4 Habits for Saving Money on Routine Family Medical Care | Frugal Dad
“our riches have buried our treasures”
From The Great Recession: America Becomes Thrift Nation:
No one wishes for hardship. But as we pick through the economic rubble, we may find that our riches have buried our treasures. Money does not buy happiness; Scripture asserts this, research confirms it. Once you reach the median level of income, roughly $50,000 a year, wealth and contentment go their separate ways, and studies find that a millionaire is no more likely to be happy than someone earning one-twentieth as much. Now a third of people polled say they are spending more time with family and friends, and nearly four times as many people say their relations with their kids have gotten better during this crisis than say they have gotten worse.
A consumer culture invites us to want more than we can ever have; a culture of thrift invites us to be grateful for whatever we can get. So we pass the time by tending our gardens and patching our safety nets and debating whether, years from now, this season will be remembered for what we lost, or all that we found.
Via Nate Barksdale / Culture Making
Quote from Rachel
There seems to be a common misunderstanding about saving money. In our consumer society, saving has come to mean spending less, as in “this shirt was on sale so I saved $10.”
You probably know about MetaFilter
You probably know about MetaFilter. You might know about Ask MetaFilter. Essentially, you have a lot of smart, savvy, curious people, asking questions and then helping each other out. If you’re familiar with Yahoo! Answers, it’s like that, but without the “how is babby formed?????” questions. It’s a fantastic resource.
Anyway, as you’d expect, a lot of people ask questions about money / life / relationships. And, as literate people are wont to do, the MetaFilter members answering the questions often recommend books to help explain the issues surrounding those questions.
One member of the MetaFilter community looked at all questions from the “work and money” category, submitted over five years (close to 7,000 pages), and counted up all of the books recommended by MetaFilter members. Most of these books (there are 40 in all) are ones you’ve maybe heard of (What Color is Your Parachute, Your Money Or Your Life, and A Random Walk Down Wall Street are the top three), but there are a number of books that are probably new to you. If you’re into reading personal finance books (I’m not, actually), you would do well to check out the list. You can see it here: http://www.philosophistry.com/AskMeFiBooks/work.html.
Quote from Get Rich Slowly
“When you reach the end of your life, you’re not going to say, ‘I wish I had more money.’ You’re going to wish you had more time, and that you’d spent more time with your loved ones while you could. If you had a magical credit card and you could buy back the days of your life, how far in debt would you go and not even care?”
Review from Bouvard et la Fins
From Bouvard et la Fins: The webish idiom. In reviewing Plotbot and PearBudget, Bouvard (I think?) notes:
Both of these applications [Plotbot and PearBudget] do something fairly remarkable: they take big-picture tasks (screenwriting and budgeting, respectively) that would quickly sprawl out into feature-creeping nightmares if they were developed on the desktop, apply the Unix Philosophy, and end up with very sleek, highly targeted applications. I like to think of them as the command line toolset of the web. They operate in very tight boxes, but they chain together well.
This opens these applications up to criticism of not being robust enough, but also recognizes a staunch reality of the web as a platform–namely users tend to be nomadic and judgmental. You have to hook them fast and hook them deep. They have zero patience for nested menus. The best way to accomplish this is to aim for 80-90% of the use cases and absolutely nail them, to the exclusion of the rest.
…
PearBudget does the same thing for household budgeting. Any desktop tool attempting to tackle this problem would quickly get bogged down in a mess of features and preferences covering everything from infrequent pay checks to annual billing. PearBudget completely ignores that 10% of cases and instead provides a truly elegant experience for planning a single-family, regular income, normalized bill cycle budget. It wouldn’t work for Bill Gates, but it works awfully well for me.
Thanks for the review! Our usual description of what we do is “the 1% of Quicken that everybody needs.” We’re glad you appreciate it!
Quote from Meredith
“Going without is not a poverty mindset.”
Meredith, from Like Merchant Ships, posting at Simple Mom: How to be frugal and still keep it simple
Budgeting Tip of the Day Update
I’d love to hear any dissenting opinions, but for now, we’re going to stop feeding the “Budgeting tip of the day” on the blog. You can still subscribe to our Twitterstream (twitter.com/pearbudget), or you can subscribe (by RSS) to just the Budgeting Tip of the Day (by adding this feed — http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=tip+from%3Apearbudget — to your RSS feed reader).
We figured that most people who wanted to get the Tip of the Day could easily subscribe to both the blog and our posts on Twitter, and many of you are subscribed to both, and don’t need to get the tips twice. A few e-mails from you guys confirmed that. So … let’s try this out.
Thanks!