Tuesday’s need-to-know money news

imagesToday’s top story: Simple ways to teach your kids about money. Also in the news: Investing tips for those in their 20s, the best things about buying a house in the fall, and why you should look at frugality as a method instead of a lifestyle.

Simple Ways to Teach Your Children About Money
It’s never too early to start.

5 Investing Tips for Your 20s
Taking the longview.

The 7 Best Things About Buying a House in the Fall
Timely tax deductions.

Think of frugality as a method, not a lifestyle, to avoid wasting your time
It’s not just about saving money.

5 ways going green can save some green

605x340xdollar-bills-2015-Dollarphotoclub_67129525.jpg.pagespeed.ic.0DZosyt27WIn honor of this month’s Earth Day, here’s a piece that first ran on DailyWorth.

If you’re trying to save money, you’ve heard all the usual advice about ways to cut back: brown bag your lunch, use coupons, shop sales.

But with Earth Day this month, maybe it’s time to take a fresh look at your frugal hacks and see which ones can be updated with the environment in mind. Many times you can save even more with some earth-friendly tweaks.

“Frugal and green lifestyles both mean making specific, informed decisions in order to waste as little as possible,” said frugal hacker Donna Freedman of Surviving and Thriving. “Bonus: Choosing to be frugal can make being green a lot more affordable.”

Old way: Brown bag your lunch.

New way: Reusable bags, wrappings and containers will extend your savings and help save the environment. An investment in an $8 Wrap-N-Mat, for example, will pay for itself in less than a year, assuming you’re spending 4 to 5 cents each for sandwich bags. Or you can just use a napkin or a bandana to wrap that PB&J. You don’t have to buy a special lunch bag, either; any small tote bag will work. Oh, and bring your drink in a Thermos. Bottled water isn’t friendly to the earth or your wallet.

“Bottled water is an environmental nightmare given the petroleum and other resources needed to manufacture and recycle and dispose of all those bottles,” Jeff Yeager, the author of four books on frugal living, including “Don’t Throw That Away! 1,001 Ways to Reuse Your Stuff.” “It’s also a waste of money since tap water is just as good.”

Old way: Make your coffee at home.

New way: Make your coffee sustainably. Still using paper coffee filters? Reuseable ones can be had for $4 to $7—about the same price as a box of 100 paper filters. Did you fall for the single-serve coffee maker fad? The variety’s great, but you’re using a whole lot of plastic pods that probably aren’t even getting recycled. (TreeHugger’s Lloyd Alter called pod coffee a “design for unsustainability.”) You could switch to pods that are mostly biodegradable, or just reserve your fancy coffee maker for special occasions and use a drip or French press version for your daily brew.

The single-serving coffee makers “may still be greener than driving to Starbucks for a cup of Joe, but it really defeats the whole intention of saving money and saving the environment,” Yeager said. (For more tips, watch his video on saving money by going green.

Old way: Shopping for clothes at discount chains.

New way: Buy gently-used clothing at consignment and thrift stores. Katy Wolk-Stanley, who blogs at The Nonconsumer Advocate, joined a “buy nothing new” movement called The Compact in 2007. Since then, she hasn’t bought new clothing other than underwear, bras and socks since 2007.

“Is it easy to only buy used? Yes and no. No, because sometimes a needed item is hard to find used,” said Wolk-Stanley. “However, that built-in lag time between wanting something and tracking down a used version often means that I figure out an alternate solution or simply that it was a momentary impulse and not buy it after all.”

Old way: Buy detergent and other cleaners on sale.

New way: Use a lot less, or make your own. A quarter-cup of laundry detergent is usually enough to clean all but the filthiest loads, while a tablespoon of dishwasher detergent will get your plates clean without overloading your machine with suds. Or make your own: Mary Hunt, author of several books including “Cheaper, Better, Faster!” has been making her own laundry soap for years.

