Spent shells: Certain ammo hard to find in the Poconos

When Danny Solomon went to buy some ammunition at Walmart, he was surprised to find the store limited him to three boxes of shells.It didn’t make sense to Solomon.“I can buy three 100-round value packs of 9mm pistol ammo, for a total of 300 rounds under the policy,” he said, referring to what he understood was the store's policy. “Yet, I can't buy more than three 20 round boxes of hunting rifle ammunition. Stranger still, for some reason, shotgun [...]

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4 new television channels in northeastern Pa.

Two local television stations have announced a total of four new, over-the-air broadcast stations available without cable. Mission Broadcasting, Inc. owns WYOU-TV, the CBS affiliate serving northeastern and central Pennsylvania, and Nexstar Broadcasting Group, Inc. owns WBRE-TV, the NBC affiliate. These separate broadcasters operate under a shared services agreement.  WYOU has announced the introduction of two new channels. ESCAPE, a broadcast television [...]

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Bummed That Summer’s Ending? This Free Dairy Queen Treat Might Help

It’s become undeniable: Summer’s ending.

School’s back in session for almost everyone by now, and Labor Day weekend white parties mean it’s time to trade in shorts for sweaters (unless you, like me, are stuck in sweltering Florida).

In the words of Barry Westrum, executive vice president of marketing at Dairy Queen, “None of us want summer to end.”

To make the transition into autumn just a little bit less painful, the unofficial headquarters of delicious summery treats is offering up a sweet deal. And unlike back-to-school necessities, it won’t cost you a thing.

How to Get a Free Dairy Queen Frappe This Tuesday

Between 2 and 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 6, participating Dairy Queen locations will serve up one small “Ultimate Oreo” frappe per customer — free of charge.  

That ought to help ward off those end-of-summer blues.

Since the treat’s a blend of Oreos, ice cream and coffee, it’s the perfect afternoon pick-me-up on your first day back at work after the last big party weekend of the season.

Dairy Queen will refer to its servers as “DQ-ristas” during the event, “a nod to baristas and specialty coffee servers” owing to the Ultimate Oreo’s java jolt.

But even if caffeine isn’t your thing, you might want to swing on by.

Weekday afternoons from from 2 to 5 p.m., Dairy Queen runs its “Hardest Working Happy Hour,” offering discounted prices on a variety of sugary treats. You can get a small Orange Julius smoothie — or a plethora of other frappes — for just $2, or small flavored iced coffees for a buck apiece.

If your treat looks almost too good to eat, feel free to share it on your social channels using the hashtag #DQFreeFrapp.

If this is what September brings, I’m OK with it.

Your Turn: Will you take advantage of this sweet freebie from Dairy Queen?

Jamie Cattanach is a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder and ice cream enthusiast. Her writing has also been featured at The Write Life, Word Riot, Nashville Review and elsewhere. Find @JamieCattanach on Twitter to wave hello.

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Are You the Best at Your Job? People in These 10 Professions Think They Are

Have you noticed people in certain jobs always seem a little more confident than the rest of us?

Some people just seem certain they’re doing their best work, even better than everyone else.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are constantly seeking validation and worrying someone will eventually realize they made a serious mistake hiring us.

You might be surprised who actually falls into each category.

PayScale surveyed more than 300,000 workers to examine the job titles with the biggest egos, as well as the differences between generations, genders, education level, company size and income.

The study asked employees to rank how strongly they agree or disagree with the statement, “I am a top performer at my company for jobs similar to mine,” on a scale from one to five.

Those who replied “Strongly Agree” were classified as big ego employees, meaning they have either a “high level of professional confidence, an inflated sense of self, or both.”

Some findings are what we expected:

• Baby boomers are more confident than millennials — probably because they’ve been working longer.

• As companies get bigger, employee confidence drops.

• People with MBAs have bigger egos than any other education level.

• As pay level rises, so does confidence.

Some findings surprised us, though! Check out these 10 most and least confident jobs:

10 Jobs With the Biggest Ego

People in these jobs showed the most confidence in their skills

1. Private Household Cooks

2. Chief executives

3 (Tie). Farm, ranch and other agricultural managers

3 (Tie). Art directors

5. Airfield operations specialists

6. Floral designers

7. Plant and system operators

8. Chefs and head cooks

9. Bartenders

10 (Tie). Farmes and ranchers

10 (Tie). First-line supervisors/managers of personal service workers

10 (Tie). Sound engineering technicians

10 (Tie). Job printers

10 (Tie). Archivists

The survey showed almost no difference in ego between genders: 44% of men and 43% of women report being top performers. However, men traditionally are more likely to hold many of the positions with the biggest egos.

