Tax season is a stressful time. Even if you’re ahead of the game or adept at filing, you’re likely surrounded by other adults who aren’t as speedy or savvy. For them, it’s a good thing that those who are well-organized, mathematically inclined, and meticulous become tax preparers. For individuals or small businesses, these people are […]
The post How to Become a Tax Preparer at Home appeared first on The Work at Home Woman.
And we’re leery of the fraud protection recommended by the companies that leaked our information in the first place.
Hard stare, Equifax.
The easiest way to make sure no one steals your identity is to freeze your credit.
A credit freeze restricts access to your credit file so fraudsters (and you) cannot open new credit accounts. To “thaw” your account, you’ll need a randomly generated pin provided to you by the reporting bureau. Historically, a credit freeze has cost anywhere from $3-$10, depending on where you live.
But here’s the good news: Beginning Sept. 21, you’ll be able to freeze and unfreeze your credit for free, as well as receive yearlong fraud reports from all three credit bureaus.
Experian, Equifax and TransUnion will all create new websites specifically for you to freeze your credit and request fraud alerts.
Fraud alerts require any business that runs your credit for something like a credit card or a car loan to notify you before the account can be opened. These have always been free, but you could previously only set them up for 90 days at a time. Now, any alerts initiated after Sept. 21 will last a whole year.
This is all thanks to a federal law passed in May after the Equifax breach. Our identities may be at risk, but on the bright side, we at least get this one long-awaited change to show for it.
When the websites for the three credit reporting bureaus are up, you’ll be able to find the links at IdentityTheft.gov.
Jen Smith is a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder. She gives money saving and debt payoff tips on Instagram at @savingwithspunk.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
Last week, I published an article entitled How to Find – and Get the Most Value Out of – Your Local Discount Grocer that tackles head-on one of the tougher frugality challenges we all face: how does a person find the cheapest grocery store in their area and, once they do, how do they really get the most value out of it?
This article generated far more feedback than I expected, with people asking for advice in situations that went beyond the boundaries of the article. One of the best questions was a simple one: how does this advice translate to places where there just aren’t many stores, period? In other words, how does a person keep their food spending low in a food desert? To clarify, a “food desert” is simply the term for any area in which there is little or no access to nutritious low cost food, and “food desert” is the term I will use for such a place going forward.
Food deserts are most commonly found in low income areas in cities (where the only grocery retailers tend to be high-priced convenience stores) and in rural areas distant from large cities (where there are often no grocers at all). In both cases, it’s pretty tough for a grocer to earn a good profit, so there tends to be a small number of stores and those that do take root often charge high prices and offer a pretty poor selection of highly processed foods that can stay on the shelf for a long time.
What can a person do in these situations? As is always the case, the reasons that people find themselves stranded in a food desert vary widely. They might simply live in a small town where there isn’t a real grocery store for many, many miles. They might live in a low income urban area and not have a car available to get to other areas with more grocery selection. In both cases, they might be struggling with the financial resources necessary to even buy many groceries.
The solutions in this article won’t work in all food deserts. Some work quite well in rural food deserts but won’t work in urban ones; some will work well in urban food deserts, but won’t work in rural ones. Some will work in both, depending on the exact situation.
Also, my focus is on practical solutions that will help people in food deserts right away, rather than social solutions to the overall food desert problem. While it would be wonderful for food deserts to no longer exist for anyone, chasing that dream doesn’t help the hungry family in a food desert right now. I’m interested in helping that family put food on the table sooner rather than later.
Many of these strategies came from my own childhood, where we lived a healthy distance from the nearest grocery store. The nearest grocer that I can identify using Google Maps was about nine miles away from our house and required use of a toll bridge to get there; there were two other very small and rather pricy grocers a little further away than that in a different direction that didn’t require toll. While that wasn’t a complete food desert, it pales compared to having a discount grocer within easy walking distance of my home as I have today. In other words, I am personally more familiar with strategies in “rural” food deserts rather than “urban” ones, though most of these strategies will work in both situations.
