East Stroudsburg church seeks volunteer help for homeless

"A supernatural intervention"That's what the Rev. Carol Fernandez of The House of Prayer of the Living God in East Stroudsburg calls the encounter that has led her and her church to realize how serious an issue homelessness is in Monroe County and do something to help. Having volunteered with her husband for years at the Good Shepherd Mission homelessness program in Paterson, N.J., Fernandez, a Bushkill resident, had just finished shopping at the East Stroudsburg KMart off [...]

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How I Use Evernote, My Most Essential Free Online Tool

A few weeks ago, I answered a mailbag question from Jim, who wanted to know how I use Evernote. I gave him an answer that almost stretched into something that needed to become its own article, but instead I cut it short and asked for readers to contact me if they wanted a full article about my uses for Evernote. Over the next few days, several readers contacted me requesting the article (and more than a few swapped some Evernote tips with me), so what follows is that requested article: a detailed guide to how I use Evernote, my most essential free online tool.

So… What Is Evernote?

Evernote is a simple digital tool that lets you keep and organize notes of all kinds – text, pictures, sound recordings, and mixed media. They store all of the notes for you in the cloud and you can access these notes from anywhere. There’s a very smooth app available for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux, plus their website itself allows you to access and edit notes, so you can access them pretty much anywhere.

I absolutely do not recommend storing any valuable personal data in Evernote, but that’s not the purpose of it. The purpose of it, at least as I see it, is to serve as a mental filing cabinet for ideas and bits of information that you’re going to want to use and access later.

I personally use Evernote perhaps two or three dozen times a day. I’m not kidding or exaggerating in the least. It is such an essential part of my daily activity at this point that I would really struggle without it. For me, it’s a mix of an infinitely long pocket notebook and a filing cabinet with magic search capabilities that takes up essentially no space.

How I Use Evernote

I currently have Evernote installed on my desktop (where I do most of my writing), my laptop (where I write when I’m traveling), and my phone. All of them are synced up to the same account, obviously, so I can seamlessly share notes and access them between all of those devices. In the rare event that I need to access Evernote somewhere else, I can look at the web version, but I genuinely cannot remember the last time I did that.

“Things”

Throughout the day, I have one note in Evernote that’s constantly open and being added to; I call that note “Things.” In “Things,” I just add anything and everything as I discover it or think of it. I might add a photo of a gift idea for my son, followed by a quote that I read on some website, followed by an article idea for The Simple Dollar, followed by the Twitter handle and name of someone I just met along with a reason that I should follow up with that person, followed by an appointment three weeks from now that I should stick in my calendar… you get the idea.

My “Things” note within Evernote is much like a pocket notebook, in other words, except it’s just one long run-on note. I separate the notes by just hitting return a few times, typing “=======” (or something similar), then hitting return a few more times and adding the next item. It’s pretty straightforward.

I probably find myself adding something to “Things” twenty times a day. It’s just a catchall for things I need to do, things I need to remember, and things I want to refer back to later for some reason.

Processing “Things”

Once or twice a day, I’ll sit down at an actual computer – either my laptop or my desktop – and process the content of “Things.” I go through each item in that note and decide what I need to do with that item.

Items that are obviously tasks that need to be done later go into my to-do list manager (I currently use Omnifocus, but Todoist is a similar and much cheaper alternative); if they’re really quick tasks, I just do them immediately instead. I then delete that item out of “Things.”

Upcoming events go straight into my calendar (I currently use Google Calendar). I then delete that item out of “Things” once it’s in my calendar.

Most of the rest of the stuff is moved into standalone notes within Evernote, usually sorted into various notebooks. I have a pretty hefty number of these notebooks: a “Future Projects” notebook for things that might develop into larger projects down the road, a “Recipes” notebook for various recipes (though these tend to wind up in Paprika these days), a “Thinking” notebook with things that I want to give further thought to in the future, a bunch of notebooks devoted to various ongoing projects, and on and on and on like this. I’ll talk about a bunch of these below.

My goal is to empty out “Things” at the end of that little session, leaving a blank note, a few little tasks done, and items that are where they’re supposed to be.

Naming Notes

I have a few simple rules of thumb that I follow when creating notes.

First of all, I want the name to convey as much information as possible about what’s in the note. Aside from “Things,” my note names are pretty descriptive. Quite often, the names of notes about Simple Dollar articles wind up being part of the name of the actual finished article, for example.