Did you notice food industry workers in the top 10 three times?

To be fair, private household cooks could be the only person in their position in the company, if they work for themselves. That could explain why a whopping 74% of them report being the best.

Why do 61% of restaurant chefs and 60% of bartenders report being the best in their company?

Well, most of us have met these folks, or at least watched something starring Anthony Bourdain or Gordon Ramsay. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

10 Jobs With the Least Ego

People in these jobs showed the least confidence in their skills:

471. Pharmacists

475 (Tie). Taxi drivers and chauffeurs

475 (Tie). Electronic home entertainment equipment installers/repairers

475 (Tie). Firefighters

475 (Tie). Millwrights (factory machinery installer/repairer)

475 (Tie). Internists (doctor of internal medicine)

480. Probation officers and correctional treatment specialists

481. Telecommunications line installers and repairers

482. Occupational therapist assistants

483. Graduate teaching assistants

Penny Hoarder staffers who have held the position are unsurprised to see graduate teaching assistants in last place here, with just 15% confident in their superiority.

One writer even told me she hated the forlorn looks of students so badly that she started to bring in fresh-baked cookies to soften the blow of graded tests. Do you think your CEO relies on cookies to break the ice?

Here are a few more — mostly unscientific — observations we had reviewing this report.

Mo’ Money = Mo’ Confidence

There’s a clear correlation between pay and ego. As salary goes up, so does ego at every level.

• <$25K: 37%

• $25K-$50K: 43%

• $50K-$75K: 44%

• $75K-$100K: 45%

• $100K-$200K: 48%

• >$200K: 56%

This doesn’t surprise us much, considering our culture generally equates pay with worth in the workplace.

If you’re paid more than your co-workers, you’ll probably assume you’re better at your job.

Conversely, a bigger ego could make an employee stronger in salary negotiations. If you’re more confident, you may ask for more money or leave jobs that don’t pay you what you’re worth.

Creatives Have Big Egos

Maybe it’s because we’re a team of writers, photographers and designers, but we were intrigued to see a lot of creative jobs near the top of the list.

In our experience, these are not people comfortable in their own skin.

Maybe they’re reporting higher confidence because they’re actually making a living doing what they love? I can personally attest to a spike in confidence when I sell books, work with a good client or land a new job.

Superiority in creative fields might also be more subjective than in quantitative fields.

Maybe we skew our skills more positively, while someone whose performance is measured with empirical data may see their mistakes more easily.

Here’s one more theory, because I’m awfully invested in convincing you that creative people aren’t all egomaniacs.

Creative professionals often rely on their own judgment and practice to qualify for a job, rather than on a clear hierarchy of professional credentials. It certainly requires confidence.

Quants Aren’t as Cocky As You’d Think

We were surprised to see a lot of highly-skilled trades fall to the bottom of the list.

Scientists and medical specialists, pharmacists, nuclear engineers and emergency management specialists are actually among the least confident professionals, while physical laborers are often among the most confident.

In fact, confidence almost directly goes down as the level of education goes up.

Those holding solely a GED or high school diploma tie with those holding an MBA for how often they report being the best at their job, while MDs report it the least:

• MBA: 45%

• GED or high school diploma: 45%

• Associate degree: 44%

• Some college: 44%

• Ph.D.: 43%

• Juris doctor degree (doctor of law): 42%

• Bachelor’s degree: 42%

• Master’s degree (non-MBA): 40%

• M.D.: 39%

If you’d asked me to guess, I would’ve put medical doctors much higher on the big ego list.

But maybe a certain humility and drive for self-improvement are necessary in these highly-skilled jobs. When you think about it, you probably don’t want your doctor believing they have nothing new to learn.

To see where your job title falls on the list, read the full report here.

Your Turn: Which of these job titles surprises you the most?

Dana Sitar (@danasitar) is a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder. She’s written for Huffington Post, Entrepreneur.com, Writer’s Digest and more, attempting humor wherever it’s allowed (and sometimes where it’s not).

