My Financial Journey

Festival of Frugality #62 at LazyManAndMoney is a HomeRun!

February 20, 2007 MFJ Comments 0 Comment

This week’s festival of frugality is hosted at LazyManAndMoney and for being so Lazy he sure did a bang up job on this week’s festival. If you have ever hosted a carnival you know how much work it is and to be able to make it fun an interesting is a real challenge. The theme for this week’s festival is baseball greats. LazyMan broke down all the articles based how on well he thought they were written and categorized them under the best baseball players of all time (Ruth, Williams, Mays, Mantle, and Herb Washington??)

My article on frugal landscaping is listed under the Ted Williams category. Go check out the carnival and all of the great articles on frugality!

MFJ one year ago (Feb 2006)

February 19, 2007 MFJ Comments 0 Comment

Well my blog has been around for over a year now so I guess I can start highlighting some posts from a year ago. I think this is kind of nice because I can occasionally see what I was thinking a year ago. See if my attitudes have changed, if I’ve learned anything new since then, etc. I probably won’t do this too often as well my blog hit a dry spell for a while last summer, but one year ago this week was a pretty good one for my blog.

It’s common sense, but I’m an idiot – realized how to do simple math to decide whether to pay off HELOC or not
$100,000 by Age 30 – came up with my first financial goal. It’s been a popular post for me.
PFBlogs.org – Site was born about this time last year and MFJ has been a friend of ever since – best aggregator around
Credit cards better for my net worth than high yield savings like ING Direct? – Realized the joys of rewards cards
Wal-Mart wallet photos for a whole lot less – Method I came up with to save money on wallet photos.

The fine line of frugality

February 19, 2007 MFJ Comments 8 comments

I would consider myself a frugal person. I live well within my means and never make a purchasing decision without painstakingly going over the details to make sure I really “need” the item and that I am getting the best absolute price. However always looking to save money can lead you to tread a fine line when it comes to being frugal vs being cheap OR being frugal and being unethical or even worse. I want to discuss some of these borderline issues, give examples of where maybe I stepped over the line, and hopefully get some feedback from my readers as to where they think the line is on these issues.

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Clothes as an investment??

February 17, 2007 MFJ Comments 3 comments

Today I went clothes shopping. I bought a lot of new clothes. In fact I spent more money on clothes today than I probably have in the last seven years combined. Now to put that in perspective I can only think of one piece of clothing I have bought in the last 5 years or so (a pair of jeans last year) and well I really only spent $225 today, which for some people may be a casual shopping trip. I never buy clothes, in fact a majority of my wardrobe consists of clothes I wore when I was still in high school. The rest are clothes I’ve received for birthday and Christmas presents from friends and family or received as freebies through work or conferences.
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Update to my $100,000 by age 30 goal

February 15, 2007 MFJ Comments 4 comments

When I originally set my $100,000 by age 30 goal I needed to sort of cheat and I made the goal to have $100,000 in principal (money I contributed) in my retirement accounts by Dec 31 of the year in which I turn 30. My birthday is in August and well according to my original calculations I would need at least those extra 4 months to reach my goal.

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Need some extra money – sue a telemarketer

February 14, 2007 MFJ Comments 1 comment

I’m always looking for side jobs or easy ways to make some extra money on the side. Turns out that you might be able to make a decent amount of money by suing companies who violate the do not call list legislation, and what could be more fun than suing a telemarketing company. Generally I have a personal aversion to lawsuits and think that it’s gotten entirely out of control in recent history, but in this case I’m all for it.

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How to go about frugal landscaping – Part I

February 14, 2007 MFJ Comments 7 comments

Well I just talked about the true cost of owning a home and well if I want to stay happily married I’m going to have to spend some money on landscaping this summer. So obviously I want to figure out the most cost effective way to do my landscaping and still end up with a product that my wife would be happy with. I already start the process of frugal lawn care last summer after the Chemlawn guy stopped by an challenged my green thumb manhood and to be honest my lawn ended up looking great. So while I know next to nothing as I write this article about landscaping I do know that if you aren’t careful landscaping can cost a fortune (we just had some professionals stop by last night with some plans and a quote – thus somewhat like the Chemlawn incident I feel personally challenged to show them I can do a much better job for a fraction of the cost)

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