Another great example is how I store gift ideas. Often, the name of the note lists both the recipient and the name of the gift idea. The note itself usually just contains a picture, a link, and/or some description of the idea. That way, when I’m browsing through my “Gift Ideas” notebook, I have what looks like a long list of ideas. (I can filter that list based on tags if I so choose).

Tagging

Each time I create an individual new note, I also add tags to it. I just use the ten or so most obvious words or brief phrases I can think of that are associated with this particular note. I try as hard as I can to not overthink this and usually the tags are really obvious.

Why use tags? The truth is that I have thousands of notes in Evernote. Some individual notebooks have more than a thousand notes themselves. Even if I’m really great at giving smart names to my notes, tags make it possible to quickly pull up subsets of notes on a particular topic.

For example, my “time management” tag has 46 notes currently associated with it. It looks like about ten of them are potential Simple Dollar articles, another 20 or so are book quotes, another ten or so are future projects, and there are few more sprinkled in other areas. This quickly reduces what could have been a very arduous task of searching for my notes on “time management” down to a couple of clicks and a much more concise and focused list of notes.

Sure, it takes an extra few seconds when creating a note to come up with a number of tags that might be appropriate for it, but when I’m actually looking through those notes later on, having them all tagged is really, really valuable.

Article Drafts

Pretty much every article that you’ve read by me on The Simple Dollar in the past year has been drafted in an Evernote note. Using Evernote, I can start rough drafts of articles, polish them up, and then post them quickly to The Simple Dollar when I think they’re ready. The fact that the articles are available on every platform that I might ever want to use with a consistent format and consistent tools is wonderful, and the fact that they’re all stored in one place is even better.

I keep the articles for The Simple Dollar in one “stack” of notebooks (a “stack” is simply a collection of notebooks on one topic; it’s a way to better organize notebooks). One is named “Ideas,” another is named “Outlines,” a third is named “Unpublished Drafts,” and a fourth is named “Published.”

When I have an idea for an article for the site, usually little more than a possible article title and a sentence or two in description, it’s a new note in “Ideas.” At some point, usually when I’ve looked into a particular idea and brainstormed some more, I’ll flesh that particular idea into an outline of a post, usually a brief phrase or a sentence describing each paragraph along with any key links I might want to include and any key pieces of information I’ll want to share. That note moves from “Ideas” to “Outlines.” When I then turn that into a full article that I haven’t quite decided to post yet, it sits in “Drafts” – these usually need editing or can be pulled from in an emergency. If I actually use an article, I move that note to “Published” and add the published date and URL to the note.

This enables me to keep a nice archive of my writings all in one place.

Book Manuscripts

I have four (yep, four) ongoing book manuscripts for books that I’m researching or thinking about or working on in some stage. Each one is – surprise! – stored in Evernote as a “stack” of notebooks.

I actually follow a model much like the notebook for The Simple Dollar. One notebook is usually notes for the book, usually organized by potential chapter, but also with plot and character notes if it’s fiction. A second is for outlines of each chapter. The third/fourth/fifth/etc. notebooks are for individual chapter drafts.

One advantage to keeping notes and drafts like this within Evernote is that it’s easy to transform a finished product within Evernote into something I can publish to the Kindle Store or other e-book stores using FastPencil, which can literally slurp out my notes and convert them straight into a document that can be edited a bit and then almost directly uploaded to the Kindle Store. Once I hit a final draft I’m happy with, it will be pretty easy to self-publish it should I choose to go that route.

Daily Journaling

As I’ve mentioned often on The Simple Dollar, I do some journaling every single day, usually in two sessions – one in the morning to “vision” the day ahead and again in the evening to reflect on the day’s successes and failures. Again, this is stored in Evernote.

I just have a single “Daily Journal” notebook, within which I add a note named with the date and, if there was a noteworthy event that day, a very brief description of that event as well. Most of my notes are just titled with the date.

The first half of the note is my morning “visioning” of the day. I usually write down what my main focus or two of the day is, a few things I’m grateful for in my life, and a reminder to myself of any new habits I’m trying to build so that I keep them front and center. I do this on paper and take a picture of it into Evernote, for the reasons described above on notes for classes.