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Achieving Health and Fitness Without Breaking the Bank

Almost every week, I receive a message from a reader looking for strategies to improve their personal health or fitness without spending substantial amounts of money.

It’s an understandable question. For starters, good health and personal fitness improves quality of life and reduces long term medical costs. In general, a person who is in good physical shape is going to feel better each day than a person who is in worse physical shape. The person in better shape will, in general, have more energy, be more well rested, and be better equipped to handle both the physical and mental challenges of modern life.

At the same time, there’s a strong perception that the strategies for achieving health and physical fitness are expensive. A healthy diet is often seen as a costly diet, for example, and the keys to physical fitness in the minds of many are deeply tied to expensive equipment and gym memberships.

What makes things even worse is that the media conveys health information very poorly, and corporations with a profit motive stir up the water even more. A corporation selling a marginally healthy product is going to want to make that product sound as healthy as possible, so they’re going to do everything they can to focus on health benefits and ignore health drawbacks in their advertising and in their public relations. At the same time, most media sources are pretty bad at actually sharing the results of scientific data. After all, scientists themselves are often not good at PR and can’t afford PR, either, and it can often be easy to draw the wrong conclusion from scientific studies.

Thus, it’s not surprising that most Americans are unclear on what they actually need to do to become healthy, even on the things where there’s a clear scientific consensus. Add on top of that the fact that many of the things that actually improve health have an appearance of being expensive and time-consuming and it’s no wonder that people make some awful health choices that, eventually, turn into very expensive health choices.

In an effort to maintain and improve my own health, I’ve read a ton of books on personal health and fitness (if I had to recommend just one book, it would be A Short Guide to a Long Life) and, along the way, I realized that out of all of the information out there, there are really only a few consensus strategies that are really recommended for virtually everyone. I can literally count them on my fingers.

Simply put, if you do the following five things, you will improve your long term health outcomes. (There are a few more that are nearly 100% consensus, but I’m going to stick with just these five.) It’s really that simple. Improving your long term health will not only save you money, but it will improve your quality of life today to boot.

But are they inexpensive? Here are the five consensus strategies for personal health I’ve learned over the years, along with some tips on how to do them without blowing out your paycheck.

Eat a Wide Variety of Fruits and Vegetables and Make Them the Majority of Your Diet

Eat fruits and vegetables. It’s that simple. They’re good for you. They’ve been the backbone of the human diet since the dawn of mankind. Our systems are designed to primarily run on fruits and vegetables.

Want a simple rule of thumb? At minimum, half of what you eat should either be clearly identifiable as a fruit or a vegetable. Things like grains, dairy products, and meats should make up the other half of your diet. If you’re not sure whether you’re eating half vegetables and fruit, err on the side of more vegetables and fruit. It really is that easy.

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” is actually pretty accurate.

How do I make this cheap?

Many people have the impression that eating in a healthier way like this is expensive, but it’s actually not bad at all. Here are some strategies for keeping it cheap.

Buy the produce that’s on sale. Check your grocery store flyer each week and check out the produce that’s normally on sale, then buy some of that for snacks and breakfasts (like bananas, apples, oranges, and so on) and vegetables for other meals.

Learn easy ways to prepare them that taste good. Making vegetables on your plate taste good without investing much time is simply a matter of learning some solid techniques. Steaming vegetables is actually really easy, as is grilling them. It’s also very easy to make them more flavorful; usually some black pepper and a pinch of salt and perhaps a bit of butter is all you really need for most vegetables. You can also buy flash-frozen vegetables in the freezer aisle that steam pretty well in the microwave in five minutes right in the bag.

Grow a garden and preserve the extras. A vegetable garden can provide an abundance of fresh vegetables during the summer months. Not only does this provide a ton of nearly free vegetables (and fruits) for your meals, it also allows you to stretch them into the fall and winter if you preserve the extras via freezing and canning and drying.

Eat as Little Refined Sugar as Possible

Refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup are not just in sodas. They’re in many of the foods that we eat – everything from pasta sauce to frozen dinners can contain sugar or corn syrup.

The truth is that a little bit of corn syrup or sugar is okay, but the typical American goes far, far beyond any reasonable recommendation for daily consumption. They get sugar from their meals, from their beverages, and from their snacks, too.