Here are some strategies to employ if you find yourself living in a food desert.
Whether you simply have to drive to another part of the city to get discount groceries or you have to drive 50 miles tot eh nearest city of any real size to do so, one way to make that trip much more cost effective is to carpool with others in that situation. Make that trip with one or two other people who also have to buy groceries and you halve the cost of transportation for each of you.
It’s easy. If you don’t have a car, ask someone who might drive out of the area for groceries if you could carpool with them for $5 or $10 toward the price of gas. If you both have cars, suggest alternating trips to keep the price low. The carpool driver simply picks up the other person (or people) on the trip and then goes to wherever the store is, then both people shop for whatever groceries they need, then the driver drops off the passenger and his/her groceries.
This also effectively adds a social element to your grocery trips. I remember when my great grandmother, who lived in a bit of a food desert herself, would look forward to going to the grocery store with her oldest son, who would come and pick her up and they would go to the store together, both of them buying their food for the week.
My basic strategy for cost-effective grocery shopping is as follows:
Step 1: Get a Flyer
Step 2: Find Sales on Fresh Ingredients
Step 3: Do Some Recipe Research
Step 4: Create a Week-Long Meal Plan
Step 5: Make a Shopping List from the Meal Plan
Step 6: Go Grocery Shopping – And Stick to Your List
This list still applies in a food desert, except that your planning might be longer than a week – you may even be planning two or three weeks of meals, depending on the availability of a ride to the grocery store (as noted in the above section). You also can’t rely on easy availability of staples.
This means that you need to be particularly careful when it comes to meal planning. You need to plan out at least some meals that don’t rely on fresh produce and ensure that you are either buying or already have every single ingredient on hand for all of those meals. This takes some time.
A grocery list in this situation is absolutely essential, too. Once you’ve assembled that long meal plan and figured out, meal by meal, what items you have on hand and which ones you need, you simply must have a big list of all of those necessary items. In areas where there are a lot of stores, a grocery list is simply a useful tool to avoid a redundant trip and to keep you focused on what you have to buy. In a food desert, a grocery list does those things, but since a grocery store isn’t convenient, it’s probably the difference between actually being able to make some meals or not.
If you live in a food desert, every trip to a discount grocer in another area should involve a detailed meal plan for the next week (or few weeks) as well as a grocery list that was carefully checked to ensure that nothing’s missing. This ensures that you’re actually able to carry out that meal plan without the convenience of a grocery store.
One of the most effective strategies to live by in a food desert is to have an abundance of common shelf-stable foods on hand, particularly if you live in rural areas with harsh winters. Don’t shy away from giant bags of dried rice or dried beans, or entire boxes of things like tomato sauce.
Besides the fact that having huge quantities means that you’re unlikely to run out between grocery store visits, the advantage of buying such things in huge quantities is that such bulk buys are usually pretty cheap. If you have to drive 50 miles to the nearest city of any size and that city has a warehouse club (Costco or Sam’s Club or BJ’s), you can probably save quite a bit of money by simply buying many of your nonperishable items there in bulk. Be aware that the first time you do this, you may wish to have a large vehicle available as you’re stocking up on bulky things like toilet paper and large sacks of rice – that can take up a lot of space.
Don’t rely solely on a warehouse club, however; while they’re typically quite good on prices, they rarely beat the loss leaders at other stores. So, when you’re preparing a meal plan and grocery list, use the flyers from the discount grocers in the area you are heading to and focus on buying those items and other items you don’t need in large quantity at the discount grocers, then buy many of your remaining bulk items at the warehouse club.
What about fresh foods? It can be hard to find fresh foods in food deserts, so the obvious solution is to buy fresh foods in decent quantity when you can find them during your trips out of the food desert.
The only problem is that fresh foods can go bad quite easily. That’s why preservation techniques are really important to learn if you’re in a food desert.
