Sometimes personal finance gets really boring. There. I said it. For instance, I’m a well trained frugalista and I have a bag full of groceries – mac and cheese, soup, tuna salad packets – that I picked up for about $20. There’s nearly a week of meals for the road in there. But I am…
Over the summer I noticed that the shopping center my gym was in was actually one giant consumerism trap for me. And I was freaking proud of myself for picking up on that so quickly (I think it also didn’t hurt that most of the stores weren’t open yet when I joined the gym there…
About a year ago I saw the one and only Stefanie O’Connell in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and I remembered being completely shocked by these stupid Whos. The only one I had remembered was the little girl – I’d totally forgotten the rest of them weren’t quite as on top of what Christmas means.…
I’m generally pretty good at keeping my Christmas costs to a reasonable amount. I buy for less than 10 people and 4 of them usually just get some small “thinking of you” token. But at the end of every holiday season, there’s always been a small amount of money that I just couldn’t really figure…
So I’m aware that one of the things I have to be thankful for is that even when I’m feeling a money pinch, I’m not destitute. $100 is not going to make or break me. BUT I’m definitely committed to doing a lot of things because of the principle of it. For instance, a McDonald’s…
I’m a big fan of the mentality that you are where you need to be and mistakes help make you who you are. That doesn’t necessarily make them suck any less. The funny thing is though, my two biggest money mistakes both turned into things I didn’t regret. Money Mistake #1 Move to one of…
The struggle is real, folks! My relationship with personal finance is almost as much of a roller coaster as my actual relationships. At the height of celebrating bringing in some extra dough in October, I went into a week long, unpaid layoff from my show. I know I shouldn’t spend much, since I’m not making…
When you are looking for solid advice on how to manage your money, Hollywood and the star-studded film and music industry are likely your last options. However, these celebs may actually have a few good things to teach us about how to (or rather, how not to) use our money. Check out this list from…
Decluttering my parents house all summer has made me sure of one thing: If spending money could actively implant a skill in my brain, I’d be freaking brilliant. When I sold off a ton of books on my bookshelves, I’d say I had read about 70-80% of them. The others I sold I bought at…
I like to think I’m hip to marketing. I can avoid their traps and pitfalls. I’m so much smarter than them, thanks to my hyper awareness of people trying to sell me junk I (mostly) don’t need and all the blog articles I read warning me about it. Um. This is not always the case.…
Online dating has always been really interesting to me. One of my really good friends met her husband online and they are just perfect for each other. Back when they met, circa 2007 or so, they both lied through their teeth about meeting online. When she came clean, I thought she was nuts! Who cares…
As a child born in the early/mid 80’s, I grew up really familiar with failing. I played soccer for 10 years and was on a first place team once and a third place team once. Which means there were 8 years when I sat at those end of season award ceremony and got nothing. Do…
One of my favorite nights out with my mom was to see a show called The Last Smoker in America, which was this awesome little show in the New York Musical Theatre Festival. It was all about one woman’s struggle to give up smoking after it’s been outlawed. It was hilarious and also struck a…
Recently one of my best friends sent me a picture of her Facebook feed showing her a breakdown of what happened on her wall 1-3-5-10 years ago. She sent it to me because apparently I had left her a note saying I was probably moving to San Francisco shortly and I had to postpone one…
To begin with – it’s still not all that affordable. It’s actually highway robbery. Mostly because you are essentially paying $300-500 a month for catastrophic coverage, since several tiers of the plan still require you to pay at least $6,000 in expenses before full coverage kicks in. I don’t know about you, but for me,…
Managing personal cash flow and accumulating wealth are priorities for most people, regardless of income levels and investment holdings. We simply want to make the most of our money, building security and resources to hedge against life’s unexpected turns. Unfortunately, opportunistic scammers are willing to exploit our best intentions for their own ill-gotten gains. Investment…
So this last week was one for the books. Besides having an unusually rough and hectic schedule, on Friday, our van was broken into. In typical tour style, all of us had overnight bags and a big bag with pretty much all of our belongs in it. Since we were just staying at a stopover…
There are so many ways that financial health and physical health overlap it’s ridiculous – one of my favorite bloggers is Tonya over at Budget and the Beach and she’s super into physical fitness as well as financial fitness. She often advocates for both. I’ve definitely noticed that discipline in one area of your life…
This week I experienced an event where impatience + stupidity cost me $80. Plus tax. I’m actually a huge advocate of being prepared, picking up spare items you may need at sales before you need them and planning ahead. But sometimes you do something stupid like leave your computer charger in Idaho and don’t realize…
So I don’t mean to sound all cynical and jaded but I’m laying my cards out on the table here – weddings are freaking stupid. There was a cool study done recently that points to a correlation between amount of money spent on a wedding and likeliness it will actually last. It came out at…
This post could also be called: Sometimes if You Think a Deal is Too Good to be True, It Is. Or I could call it: Never Click the Ads on Facebook This particular ad was for a company called Adore Me that started popping up in my Facebook sidebar this spring. It immediately caught my…
I’ve found being a blogger can be a little weird at this beginning stage I’m in. For months I sort of plodded along in my own little world here, with a couple dozen visitors who I started to consider friends. Then, nearly overnight it seemed, I switched over to a couple hundred visitors a day…
You may have noticed that more than once I’ve talked about losing my Metrocard (here, oh, and here). Lots of times when you talk about a fail, you don’t get the most sympathetic audience, but based on the responses I got regarding losing my Metrocard, I’m not the only who has frantically searched all of…
I think in the personal finance blogger realm, we like to dole out advice and tips about all our awesome saving, investing, frugal, thrifty, money wins. But sometimes we fail. And this is one of those stories. One of my resolutions this year was to get my own apartment in NYC. It had been…
Something that folks of the Depression era seemed to have a much better grasp on than the Generation X and Yers is the concept of needs versus wants. Clearly defining these and coming up with an approach to pay for them is likely to change your outlook on spending. Here, in its most basic form,…