Sugar overconsumption is bad because it’s an extremely high-calorie food and it causes your blood sugar levels to escalate, which can really wreak havoc with your energy levels in the short term (sure, you might get an energy bump immediately, but that bump will have a crash and it will affect your baseline levels too) and cause serious long-term conditions such as diabetes and obesity.

Beyond a very small amount of daily sugar intake – an amount virtually all Americans get with incredible ease – additional sugar is almost entirely bad for you.

How do I make this cheap?

Unfortunately, many inexpensive foods and typical American household staples are laden with sugar and high fructose corn syrup. How can you get away from these foods and still keep your food bill in a reasonable place? Here are three strategies.

Dump soda. Almost all sodas contain some type of sweetener. Whether it’s sugar or corn syrup (or something that imitates their effects), that sweetener either directly brings about the negative effects described above or, in the case of artificial sweeteners, has other side effects that you really don’t want. The solution’s simple – dump soda from your life. If you switch to primarily drinking water, you eliminate the cost of soda as well as the negative health effects.

Dump sugary additives like coffee creamer. Many additives to coffees and teas, like sweetened creamers and, well, sugar, trigger almost all of the bad effects described above. Black coffee itself isn’t a problem – it’s the stuff that gets added to it. Slowly trim back on the sweetened creamers and sugar over time. Not only will this make the coffee cheaper, it’ll have health benefits, too.

Make simple staples like pasta sauce yourself. Whenever you have a chance to make something from raw ingredients or at least from simpler ingredients, it’s going to be healthier and it’s also probably going to be cheaper. For instance, you can make a great pasta sauce out of just a bit of olive oil, some diced tomatoes, and maybe some sauteed onions and green peppers. It takes about as much time to make it as it does to boil pasta, it’s cheaper, it’s incredibly tasty, and it comes without the extra sugar. (Plus, you can make extra and store it in the fridge in a closed container for a while, as the acids from the tomatoes give it a long fridge life.)

Choose Whole Foods over Refined Foods

This one’s simple. If you’re unsure as to which food to eat, choose the one that’s closest to the natural form that it takes when it’s picked or when it’s killed. If it’s been processed into some other form, eat as little of it as you can.

Why? In the industrial food era, whenever a food is processed by a company, lots of other ingredients that you usually don’t want are added to it. Look at the ingredient list on almost any food product on store shelves outside of the produce and meat sections. It’s loaded with stuff, much of which a typical American can’t identify and much of which you really shouldn’t be putting in your body.

The solution is easy: when in doubt, eat foods that are as close to the natural form as possible. That allows you to avoid lots of unnecessary things in your food that are, on the whole, detrimental to your health.

How do I make this cheap?

Many such processed foods are really cheap – I mean, have you ever looked at a ramen packet, for instance? How can you eat whole foods cheaply? Here are three tricks.

Keep lots of fruits and unseasoned nuts on hand for snacks, and buy the ones that are on sale. It’s very similar to what I mentioned earlier. Watch the grocery store flyers and pick up fruits and nuts when you see them on sale, then enjoy them as a snack. Many nuts are heavily seasoned with all kinds of stuff, so get unseasoned nuts and add your own simple seasonings if you’d like. Make nuts and fruits your default snack.

Eat simply-prepared vegetables as a side dish for most meals. As I mentioned above, it’s pretty easy to steam some vegetables – you can even buy pretty inexpensive bags of frozen vegetables that can be steamed in the bag in five minutes. You can also grill them or saute them in a bit of oil, too – there are lots of ways to do a simple prep of vegetables to get them on the table as a tasty side dish.

Get Some Moderate Exercise Most Days

No one expects you to become a superathlete, but most medical sources do encourage at least a little bit of exercise several times a week. The most common recommendation I’ve found is to exercise moderately for half an hour five times a week.

Moderate exercise simply means that you’re doing enough to get your heart rate pumping a little bit and getting a little bit out of breath. Depending on your fitness level, it can take different exercises to reach this point, but as long as you’re doing something regularly that raises your pulse and your breathing pace, you’re good.

I suggest trying to make it a daily routine because it’s easier said than done.

How do I make this cheap?

Many people turn this into a gym routine, but it doesn’t have to be a gym routine. It just has to be a routine that you can repeat yourself. Here are some ideas for home exercise that don’t include the cost of a gym.