Whenever you bring home a healthy quantity of a particular type of fresh produce or fresh meat, you should be asking yourself what you can do to preserve the extras for the future. With many items, you can simply freeze them with almost no additional effort. I consider a deep freezer to be a vital purchase for people in food deserts, as you can simply fill up freezers with meat items and many vegetable items with minimal effort.
Another good option is canning. Canning offers the advantage of long-term storage of vegetables, fruits, and even meats without the necessity of refrigeration or freezing. It can be a bit time consuming; one great strategy for canning is to simply have a “canning day” where you get out all of the equipment you need for many canning batches and fill up your pantry all at once. This was a pretty common activity at my house growing up; we would have a “canning day” every month or so when the garden produce was coming in where we would simply can every bit of unused produce we could get from the garden – whole tomatoes, tomato sauce and juice, green beans, pepper slices, and so on. We had a “pantry” in our basement that was nothing but canned vegetables in glass jars.
If you have a patch of ground available to you, take advantage of that patch to start a vegetable garden, which will provide produce for you throughout the late spring, summer, and into fall.
During periods of overabundance of produce, you can easily use the techniques above to preserve the extras for the late fall, winter, and early spring when your garden isn’t producing.
Yes, a garden takes some work. You have to turn over the soil and plant things in the spring. You have to maintain the garden with weeding and fertilization. You have to harvest regularly throughout the harvest season, and you’ll probably have to deal with sudden floods of food.
Still, a garden is well worth it, particularly in a food desert. It provides a source of food that produces without you even have to leave your property. Fresh tomatoes, fresh beans, fresh cauliflower and broccoli, fresh peppers, fresh lettuce… all of it is easily available and more if you take the time to grow a garden.
Another strategy for providing your own food is to raise chickens or, if you’re ambitious, other livestock.
Raising chickens is relatively easy, generally only requiring a small coop and a small fenced-in area for the chickens to wander. Within the coop, the hens will lay eggs regularly, which you can harvest daily for a steady and practically free supply of eggs. The chickens themselves can be harvested for their meat if so desired. This can be done in almost any yard; I’ve seen many chicken coops in rural food deserts as well as a few in urban food deserts. A friend of mine in an area of Des Moines with few grocery stores nearby had a neighbor that had a chicken coop in his back yard, right in the middle of the city.
Other livestock can be raised as well, but they generally require more work and space. A better approach might be to work with a local farmer that provides a co-op service, whereas you pay for most of the expenses of a single farm animal along with an additional fee for the farmer’s effort and in exchange you receive the meat from that animal. This is often an option in rural food deserts, but is largely unavailable in urban food desert settings.
This final strategy is a very important one. Cultivating your own “food network” when you live in a a food desert is an absolutely essential tool.
A “food network” is a really straightforward idea. It’s simply a collection of neighbors and friends that live in your immediate area that you can rely on for food items as needed, just as they can rely on you for food items as needed.
With someone in your food network, depending on your exact relationship, you can easily ask them for staple foods that you might need to make it through your meal plan for the week, and they’d be able to do the same for you if needed. You might swap excess produce with them, or swap canned goods with them. You might even plan to have a regular dinner together – perhaps each family prepares dinner for both families one night out of the week.
In essence, your “food network” becomes your protection against food shortfalls so that you don’t have to skip meals and you also don’t have to rely on highly expensive local grocery stores or convenience stores if you’re in a pinch. Instead, you can rely on your good relationship with your neighbor.
How can you start this kind of relationship? A good way to start is by simply giving or swapping some of your excess food. If you find yourself with an abundance of produce, give it to a neighbor. You’ll find that if you do so and they find it useful, they’re much more likely to share food with you later on if you are in need.
Another good way to start is to simply ask for a small food item – a cup of rice or something like that – when you need it. Then, promise to help them out in a similar pinch and when they come knocking, do so. You’ll find that, as you help each other out with such small moves, the relationship builds into a certain level of trust, and that kind of neighborly trust is incredibly valuable.
