August 2011

In pursuit of (paperless) happiness

I used to be a pack rat. I saved every single piece of mail, cancelled check, receipt, bill and policy. I was drowning in a paper avalanche.  Finally, it was time for me to move cross country and I spent 50% of my moving expenses on moving junk!!! I had been keeping so much stuff [...]

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I like it but I don’t know why…

Middle of the day, you are busy… suddenly you want pizza… Not just any pizza, a “zzz” pizza. Whoa! Where did that come from? It probably worked this way – It might have been a hot day, you might have been thinking about the amount you are sweating and how good it would have been [...]

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FSA 2011 eligible expenses

(Updated for 2012 Flexible Spending eligible expenses) A year has flown by. The FSA 2011 season ends in only 3 months, at least for me. We will have to allocate new amounts in my flexible spending account for 2012 during the open enrollment season in November. I can spend my fsa 2011 money until November [...]

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How to Find Unclaimed Money (and Unclaimed Property)

Free money – sounds seductive doesn’t it? The idea that somewhere out there is unclaimed money with your name on it, sitting and waiting for you to come and claim it… sounds awesome. It is not really free money, it is rightfully yours, but that doesn’t reduce the enjoyment of found money a bit, whether it is [...]

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Are we saving too much for retirement?

A child thinks 20 shillings and 20 years can scarce ever be spent. — Ben Franklin. There are plenty of us that have this view point about how much we need for something we have no clue about. We try to find a rule of thumb and follow that. Personal finance is replete with rules of [...]

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Where to get free stuff : Mega Guide to freebies

Who doesn’t like more stuff in life I have a semi-regular series on how to get free stuff either free bowling during summer, free movies, free credit scores… I will continue to write this series but I have a lot of short notes that wouldn’t fit in my series (I don’t write about “today only” [...]

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Oh…No… Not “that” topic again!

Frugality vs. Earning more… Do we really need another post on this? Hasn’t the personal finance blogosphere beaten this topic to death? Half the PF bloggers & main stream media says frugality is the way to go and the other half likes to make fun of the frugal people saying they are wasting their time [...]

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7 Links Project – A Blog Synopsis

This blog was nominated by Retire by 40 to participate in the “7 links project”.  The purpose of the project is for each blog writer to highlight 7 of their previous posts, based on 7 questions.  The following are my responses to the 7 questions.  I hope you take the time to maybe click on [...]

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Battling the Rebaterus…

Yesterday I was filling out a mail in rebate after a very long time. I used to do a lot of free after rebate stuff, but with lack luster success in getting the mail in rebates without any follow up I pretty much gave up. This time, I already decided to purchase a USB drive [...]

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