Make a daily walk part of your routine. I find that going on a walk/jog at whatever pace I need to do to raise my breath and pace a little is a great and incredibly inexpensive way to get that exercise. I do it as part of my normal workday as a method for clearing my mind and working through problems, and I’m often listening to a podcast while doing so.

Find exercises to do at home that you enjoy and can do every day. There are many, many bodyweight exercises you can do at home that can improve your health, from pushups and squats to planks and situps to lunges and jumping jacks. I like using my own variant on the lifetime fitness ladder for these exercises. You also might want to try a 7 minute workout for a similar effect.

Find simple ways to incorporate lifting weight into that home routine. Lifting even a little bit of weight can really amplify the health effects of exercise, as you’re working more muscles and building some muscle tone (you generally don’t build large muscles unless you’re intentionally trying to do so). One thing I like to do is to do lunges with a barbell, lifting it above my head with alternating arms. You can get a barbell at almost any secondhand sporting goods store for just a few bucks.

Don’t Smoke, Don’t Do Drugs, and Don’t Drink to Excess

If you’re intentionally putting things in your body that you don’t need for basic hydration and nutrition, they’re probably a waste of money, plus many of those things have detrimental side effects with even a little bit of consumption (the jury’s still out on very moderate alcohol use, but heavy alcohol use is quite bad).

The problem with many such substances is that they’re addictive. It can be very difficult and even quite painful to get out of a routine of using them. However, breaking an addictive habit like these habits will not only improve your health, it’ll also improve your finances as well.

Hopefully, you can go by this section and simply mentally mark it with a check, as you’ve already done it. But if not, read on.

How do I make this cheap?

Obviously, cutting the expense of alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs out of your life is going to be a money saver, so here are three strategies that work well for cutting a bad habit out of your life.

Quit cold turkey. Almost every story I’ve heard about individuals quitting a bad habit involves them simply deciding to stop at some point and never returning. A gentle slowdown rarely seems to work – the best approach is to stop, deal with the short term intense challenges of breaking an addiction, and moving on from there. Make the choice to quit and just do it.

Find social support for not using that substance, and avoid social situations that encourage use. If you have a normal social routine that involves using a particular substance, do everything you can to change it. Instead, consciously choose to spend your time on social and life situations that don’t encourage use and, in fact, subtly discourage it. You’ll be far better off with that new routine.

Learn other ways to handle stress and challenging emotions. Many people rely on substances in times of stress or even to just handle the emotional twists of everyday life. Seek out a new outlet for those feelings. (Personally, I find exercise and long walks to be a killer outlet, so try those strategies listed above).

Final Thoughts

Like it or not, poor health has a steep financial cost, and the day to day choices that many of us make put us on a direct path toward poor health. From the food we eat to the activities we choose to the ways we relieve our stresses, we often end up doing bad things to our bodies that end up costing us a ton of money over the long haul, never mind the reduction in life quality.

The best solution, of course, is to stop those routines now rather than later and establish better ones. Eat more fruits and vegetables. Cut back on sugar. Eat more raw foods. Get some regular exercise. Stop the use of any vice substances.

What you’ll find if you make those choices is that your long term health prospects improve and your long term health costs go down significantly. You’ll also find yourself feeling better, which increases your earning potential and also increases your likelihood of making good decisions.

These changes aren’t costly, either. Most of them can be done at minimal cost and some of them directly save you money. In fact, you can probably make all of the changes in this article and find yourself spending less money on food and health than you do right now.

It just requires some changes in routine, and those are the hardest changes. Your best approach for making those changes is to do it with others. Get the support of people around you for all of the changes you make and you’ll find those changes become easier and easier.

Good luck!

The post Achieving Health and Fitness Without Breaking the Bank appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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Here’s How Much One Family Saved By Ditching Their Second Car

Of all the crazy things I’ve read about people doing to save money, there was one thing I always admired but never thought my husband and I could pull off. (Apart from making our own laundry detergent, which — let’s be honest — is never gonna happen.)

That thing? Becoming a one-car household.

It just seemed like such a hassle. How would we get stuff done? Wouldn’t we feel restricted? What if we both needed the car at once?

Then my husband lost his job and learned he wouldn’t be able to work again; he has a lifelong condition and is applying for disability.

Suddenly, we had to drastically slash our budget, and whether it would be a hassle or not, we realized that meant getting rid of one of our cars.

