March 2009

What’s “groceries,” anyway?

March 13, 2009

How do you account for your spending at emporiums that sell household and personal care items as well as food? In the past, I’ve let Quicken record any charge that occurred at, say, a Safeway or an Albertson’s as “groceries.” But the truth is, a substantial part of what you buy there isn’t groceries at [...]

Read the full article →

Slow Money: Countercultural thinker may have something…or not

March 13, 2009

I stumbled across Woody Tasch on NPR yesterday afternoon, when NPR’s All Things Considered ran a segment on his “slow money” concept, as it applies to a small organic dairy farm in upstate New York. It’s basically a variant onpeer-to-peer lending, or disintermediation, which cuts out the lending institutions with which we are presently feeling [...]

Read the full article →

Life in the Big City

March 12, 2009

Dang! Now I’m stuck in the house for an hour or so. Thanks to a seemingly endless stream of missives from the neighborhood association warning of burglars who wait and watch on the street and then clean out your house when they see you leave on an errand, I’ve been checking all around before I [...]

Read the full article →

A Sucker for Packaging

March 11, 2009

I love a cool package. They say a large part of product mark-up comes from and is made possible by creative packaging, especially for make-up. Well, I’m wise to make-up and buy that in drugstores, but when it comes to ice cream…doomed! This noon I drove to the Social Security Administration’s offices up on Tatum, [...]

Read the full article →

Moments of Fame

March 11, 2009

Stock Trading to Go.com has posted the 195th Carnival of Personal Financewhere Funny’s squib on paying bills by snail-mail vs. electronic funds transfers appears. On the same subject, Green Panda Treehouse expresses a preference and polls friends on Twitter. Interesting post from Bad Money Advice, who explains why we soon may want to consider converting [...]

Read the full article →

A Close Brush with Financial Disaster

March 10, 2009

Some years ago, I came very close to jumping off the financial cliff: I seriously considered buying a 100-year-old bed-and-breakfast in Flagstaff, Arizona. I was reminded of this episode by a post at Manely Montana, a blog whose proprietor runs an inn that appears to be very beautiful. All so idyllic. The Inn at 410 occupied [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →