Eight Things I’m Thankful for This Year
Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day (one of the two holidays of the year that are really important to me, the other being Christmas), I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the eight things over the last year that I’m most thankful for. I’m thankful for my family. My wife, my son, and my daughter are the center of my life. Every day, each one of them does something that fills me with joy and makes me realize that my life is a wonderful one. I’m thankful for the conception and early health of our third child. He’s healthy (as far as we can tell), happy (he moved around a lot during the ultrasound and appear

The Simple Dollar Weekly Roundup: Travel Tips Edition
Since many of you are reading this during the workday and will be traveling as soon as you leave, I thought I would collect together some of my favorite travel, Thanksgiving, and auto tip articles from various websites. A Holiday Travel Survival Guide A good collection of tips, plus the article includes a pretty worthwhile video. (@ msn) Tips to Improve your Gas Mileage Before our family leaves to visit our extended families, this is pretty much the checklist I’m g

Teenagers and Expensive Clothes
Monica writes in: I used to buy my daughter several new outfits before the start of the school year and then a few more items for Christmas. This worked well when she was less picky about her clothes. The last few years, though, she’s wanted nothing but a few specific brands of clothing – and those brands are expensive. I want her to have plenty of clothes to wear during the school year, but I don’t want to go broke during the process. What do you suggest? I actually went through this myself when I was a teenager, but instead of wanting trendy clothes, I mostly just wanted high-end basketball shoes. I was usually quit

New Eyes
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes. - Marcel Proust The single most important element of personal finance is patience. Financial independence isn’t built in a single day – it takes many years of consistent, patient work to build the foundation necessary for money success. Whether you choose to take the route of earning more through building an impressive career or a stellar business or you focus on spending less through frugality and strong spending choices – or you do both – it’s still a long, long road. That road can sometimes seem really dull. When we make the hard choice

How to Start a Meal Exchange
Recently, several couples in our community started a frozen meal exchange. It’s a really simple idea. On a certain day, everyone in the exchange meets for coffee and brings along a laundry basket full of frozen meals, one for each family, along with any needed instructions taped to the lid. The members of the club just swap the meals so that everyone takes home one of each meal that they didn’t prepare. It’s a very clever idea for several reasons. First, it makes it very easy for people to prepare a variety of home-cooked meals. Second, it drastically reduces the meal preparation time, since there’s only one big session of making several copies of one