How have we fared? Better than you might think…

What We’ve Saved By Only Having One Car

Moneywise, going down to one car has reaped us all sorts of savings.

When we sold my car, we used the money to pay off the remainder of my husband’s car, which still had a couple years of payments left. (Car payments: $310/month)

Having one less car to cover also cut down our insurance payments. (Insurance: $45/month)

Since my husband is no longer commuting to work, and I work from home as a freelance writer, the only major driving we do anymore is running errands — which we often combine into one quick trip insteading of doing them piecemeal on our drives home from work. (Gas: $100/month)

We no longer have to fill out the annual paperwork for a second car (Registration/Inspections: $75/year), and we haven’t been faced with any major (or minor) repairs since we cut back our driving habits — partly because the low mileage means parts last much longer, and partly because the car is on the road less and therefore has a lower likelihood of getting into an accident, especially during our snowy Buffalo winters. (Repairs/Maintenance: $300 to $500/year)

Add in miscellaneous savings like one less E-ZPass to refill ($25/refill), and that brings our estimated combined yearly savings to between $5,560 and $6,060.

Not too shabby, huh?

How to Become a One-Car Household

Toying with the idea of becoming a one-car household yourself? Here are some tips to make it doable:

1. Change your working arrangements.

If one of you can work from home, it radically reduces your need for a second car. If you’re not one for self-employment, you could look for a traditional job that gives you the option to telecommute.

If you can’t work from home, consider alternating work schedules with your partner or finding a job that’s closer to home so you can get to it by foot, bike or bus.

2. Coordinate and plan ahead.

When you’re sharing one vehicle, you need to make sure your whole family is on the same page with their personal schedules, especially if you have kids involved in lots of extracurricular activities.

Set up a family calendar in a central location and make sure everyone keeps it updated. Or, to really keep everyone in sync, create a shared Google Calendar everyone can access from their smartphones.

Emphasize the importance of giving as much advance scheduling notice as possible. If someone has a conflict (your daughter needs to get to soccer practice while your son has a dentist appointment), one of you will have to reschedule or find alternate arrangements to get there and back.

It’s a good idea to schedule a time each week (like Sunday evening) when everyone can sit down together and go over the coming week’s schedule.

3. Carpool.

Join other parents in a neighborhood carpool where people take turns driving everyone’s kids to school and back. Offer to give a nearby coworker gas money if she’ll swing by and pick you up on her commute. Ask your friend if you can tag along when he goes grocery shopping, and offer to buy him a thank-you lunch.

4. Use public transportation (and your own two legs).

Most cities and towns have some sort of public transportation. If you live in a bigger, more walkable city like New York or Boston, you may find you can even become a zero-car household.

On the rare occasion you really do need your own set of wheels, you can always rent a shared car for the day through a service like Zipcar or Relay Rides.

And don’t forget your own private mode of transportation: your legs (and a bike, if you have one).

If you’re a suburbanite, you may be all too used to hopping in your car to grab something from the corner store just a few blocks away. Getting there under your own power helps out both your budget and your health.

Sharing a car isn’t always super-convenient, but it’s not impossible. You just may find you can make it work for you — and that the savings are more than worth it.

Your Turn: Is yours a one-car household? How do you make it work?

Kelly Gurnett is a freelance blogger, writer and editor who runs the blog Cordelia Calls It Quits, where she documents her attempts to rid her life of the things that don’t matter and focus more on the things that do. Follow her on Twitter @CordeliaCallsIt.

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How I Saved 44% on My Grocery Bill Without Using a Single App or Coupon

I feel lucky to have grown up in a household where exotic meals were the norm. Since my mom is Japanese, her cooking often featured flavors from a variety of Asian cuisines.

Now that I’m on my own, I try to be adventurous with my meals, too.

But the thing is: The ingredients can quickly add up.

So I started thinking about how my mom had done it. And I realized she never bought Asian products at our town’s grocery store. Instead, she made a monthly run to the Asian grocery store in a nearby city.

[Insert lightbulb moment! ]

Would shopping at the Asian grocery store help me save money on specialty ingredients, and maybe even produce, too?

I decided to see for myself…

Is the Asian Grocery Store the Cheapest Grocery Store?  

To test my theory, I used a simple standby meal: stir fry.

I made a shopping list and headed out to compare prices.

Here’s what I found:

Um, WHAT?

How have I not been shopping at the Asian grocery store for ALL of my produce?