I do the same thing in the evening. I take out a sheet of paper, look at my morning notes from Evernote, and then reflect on the successes and failures of the day. Did I do things well? If I did, what caused that success and how can I keep it? If I didn’t, what went wrong and how can I avoid it? I also usually list five to ten memorable events from the day.

Notes for Classes

Evernote is really good at storing class notes or notes from a book if you’re trying to learn about a topic or taking a class of some kind.

Having said that, I am also a huge believer of taking notes by hand for classes and for actually integrating information. If I’m trying to learn something from a book or an online lecture, I use exclusively handwritten notes. I find that I retain and process that information far better if I do it by hand. This is a concept that has a lot of scientific evidence to support it; in other words, it’s a practice you may want to consider yourself for note taking. Just leave the electronics closed, listen and/or read, and take notes with a pen or pencil right onto the paper.

So what does this have to do with Evernote? It’s where I actually store all of those notes! Whenever I fill up a page with notes, I take a photo of that page with my phone within Evernote. I add it to a notebook that’s centered around the book that I’m studying or the class I’m taking as its own note.

The magical part is that Evernote makes the text in that page of notes searchable. If I’m looking for instances where a particular term shows up in my notes, I can just search that notebook and, like magic, all of the places where I wrote that term in my notes are returned to me as results. Along with tagging those pages of notes, I can pretty much zip through my notes on any topic.

As a result, Evernote now contains more than a thousand pages of my handwritten notes that I’ve taken over the years from online classes, books, and other things. I just took a picture of each page of notes straight into Evernote, gave it an appropriate title with some appropriate tags, and now I can find and search all of them and I don’t have to retain the physical notebook.

How do I organize them? As I said, I usually start a notebook – a collection of individual notes within Evernote – for each class that I take and each book that I’m studying in depth. So, for example, I have a notebook called “Yale Pl Sc 114 – Introduction to Political Philosophy,” which contains all of the lecture notes I took as I went through the free Open Yale course Introduction to Political Philosophy. Each page of notes was named after the lecture title, so the first one is named “#1 – Introduction: What Is Political Philosophy? (1/6)” (because I have six pages of notes on that lecture. Within that note is just an image of that particular page from the notebook I was using.

To me, this is the absolute best way to store notes from your classes and from any books you’re studying in depth. It takes no physical space, you can see your original notes in full, you can search them with ease, and they’re available on practically any device.

(This is usually a task that I do independently of my general “Things” note, as are many of the specialized tasks that I mention here. “Things” is just a catch-all for items that I don’t really know what to do with immediately or want to tag later.)

Receipts

This is something that I’ve just started doing in the last few months, but I’m basically never returning to any other method of doing things. I use Evernote to take pictures of my receipts and then toss them in the trash afterwards.

This takes advantage of the text recognition feature that I discussed above so that I can quickly search my receipts for, say, “milk” or for the last four digits of my credit card number or for a particular store and pull them all up instantly. I find that this works insanely well along with You Need a Budget 4 for the purposes of digging through my receipts and figuring out where all of my spending went.

Pictures of Insurance Policies

This is as close to “personal information” as I keep in Evernote, but this is so useful and will be beyond useful in the case of a true emergency, so I go ahead with it.

I have a notebook in Evernote that stores recent images of our key insurance documents. I have pictures of our recent car insurance, homeowners insurance, life insurance policies, and health insurance card. This is a great backup to have in the case of a serious accident or a house burning down or a major crisis when I’m not able to find the documents. I know I can just turn to Evernote at those moments and the info I need is right there.

Miscellaneous Things

I use Evernote for so many things that I could honestly go on listing them all day long.

I have a long note full of books I want to read someday. I reference that list almost every time I go to the library. (This is in a “Misc. Lists” notebook.)

I have a long note full of movies I want to watch and TV shows I want to binge-watch at some point, though this list seems to grow and rarely has anything removed from it, as I just seem to spend less and less time watching TV and movies.

I have a notebook with literally hundreds of projects I’d love to work on someday. I’ll make a note where I’ll throw down all of my ideas and excitement related to a project, but often just doing that is enough for now. I’ll probably never return to 95% of these projects. If a project ever blows up into something I want to actively work on beyond just a quick brainstorm, it turns into its own notebook.

I use Evernote Web Clipper a lot. It’s a tool that’s integrated into my web browser which allows me to just click a button and save the text and images from that article into a note in Evernote. I give it a few tags and save it in an “Articles” notebook. This is great for searching down the road!

