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Fall is the perfect time to evaluate garden plants based on their actual performance, maintenance demands and value before spending money on next year’s garden – Shutterstock A garden can look wonderfully productive from a distance while quietly wasting money up close. Fall makes those disappointments much easier to spot because the growing season has finally handed over the receipts: Which plants produced plenty, which struggled all summer, and which seemed determined to occupy valuable […]
Most employees auto-renew last year’s health plan without checking whether their premiums, deductible, or covered providers changed. Plans reprice every year, and the cheapest option for your situation often shifts, especially if you added a dependent or a new prescription. Compare your options every open enrollment before the window closes. Source
A person uses tongs to tend to meat grilling over smoke and open flames. When buying meat for the week, watching out for deceptive price-per-pound traps helps protect your grocery budget. Pexels. Walking up to the fresh meat counter at your local supermarket is often the most exciting part of planning a weekly menu. Neatly wrapped packages of marbled ribeyes, plump chicken breasts, and gleaming pork chops promise delicious family dinners ahead. Yet standing between […]
Frugal living isn’t just something that happens at the store or when you’re crunching the budget numbers. It really is a way of life. Rather than getting uptight or frustrated I like to look at our frugal adventures as just that– an adventure! There are wins, bumps, and funny things that happen along the way. That’s what this “Frugal Feats, Flops, and Funnies” series is all about– the adventures and misadventures of living the frugal […]
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law last July, brought some notable changes to the fine print of … Read more
Happy Labor Day weekend everyone. Perhaps some of you are in the market for a new car this weekend. I’m definitely not. After almost a year of deliberating between replacing my 2015 Range Rover Sport or continuing to fix it, I’ve finally decided to keep fixing it indefinitely. The main reason is that we may […] The post The Hidden Costs Of Buying A New Car Nobody Warns You About appeared first on Financial Samurai.
I want to be really intentional with our grocery budget in September. We have a lot going on financially, so I want to keep our grocery spending to a minimum this month. Planning out a menu is a great way to minimize spending because you can control the cost of the meals you choose, you can prioritize meals that use ingredients that you already have, and you don’t waste food. All of that is easier […]
It may still be warm outside and Christmas might feel a long way off, but if you want to make the holidays a little easier on your budget, now is actually the perfect time to start. And I’m not talking about buying Christmas gifts in the summer or putting yourself on a strict no-spend challenge. I’m talking about taking a good look at the things to stop buying before the holidays so you can free up some […]
Your grocery bill jumped again this month. So did your car insurance, your kid’s daycare bill, and the interest charge on the credit card balance you keep meaning to pay off. None of that is in your head. Household debt across the country just climbed to one of the highest levels ever recorded, and the pattern behind it looks a lot like your own budget: not one big purchase, just everyday costs outrunning what people […]
Whenever someone asks how much it costs to homeschool, I never quite know how to answer. Because technically? You could homeschool for very little. There are free resources online, libraries full of books, used curriculum sales, hand-me-down materials, and approximately 47 pencils hiding somewhere in my house at any given moment. For years, we’ve used the free curriculum from The Good and The Beautiful (highly recommend it). But that’s not really how I think about […]
After a rough summer, I’m glad to be back to sharing our budget updates. I’m also proud of getting August’s budget update posted so promptly!;) If you’re new here, I have been sharing our family’s transparent finances since 2013 when we were in six figures of student loan debt. I realized that most people have never looked at someone else’s real budget numbers before. If you’ve never been taught how to budget, you’re not alone. […]
Last year, I took an official Certified Financial Planner (CFP) course, which satisfies the “Education” requirement of becoming an official Certified Financial Planner (CFP). Mine was online and self-paced at the University of Georgia with a net cost of around $3,000. I did not take the official CFP Exam ($925), nor did I satisfy the “Experience” requirement of 6,000 hours of “professional experience related to the financial planning process”. I don’t want the actual certification […]
It’s hard to believe that September is almost here! Here’s your friendly reminder to get your September budget ready pronto – and don’t forget to include these potential expenses in your September budget! The post THREE IMPORTANT EXPENSES TO INCLUDE IN YOUR SEPTEMBER BUDGET appeared first on a life on a dime.