Everyday veggies like mushrooms and red peppers were 50% cheaper than at my regular grocery store — and specialty produce items like bean sprouts and ginger yielded an even greater discount.

Of course, the Asian grocery store probably won’t carry your favorite brand of cereal or pasture-raised eggs — but for produce or Asian ingredients, it seems like a no-brainer.

Cooking stir fry AND saving money?

What a way to make both my Japanese mom and my Jewish dad proud.

Your Turn: Have you ever shopped at the Asian grocery store?

Susan Shain, senior writer for The Penny Hoarder, is always seeking adventure on a budget. Visit her blog at susanshain.com, or say hi on Twitter @susan_shain.

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More than a third of Moneywise readers successfully use price promises

Helen Knapman

price-promise.jpg

More than three in 10 (35%) Moneywise.co.uk users have successfully used price promises to claim the difference back if they can find an item cheaper elsewhere, according to our latest poll result.

More than three in 10 (35%) Moneywise.co.uk users have successfully used price promises to claim the difference back if they can find an item cheaper elsewhere, according to our latest poll result. 

In contrast, just one in 10 (11%) has had no success when trying to use a price promise.

read more

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Will Paying Collections Raise Your Credit Score?

So you’re ready to start rebuilding your damaged credit? That’s a smart decision. One of the first places that many consumers like to begin when setting out to rebuild their bad credit is by paying off or settling their collection accounts.

Unfortunately, eliminating your collection account balances may not have the huge impact on your credit score you’d expect. While paying or settling your outstanding collections certainly can be a good idea, it’s important to set realistic expectations as it pertains to your credit scores.

The Impact of Outstanding Collection Accounts

Collection accounts can certainly damage your credit scores — this is not breaking news. The reason collection accounts can be detrimental to your credit scores is the fact that credit scoring models like FICO and VantageScore heavily weigh the presence or lack of derogatory credit report entries in the all-important payment history category of your credit reports.

The impact of a single collection account is going to vary from person to person and from credit report to credit report. However, if a single collection account is added to an otherwise clean credit report, the negative score impact is likely to be severe. The best way to avoid the potential impact of a collection is to avoid the collection altogether.

The Impact of Paid Collection Accounts

While paying collection accounts is certainly a wise move — it protects you from further escalation on the part of your debt collectors, such as lawsuits — doing so likely won’t have the positive impact on your credit scores you might have hoped.

Zero balance collection accounts are still allowed to remain on your credit reports for seven years from the date of default on the original account. Unless you’ve negotiated a pay-for-delete settlement arrangement with your debt collector (a settlement that’s very difficult to achieve), your collection accounts will continue to remain on your credit reports even after you’ve taken care of your outstanding balances.

Since paying collection accounts doesn’t remove them from your reports, doing so will not erase the fact that the negative event occurred in the first place. You may have resolved the situation after the fact, but at some point you still failed to pay a lender according to the terms of your agreement — and that’s what credit scoring models will look at. Statistics clearly show that consumers with collection accounts are more likely to have problems paying their bills on time in the future, which is why FICO and VantageScore consider them in the first place.

Future Changes

It is worth noting that newer versions of the most commonly used credit scoring models will ignore paid or settled collections entirely when calculating your credit scores. And however the balance was eliminated — whether it was you paying it in full or settling the debt — the newer scoring models still ignore them. Specifically, FICO 9 and VantageScore 3.0, the newest versions of credit scores available from FICO and VantageScore, were designed to actually exclude paid collections from their scoring calculations all together.

However, since most lenders still currently use much older versions of the FICO scoring model, it will likely be many years before paying collections will have a positive impact on your credit scores.

Finally, despite the fact that newer scoring models will ignore the zero-dollar collections, if they’re still present on your credit reports then lenders can certainly build policies around the consideration of the negative entry, even if scoring models do not.

So again, the best way to avoid all of this mess is to avoid the collection in the first place.

Related Articles: 

• Expose a Fake Debt Collector by Asking These Three Questions
• You Can Improve This Part of Your Credit Score Almost Immediately
• Revolving Debt vs. Installment Loans: Why the Type of Account Matters to Your Credit Score

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This One Important Number Says Everything About Your Financial Health

Do you know your net worth?

Actually, first — do you know what net worth is?

What is Net Worth?