I take pictures of business cards when I receive them, along with a note on who this person is and why I would want to follow up with that person.

I could literally list minor uses like this all day, but I think the idea is clear: Evernote is just really, really useful and I’ve come to rely on it as something of a filing cabinet extension of my brain.

The “Freemium” Question

So, as I mentioned at the start, Evernote is free to use. The free version of Evernote allows you to upload 60 MB of text, images, and audio to your account at no cost. If that’s not enough space for you, they have enhanced accounts at various levels that add greatly to that monthly upload limit, allowing you gigabytes of monthly storage.

My philosophy with online tools that use a “freemium” model is a simple one. If a tool seems useful in concept, I start using the free version. Many, many tools stop right there; they’re not useful enough to me to replace other tools or they don’t create their own niche. They don’t become essential, in other words.

When a tool does become essential, two things happen. One, I usually have some significant need for the features of the “premium” account. With Evernote, I blow away that 60 MB of uploading each month. Two, I don’t want that product to ever go away because I’ve come to rely on it, which is absolutely true with Evernote.

So, I invest the money each year to pay for the premium version of Evernote and I don’t look back. It’s an essential tool for me.

What About You?

If you haven’t already tried it, I strongly encourage you to give Evernote a try with a free account. Sign up, put it on your phone and in a clear place on your computer, add the Evernote Web Clipper to your browser, and try using it for some of the things I mention above.

For some of you, it’ll click and you’ll start using it more and more. For others, it’ll become a forgotten tool, and that’s okay. Everyone organizes their lives differently, and I think Evernote just clicks with some people and doesn’t with others.

Good luck!

The post How I Use Evernote, My Most Essential Free Online Tool appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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10 Reasons to Toast to Boxed Wine (and Not Just for Its Affordability)

Its presence at a party doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

But despite its reputation, boxed wine is actually mad awesome — and not just because it’s so much cheaper than the bottled stuff. (But let’s be real: That doesn’t hurt.)

They might not look fancy, but boxes — or more accurately, the vacuum-packed bags inside them — are actually a great way to store wine. In fact, vintners around the world are starting to ditch the stigma and box their wine. Yes, even the (pretty) good stuff.

Listen, I’m not saying you’re going to find the finest Bordeaux or can’t-miss Champagne cuvee in cardboard. (In fact, the latter would be literally impossible.)

But if you’re a casual wine drinker, buying boxed to save money is a totally solid option. Here are 10 reasons your bias against boxed wine is actually all wrong.

1. It’s Cheaper, Obviously

It’s not the only reason to love boxed wine, but it’s one of the most important.

The value of boxed wine is pretty freaking enormous. Even the better ones hover around $20 a box.

And since a standard 3-liter box contains as much wine as four regular bottles, that breaks down to five bucks a bottle (or about a dollar a glass).

Which leads us to the second point:

2. You Get More Wine

Which is always better than less wine.

Yes, even if it’s Franzia… I think.

3. It’s Better for the Environment

According to the back of the box (and also the New York Times), the production of boxed wine generates about half the emissions per 750-milliliter serving — that is, the amount inside a standard bottle — of bottled wine.

The Times goes on to conclude that boxing, rather than bottling, the 97% of wines made to be drunk within a year “would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.”

As if you needed another reason to feel great while drinking wine, am I right?

4. It’ll Never be Bad When You Open It…

And unlike traditionally bottled wine, you’ll never open it to find it “corked” (that is, contaminated with the nasty, musty, wine-destroying compound TCA).

5. … and Once You Do, It’ll Stay Good for Weeks

If you’re a red wine drinker, you know the struggle: You’ve got three days on the counter, tops, before that delicious merlot turns to vinegar.

But thanks to its handy-dandy vacuum-sealed spigot, boxed wine has a longer shelf life after opening than its bottled counterparts. And I mean way longer. Up to six whole weeks, in fact.

(Not that leftover wine is usually a problem in my house.)

6. The Labels are Way Less Confusing

Overwhelmed in the wine aisle?

Understandable. You figure out your favorite varietal only to discover some bottles don’t list it. You hear California wine is the best but don’t know the difference between Monterey, Paso Robles and Sonoma.