“It’s better than anything I can buy–no perfumes, no dyes or other stuff that causes itching and other skin reactions—and infinitely cheaper,” said Hunt, who runs the Debt-Proof Living site. “Makes me smile to think of all the gallon plastic jugs, bottles, boxes, and other packaging I no longer buy with laundry products in them, to simply haul that fancy packaging to the trash.”

Meanwhile, vinegar and baking soda are two of the most versatile cleaners, and they’re cheap. They can replace most of the store-bought cleaners in your home.

“If you mix vinegar and water in a spray bottle it’ll stand in for Fantastik and other ‘all-purpose’ cleaners,” Freedman said. “You can use a straight vinegar spray if it’s a particularly greasy stovetop, but I use a 50/50 mix and it usually does the trick.”

Old way: Using coupons and sales to stock up on paper towels and napkins.

New way: Ditch paper for cloth. You already have dishtowels, rags and cloth napkins, so put them to use. (If you need to stock up, you can get Tekla dish towels from Ikea for 79 cents apiece.) While you’re at it, ditch those stinky sponges for good old-fashioned dishcloths. I love the Ritz Cotton ones with a scouring side, $8.99 for a five pack. I whip out a new one each day and toss the old one in the hamper. Yes, using cloth creates a bit more laundry, but I haven’t noticed I’m doing any extra loads.

“Buying less and reusing stuff is the way to save money and save the planet,” Yeager said.

Want more? Check out my other columns on DailyWorth.

 

 

What “secret millionaires” can teach us

Zemanta Related Posts ThumbnailThis column first appeared on DailyWorth under the headline “Lessons from secret millionaires.”

Eugenia Dodson grew up on a Minnesota farm, the daughter of poor Swedish immigrants. Her childhood poverty affected her so profoundly that even in her old age, she refused to replace a stove with only one working burner — even though by then she was worth tens of millions of dollars. Dodson, who left nearly $36 million to the University of Miami when she died in 2005 at age 100, is just one of many secretly wealthy people who live quiet, frugal lives and then leave unexpected fortunes to charity.

I’ve been collecting stories of such secret millionaires for years now. Some are men, though the women interest me more, as females usually earn less, invest more conservatively and wind up poorer in retirement. These women break that mold. Here’s what we can learn from them.

They’re not born rich

Secret millionaires can be farmers, school teachers or, in Dodson’s case, a hairdresser. Dodson eventually opened her own beauty shop after she moved to Miami in the 1920s at the urging of a high school friend, according to her attorney, Donald Kubit. She made it through the Great Depression living simply and frugally, habits she continued through her life. “I had no idea when I met her that she was a woman of such wealth,” says Kubit, who met Dodson in her nineties.

Buy and hold works

Secret millionaires are often heavily invested in stocks — the one type of investment that consistently beats inflation over time. Many favored well-known, blue-chip companies. Margaret Southern, a retired teacher of special-needs children in Greenville, S.C., preferred household names like 3M, General Foods and Heinz that paid dividends, according to a story about her in the Greenville News. Southern reportedly liked having the dividend checks to buy whatever she wanted. When Southern died at 94, she bequeathed $8.4 million to the Community Foundation of Greenville to benefit children and animals.

Let it grow

Long lives mean that even small amounts invested over time have the decades they need to grow into real wealth. (As an example, $10,000 can grow to $100,000 in 30 years with an 8 percent average annual return, which is a typical long-term gain for stocks. In 40 years, that $10,000 would grow to $200,000. In 50 years, you’d have nearly $500,000.) You can’t control how long you live, but you can take advantage of long-term compounding by starting to invest as early as you can and leaving the money alone to grow.

These secret millionaires tend to be pretty vital, too: Elinor Sauerwein of Modesto, California, painted her own house, mowed her own lawn and harvested her own fruit from atop a ladder into her nineties, according to an ABC News report. Sauerwein left $1.7 million to the Salvation Army.

Don’t live too poor

Living below your means is essential to growing wealth, but it is possible to go overboard. Helen Dyrdal of Renton, Washington lived with broken furniture and wore tattered clothes, leaving her best friend with the impression she was impoverished, according to a KOMOnews.com report. Dyrdal was actually worth more than $3 million, which she left to Seattle-area charities when she died at 91.

