During tough economic times, it’s easy to feel the pinch when you’re short on cash. Prices seem higher than ever and the paycheck doesn’t seem to cover as much as it once did. It’s during these times that you need to tighten the belt and lower your cost of living. However, tightening the old belt doesn’t necessarily have to mean that you can’t enjoy life. Here are ten easy ways to cut down on your cost of living:
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10 Ways To Lower Your Cost Of Living
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SmartyPig Race Out of Debt Contest – One Winner Gets Almost Five Thousand Dollars!
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SmartyPig is running a new contest called “Race out of Debt.” The winner will get $4,951. Why $4,951? Well, it seems that’s the average American’s credit card debt as of this Summer. Sound like a lot? It’s actually down 13% from last year! So to celebrate bringing our debt down, SmartyPig is going to make one contestant super happy.
Pork Run For Cash!
Pay For Amazon Purchases With AmEx Membership Rewards Points
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Do you shop at Amazon? Do you have an American Express card that earns Membership Rewards points? Great news! Amazon now accepts AmEx Membership Rewards points as payment (for most items).
In order to use your Membership Rewards points on Amazon you need to register your American Express card with Amazon. It’s a one-time registration and it’s real easy to do.
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Why We Chose A 30 Year Mortgage When We Bought Our Home
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Owning a home is an awesome feeling, let me tell you! Though we don’t own our home outright yet. Maybe we own a bedroom and a bit of the kitchen? Some grass in the yard? Like most people we had to take out a mortgage loan in order to buy our house. There are many different types of mortgage loans out there these days. We chose a 30-year, fixed rate mortgage.
Here’s what we considered in choosing a 30-year mortgage:
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What is Asset Allocation?
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What is Asset Allocation?
Different buckets for asset allocation
Asset allocation is an investment strategy that is used to choose among various asset classes such as stocks, bonds, commodities, foreign currencies, real estate, annuities and life insurance, and high value collectibles including precious metals.
Asset allocation as a way of investing is an important part of a person’s financial planning process that primarily concerns the very relationship of an investment portfolio’s risk and return. Different asset classes offer different risks and returns as long as their performances are not perfectly correlated (if they go up and down in the same market conditions). Asset allocation reduces the volatility of investment results when not all investments in the portfolio rise and fall at the same time.
How is Asset Allocation Related to Investing?
Buying Stuff on Credit is Expensive [Infographic]
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You know that making purchases using credit cards is expensive if you do not pay off your balance each month. Indeed, carrying a balance on your credit card is one of the biggest ways that people waste money each month. However, it is hard to see this, since the minimum payments required by credit card companies are so small and seem so affordable. The Credit CARD Act of 2009 has required credit card companies to list total payoff amounts, and alternatives to only paying the minimum, on statements, but many still overlook some of the issues associated with a slow repayment of credit card debt.
This infographic from Go Banking Rates offers a look at just how expensive it can be to make purchases using credit:
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Peapod Review – Online Grocery Shopping Made Easy
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Isn’t grocery shopping a huge time suck?
You pack the family in the car, go to the grocer and deal with the kids running around, stand on line, then drive back to unload groceries. If you’re like me, odds are this is done on the weekend which is the closest you have to free time.
What’s the alternative? Peapod.
Check out more in our Peapod review below.
Peapod is an online service (through Stop & Shop) that all allows you to shop online for your groceries. They put together your order and deliver it to you. Simple and efficient.
Here are the basics of Peapod grocery shopping…
My Blogging Essentials or What I Use To Blog
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Every now and then the subject comes up – What do I use to blog? Let me give you a quick rundown of my blogging essentials:
WordPress.org - Here’s where it all starts. WordPress.org provides the major framework for this site. Without it I wouldn’t be able to set up a place where I could write and we could all communicate on the articles. WordPress.org is free to download but you need a hosting plan somewhere else in order to get it up and running.
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What’s This Groupon I Keep Hearing About?
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Maybe you’ve seen some ads on the web. Perhaps you heard about it on the local news. I don’t know about you but I’ve been hearing about Groupon everywhere!
So what is this Groupon all about?!?
Groupon (group+coupon) is a site that offers up a daily deal on some of the best attractions, eateries, and shops in your area (well, in lots of areas so far).
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Too Much Debt? 5 Steps To Pay Off Your Debt
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I still remember the first day of class at college.
The professor walks into the classroom and hands you a piece of paper called a syllabus. In that paper is all of the work you will complete over a four month period. However, you automatically begin to feel overwhelmed. How, you ask yourself, am I going to finish all of this?
In my case, I would total up all of the number of pages that needed to be read in a semester. I would then take that number and divide it by the number of days in the semester. Suddenly, reading 15 pages per day seems a lot more manageable than reading four books.
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