With boxed wine, it’s pretty self-explanatory: There’s a brand, a varietal and little else. No need to puzzle over appellation names or vintages.

Bonus: You pretty much know exactly what to expect every single time, no matter when you buy it!

7. You Can Bring It to Glass-Free Zones

I will never forget the time I went to Bonnaroo and was forced to drink crappy light beer for four days.

Never again.

With boxed wine, music festivals, campsites, public pools and more become totally wine-friendly — and thus, obviously, much improved.

8. You Don’t Have to Struggle With a Bunch of Bottles

Talk about efficient: Bringing a box into the house is like toting four bottles with one hand — and looks far less suspect.

9. It’s Usually Pretty Easy to Drink

Boxed wine is made to be simple, widely paired and crowd-pleasing. You’re likely not going to find a big, complex or aggressively flavored wine in a box.

That said, it probably also won’t be the best wine ever… but if you’re not a gourmet, it’s unlikely to be straight-up offensive.

10. Nobody Has to Know

Just open that spigot, and let your boxed wine flow directly into that pretty glass decanter you never get to use.

Place your decanted wine on the table, and voila — fancier than any ol’ bottle could ever hope to be.

Cheers!

Your Turn: What’s your favorite boxed wine?

Jamie Cattanach is a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder and WSET-certified wino. 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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What to Do if You Win the Lottery: Five Steps to Take When You Hit the Jackpot

Over the course of a few hours, you’ve gone from regular middle-class schmuck to millionaire. How? Despite shark-attack odds, you purchased a winning lottery ticket worth millions of dollars.

Step one to not mucking this up is to sign the back of your lottery ticket, like now. If you should drop it or lose it without your name slapped on the back, it would be far too easy for someone else to claim your jackpot as their own.

What goes down next depends on you. With the right moves, your lottery win could boost your lifestyle across the board. But, with the wrong moves, your winnings could easily cause your life to fall apart.

That’s right: Winning millions of dollars overnight isn’t always the dream it’s made out to be. For every lottery happy ending, there’s at least one person who lets their newly-won millions destroy them.

Five Steps to Take When You Win the Lottery

If you don’t want to be a statistic, it’s wise to read up on the best ways to handle your lottery winnings before the unthinkable happens. That way, you’ll know exactly what to do if you actually win.

To learn the next best steps for any lottery winner, we reached out to several financial advisors to hear their advice. Here’s what they said:

Step 1: Keep your mouth closed while you hatch a plan.

While winning the lottery might make you want to scream from the rooftops, telling everyone of your good fortune is probably the last thing you should do.

“Keep the big win quiet and to yourself,” says financial advisor David G. Niggel of Key Wealth Partners in Lancaster, Pa. “The news will spread quickly and you’ll be attacked by some unscrupulous characters asking for a handout.”

Trust us, you don’t want to hear from all 367 of your extended family members while mapping out your lottery winnings. By keeping the story secret, you can have some time to think.

Furthermore, staying mum on the topic will give you time to bring in professional help.

Step 2: Hire a team of professionals.

Speaking of professional help, you need some… and quick. Before you cash in your lottery winnings or tell anyone outside of your immediate family, you need to make sure you’ve got your ducks in a row.

But, who should you hire? According to Niggel, your team should include a “fee-only financial advisor to handle investments and planning” for starters.

Notice he suggests a fee-only advisor. Where some financial advisors earn huge commissions from selling certain investment products, fee-only advisors are paid a flat fee for their advice and are obligated to act in your best interest, not their own. Since you have millions of dollars at stake here, the last thing you need is a financial advisor who earns a percentage of what they sell.

Other professionals you need include a CPA to handle your taxes, and a lawyer to set up family trusts and help you avoid scams, notes Niggel. Make sure you’re hiring individuals who have clear-cut fee schedules that show exactly how much you’ll pay.

• Related: The Ultimate Guide to Selecting a Financial Planner

Step 3: Get ready to pay up.

While winning the lottery can mean pocketing millions in cash, it also means paying out… you guessed it, millions in cash. Not only will you lose more than half of your winnings if you take the cash up front — the advertised jackpot is usually based on the long-term payout schedule — but you’ll need to pay taxes, too.

Let’s say you win a cool $60 million playing Powerball. If you take the full $60 million over 30 years, you’d 30 average annual payments of around $2,000,000. Out of that money, however, you’d have to pay federal and state income taxes. With most of that money falling in the top tax bracket of 39.6%, you’d owe almost $800,000 in federal taxes alone every year.