At its heart, net worth is really simple: It’s the total value of all of your assets, minus the total value of all of your liabilities.

So if you add up the value of everything you own, including all your investments and all the money in your bank account…

… and then subtract all the debt you owe, including everything from your student loans and mortgage to taxes…

…the number on the bottom line is your net worth.

It’s also the number you’re talking about when you sit around speculating about how much your favorite TV star is “worth.”

It’s a pretty simple calculation — but ultimately, it’s a theoretical number.

No matter what your net worth is, it most likely isn’t equal to the amount of cash you could access today — or even in a couple of weeks.

Unless, of course, you’ve sold all your possessions and live out of a backpack and only have $200 in cash to your name… or you’ve decided to give up money completely.

To actually obtain your net worth in cash, you’d have to sell everything you have and settle all your debts, which is a process that sounds so time- and labor-intensive you should be glad it usually only happens after you die.

All that to say nothing of the unfortunate fact that, for a lot of us (read: anyone with any as-yet-unpayable debt, so just about every person who’s ever gone to college in the U.S.), net worth might actually be a negative number.

At the time of this writing, I fall into that craptastic statistic myself, owing to a particularly un-smart money move I made before I got my TPH gig. Oops.

But maybe we’re getting a couple of steps ahead of ourselves.

Cool, I Understand Net Worth… But Who Cares?

Why does knowing your net worth matter?

Well, from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s a metric lenders use to decide if they’ll loan you any money. If you ever want a small business loan, for instance, you’ll probably need some net worth — no matter how stellar your credit.

But even if you’re not planning on taking out any kind of loan, net worth is a powerful personal finance tool.

Basically, it boils down your financial health into a number. And tracking that number carries the answer to a powerful question: Are you gaining wealth?

Or are you losing it? Even if you’re not in actual debt, failing to invest and earn comes at an opportunity cost.

Furthermore, tracking your net worth can help you achieve your personal finance goals. It makes your money matters — which are so frequently abstract and digitized and not in your hands — tangible and distinct.

And it also makes paying down debt that much sweeter.

“Even though I don’t like having to pay a monthly mortgage payment,” says financial writer Danny Kofke, “every time I do so I am increasing my net worth.”

It’s kind of like gamifying your finances.

If you stick a fast number on your goal, it makes it that much easier to think about it in terms of a score — which can be even more motivating than dollar signs.

Ready to Calculate Your Net Worth?

So. Want to know your number?

If itemizing all your possessions and other assets seems labor-intensive to you, never fear — the ‘net is awash with calculators that make it quick and painless.

If you already use Mint religiously to track your budget and spending habits, you can find an accurate figure for your net worth there, too.

And even if you go the pen-and-paper route, it’s not as bad as it seems. You don’t actually figure everything you own into your assets, because many items lose their resale value pretty quickly — or didn’t have much to begin with.

“Clothing” and “household goods” might figure into your assets, writes certified financial planner and enrolled agent Mathew Dahlberg. However, if you “were forced to sell these items to raise cash, the secondhand value (would be) significantly less” than what you might think — and maybe even negligible.

In short, your sweatpants probably don’t figure into your net worth, unless you own these.

Once you calculate that fateful figure, you can assess how much financial work you’ve got to do to get it where you want it to be.

And as it happens, we’ve got some posts to help you get started.

First things first: It’s time to sit down and set some tangible financial goals. One of them might be achieving a specific net worth!

If you find yourself in the red, you’ve gotta fix that first — and fast. Here are 11 creative strategies for paying down credit card (or any other) debt as quickly as possible.

Finally, find some new ways to earn a little extra cash. You can only make so many cuts — but with these flexible, smart ways to make some money on the side, you’ve got lots of ways to bolster your income.

Giving your financial status a good, hard look is the first step, so congratulations — you’ll be in the black before you know it.

Your Turn: What are you going to do to increase your net worth?

Jamie Cattanach is a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder. Her writing has also been featured at Word Riot, DMQ Review, Hinchas de Poesia and elsewhere. Find @JamieCattanach on Twitter to wave hello.

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How and When to Choose the Best Legal Service for Your Business

By Jan Pinnington My neighbor is a very successful restauranteur who owns 14+ restaurants throughout the state of South Carolina. His restaurants run 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Recently he shared a little secret with me that seemed to emerge from his mouth as more of a humorous fact rather […]

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