won’t open your computer to all sorts of security holes. Better yet, it will automatically kill most pop-up windows and, when you switch to it, it will incorporate all of your bookmarks from Internet Explorer. I switched years

If you’re reading this, you likely have ready access to a computer with an internet connection. Most people are aware of a few ways that a personal computer can save them money, but there really are a plethora of simple, ethical ways that anyone can use a computer to make a few dollars. Here is

It seems like a surprising claim, but simply switching your regular lightbulbs for CFLs, even though they have a higher initial cost per bulb, can easily save you $100 a year. Let’s look at them in detail. I took the information off of GE Soft White A19 bulbs in both their regular and CFL form