If you chose to take a lump sum up front, on the other hand, your $60 million jackpot would immediately fizzle to $35.9 million. That year, you would owe more than $15 million in federal taxes alone.

State taxes obviously vary based on where you live, so you’ll need to figure out that part quickly. While winning the lottery can be a load of fun, it can also be a case of “mo’ money, mo’ problems.” The more you make each year, the more money you’ll need to pay out.

Step 4: Have some fun, but also save up for a rainy day.

When you win millions of dollars, it can be tempting to splash some cash around right away. If you want a new Cadillac Escalade, for example, you can just go buy one. Want a mansion? You can afford that, too. Want to take your kids to Disney World? Load the kids in the van and you’re off.

While all of this is great, you’ll want to be smart with your money, too. And this is where your team of professionals will come in handy. They may tell you some of what you want to hear, but it’s their job to help you stay rich, remember?

While the advice you get from your financial advisor may vary, Seattle-based financial advisor Josh Brein says the best thing you can do is diversify your investments.

In other words, don’t bet the farm on anything – no matter what anyone says.

“The best way to protect yourself against losing that money as fast as you made it is to not put it all in the same spot,” says Brein. “You may be tempted to go heavy on real estate or buy a ton of company stock from just one company because you think it’s a smart investment. However, you should resist the urge to risk too much of that money at one time and in one place.”

As Niggel notes, you should also try to avoid rushing into any big financial decisions. While spending and investing can be exciting – especially at first – you don’t want your enthusiasm to cloud your judgment.

“Take some time to let the winning sink in before you quit your job or go out and make some large purchases, such as the gated mansion or luxury vehicles.” Says Niggel. “Be patient and cautious and listen to your gut about decisions that need to made.”

Step 5: Watch out for pitfalls and predators.

While winning the lottery may seem like a dream come true from a distance, the reality of winning doesn’t always pan out the way you think. A quick google search of “curse of the lottery” will turn up countless stories of lottery winners whose lives fell apart, for example. Try as they might, many people just cannot handle having a large sum of money at their disposal.

Take Jack Whittaker of West Virginia, for example. It was 2002 when Whittaker won the $315 million Powerball jackpot on Christmas day. As ABC news notes, Whittaker’s initial lottery plans were golden; he planned to build churches in the area and give back to his community, all while creating the perfect life for his family.

Within a few years though, the money had reshaped his life in ways he never wanted. Constantly inundated with requests for cash, Whittaker was afraid and alone. His granddaughter, who had once been the light of his life, was found dead behind a dumpster – the victim of both drugs and crime. Years later, Whittaker wishes he would have ripped up the lottery ticket the day he won.

“More than 70% of people who win the lottery end up being broke within a few years,” says wealth advisor Kirk Chisholm of Innovative Advisory Group, adding that professional athletes who suddenly earn millions have a similar failure rate.

“The problem is human psychology,” says Chisholm. “Most people are not disciplined with their money. They spend what they have and save the rest. Ideally, they should save first and spend the rest. Saving should always come first, otherwise you will rarely have enough to save at the end of the year.”

This is yet another reason you should keep quiet about your winnings and hire a team of professionals first. With professional help on your side, you can set yourself up for life while setting limits on the “fun money” you can spend.

Final Thoughts

If winning the lottery is one of your goals this year, it’s smart to prepare your finances now. By learning to live with a budget, paying off debt, and investing regularly, you can build positive money habits that can carry over to your post-lottery lifestyle.

And even if you don’t win the lottery, making smart moves with the money you do have will still leave you better off. While a lottery win can help you become rich, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll stay rich. To build real wealth, you need to learn to hold onto the money you have.

Holly Johnson is an award-winning personal finance writer and the author of Zero Down Your Debt. Johnson shares her obsession with frugality, budgeting, and travel at ClubThrifty.com.

Related:

• Why the Lottery Isn’t the Answer to Your Problems
• Personal Finance and Magical Thinking
• 60 Simple Rules of Personal Finance
• The ‘Billion-Dollar Lottery’ and You

What would you do if you won the lottery? Would you add any tips to this list?

The post What to Do if You Win the Lottery: Five Steps to Take When You Hit the Jackpot appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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