Eugenia Dodson, meanwhile, was desperate to find a cure for diabetes, the illness that killed her two brothers. That’s why she gave two-thirds of her fortune to the University of Miami’s Diabetes Research Institution Foundation. (A lung cancer survivor, Dodson left the other third to the university’s cancer research center.) But she wasn’t able to give money away during her lifetime, Kubit says.

“She would have been treated royally by her charitable beneficiaries,” Kubit says. “But she was always afraid that she might need the money.” If Dodson, Dyrdal and other secret millionaires had been able to address their fears about money, they may have died a bit less wealthy — but they might have been happier. The best part of money is enjoying it while you’re alive, even if you want to benefit others when you die.

Please check out my other DailyWorth columns here.

 

The problem with bargain hunting

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERADeal sites. Garage sales. Thrift stores. All can be a part of a frugal lifestyle. Or they can just be substitutes for a more expensive shopping habit. The question to ask: Are these thrifty alternatives really thrifty for you? Or are they just feeding that lust for acquisition that leads to too much stuff and too little money?

In a terrific article for LearnVest titled “How I maxed out my retirement savings while making $28,000 a year,” writer Leah Manderson puts her finger on the problem:

I tried a stint at being frugal; shopping the sales and searching out deals on food, entertainment and other activities. What I discovered was that a lot of deal-hunting activities are attempts at “keeping up with the Joneses on less,” and, not surprisingly, they made me feel like a lesser version of the Joneses.

That feeling did not make me want to save money for my future—it made me want to spend more money on “deals”!

Manderson found more peace, and more savings, by unsubscribing from deal sites and making do with what she had: “I let my hair grow out, I made new outfits with clothes already in my closet, I rearranged my home decor to change my surroundings, I reread old books that I loved, and I got comfortable with living on less.”

Most of us have more than enough. Recognizing that can help tame the beast within that insists we “need” the new shiny thing that just captured our attention.

Or you can just remember something my grandmother said while laughing at retailer signs that promised big savings. “You’re not saving,” she said. “You’re spending!”

Monday’s need-to-know money news

1994-08-033 002Living within your means with a smile on your face, getting the most from your credit score, and separating fact from fiction with life insurance.

5 Tips for Frugal Living That Won’t Leave You Feeling Miserable
Living within your means doesn’t mean misery.

What’s the Lowest Credit Score You Can Get?
Don’t let your fear of The Number prevent you from monitoring your credit.

6 Worst Myths About Life Insurance
Separating fact from fiction.

7 Courses Finance Students Should Take
Studying beyond the numbers.

Does College still pay off?
Are the degrees still worth the dollars?

The weekly round-up

Spring break starts tomorrow for my kiddo, so I won’t be hanging out at the computer–we’ve got some serious goofing off to do. Therefore, I’m posting links to some stuff I hope you’ll find interesting, by myself and others, a day early.

Bob Sullivan of MSNBC posted a very scary column about how “Hackers turn credit report websites against consumers.” This one’s a must read.

GoBankingRates.com posted my column “Biggest Myths About Credit Scores.” We know so much more about  how these formulas work than we did a decade ago, but some of the same myths persist. Falling for any of these could cost you.

Fox Business picked up Jodi Helmer’s piece for CreditCards.com “Seven Easy Ways to Go Green with Your Finances,” to which I contributed a thought or three.

Donna Freedman’s latest for MSN, “A cheap death: Donate your body,” may take frugality a touch too far for some, but it could be just the ticket for those who want to benefit science and education while avoiding big burial costs.

Are you pregnant, or hope to be so soon? You might want to check out the baby planner created by “Generation Earn” author Kimberly Palmer. You can find the link, and read about the soon-to-be mom that Palmer’s advising, at Daily Worth’s Money Fix 3.

My MSN column this week “Lose your house, get socked by the IRS?” is about the coming expiration of the Mortgage Debt Relief Act, which protects homeowners from facing a tax bill after they lose their homes to foreclosure or short sales.