I spotted a killer deal at the grocery store the other day… These Bitchin' Chipotle Sauce things are usually $7-8 each at Costco… but I found them for only $1 at the 99c store! Woohoo! After stacking about 15 into my shopping cart, I took a celebratory photo and sent it to my wife… She was very proud, having taught me most of the deal-hunting tricks I use today. I
Budgeting
My Annual Budgeting Process
“A budget is simply telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went.” – John Maxwell Good morning, money friends! Hope you had an awesome Christmas weekend!! Today I’m gonna run through a quick overview of my annual and monthly budgeting process. It’s super simple and doesn’t take me much time — about an hour at the start of every year and 20-30 mins
My Cliffs Notes on How to Make, Save and Invest Money
I received a sobering comment the other day… “Joel, thanks for the nice stories and happy emails but please give us some content that’s actually worthwhile in terms of making and saving money.” Ooops … I guess I’ve been a little sidetracked with random stories on the blog. I figured that most regular Budgets readers already know the basic “how to” stuff. But now that I think
3 FinTech Innovations I Want You to Know About
October 14, 2021 update: After this post was published, Joel made a personal investment in LifeGoal Investments. Just got back from FinCon in Austin last week! For those of you who don’t know, FinCon began in 2011 as the Financial Blogger Conference, but now it’s a place for all types of digital content creators, money nerds and brands to get together and geek out on
Time Is Money. And Money Is Time.
You’ve probably heard the saying time is money. As weird as it sounds, it was one of my favorite concepts growing up. As a teenager, my first jobs were hourly paid. The more hours I worked, the more money I made. If I didn’t work any hours, I didn’t get paid anything. Back then I took the phrase ‘time is money’ quite literally, and it motivated me to work harder and earn
Value Based Budgeting = More Happiness for Your Dollars
About 3 years ago, my wife and I sat down to create a new type of budget. We’d always been good about tracking our expenses and had a standard budgeting method for stuff, but since we discovered the FIRE movement we decided to change things up a bit. Actually, around that same time we also read the book Smart Couples Finish Rich. It included a bunch of worksheets and
30 Mini-Challenges for September to Improve Your Life and Money!
Happy Friday! It’s been an expensive summer for me and my wife … all the vacations, celebrations, gifts, and fancy foods have given our wallets a little hammering. I was trying to think of a no-spend challenge or something we could do for the month of September to try and save some $$... But then I thought maybe it would be more fun to try 30 x mini-challenges, instead of
How Your Neighbors Spend Their Money (aka the Average Household Budget)
Happy Fry-day! 🍳 Do you ever lay awake at night and wonder how much your neighbors spend on canned ham each year? What about their video game budget or annual snack food spending? Well I have good news for you... Today’s guest post from MoneyLemma reveals these very important statistics -- and more -- while digging through the average household budget.
Net Worth Report #11 “Legs Eleven”
Holy schmoley! My wife and I spent $537 on gas last month. At an average price of $4 per gallon, that works out to about 134 gallons of fuel... And since our Prius averages ~44 miles per gallon, we must have driven about 5,907 miles in the month of July. Hot dang! (Hang on a sec, that can’t be right… OK, maybe there were a few snack food or energy drink purchases at
Tight-Ass Date Ideas to Try This Summer
Dang! How expensive is dating these days!!? I just learned that the average date in the USA costs $102 ... That’s average across all U.S. states, but where I live in California, singles apparently shell out an average of $226 for a date night. Ouch 😳 My poor wife... The last time I spent $226 on a single date night was... well, ummmm... I can’t even remember a time.