The easiest way to start building a relationship of trust is extending your own trust a little. Don’t be afraid to give first. If you find out later that the person doesn’t reciprocate, it’s not a big deal. It’s just a small loss. If you find out later, however, that the trust is reciprocated, then you’re building the foundation of a great relationship, one that’s going to save you a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of little worries over the years.
Obviously, there is no perfect solution for living in a food desert. Not having easy access to reasonably priced groceries is a challenge for anyone, and there is no perfect solution to the problem.
Rather, the best approach for dealing with the problem is using several different strategies at once. Don’t just rely on carpooling; also plant a garden. Don’t just rely on meal planning; also build a food network. Don’t just rely on buying in bulk; also spend time preserving food.
Do lots of things. Do all of the strategies that will work in your area.
“But won’t this take a lot of time?” Sure, but living in a food desert means that no matter what you do, food acquisition is going to take extra time and extra cost. By applying your time in a smart fashion, you can save quite a bit of money along the way.
Good luck!
The post Keeping Food Spending Low When You Live in a Food Desert appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
“Looking at a ton of different houses was fun and allowed me to explore parts of my city that I had never seen before,” said Rebbecchi, a marketing coordinator who lives in Tampa. “The most stressful part — definitely — was gathering all the necessary documentation for the mortgage.”
Buying your first home is intimidating. It’s the biggest purchase of your life so far, and you get bombarded with strange new concepts like “escrow” and “pre-qualification” and “closing costs.”
Adding to the pressure, skyrocketing home prices are making it harder than ever for first-time homebuyers like you to save enough for that crucial down payment. That puts you at a disadvantage when you’re competing with older homeowners who’ve built up tens of thousands of dollars in equity.
Hey, you’re not alone. First-time buyers make up roughly a third of all homebuyers, according to the National Association of Realtors. We’ll walk you through it.
Before you start shopping, a few things to consider…
You’re better off renting if:
You’re better off buying if:
Ready to buy your own place? You’ve got this. Educate yourself. If you do a little research and ask for advice, you can save yourself a ton of money and stress.
Here’s our step-by-step guide for first-time homebuyers:
The best time to start saving is now. Right now.
The good news is, as a first-time homebuyer, you won’t have to come up with a huge down payment of 20% of the home’s purchase price. Government loan programs for new buyers allow as little as 3% to 5% down.
But even a small down payment is a big chunk of change. For example, a “low” down payment of 5% on a typical $200,000 house is still a whopping $10,000. Start saving those pennies!
It’s best to stash your savings someplace where you’re not going to touch it. A quick and easy way to get started is with Stash, a popular microinvesting app.
Stash lets you start investing with as little as $5. You can set it up to automatically pull a certain amount of cash from your bank account every week or every month. It funnels your money into a set of simple investment portfolios reflecting your goals and interests.
Stash charges a $1 monthly fee for balances under $5,000. If you sign up through this link with the code PENNYH, you’ll get a $5 bonus — that’s like five months free.
Before starting your fabulous home-buying journey, check your credit score. The better your credit, the better your odds of getting a mortgage with favorable interest rates.
Clueless about your credit score? Credit Sesame is a free credit monitoring service that’ll keep track of it for you. It’ll offer you personalized tips and tools to manage your debt and raise your score. You can also look at your credit reports and dispute any errors that are hurting your credit score.
We know, we know. You want to go house-hunting! Why aren’t we going house-hunting yet? That’s the fun part! My God, this is torture.
Patience, young Jedi. Now it’s time to reach out to a mortgage lender. Don’t skip this part.
Here’s an easy way to do it: Just talk to the bank you’re already doing business with. It’ll set you up with a loan officer. Or you could contact a major mortgage lender like Quicken Loans, Wells Fargo or Bank of America. They work with a lot of first-time buyers, so they’ll know how to talk to you.
You could also hire an independent mortgage broker to shop around and find the mortgage that works best for you. This will save you time and hassles. But you’ll have to pay your broker about 1% of your loan amount. (That happens later, when you officially close the deal.)
You have two reasons for talking to a mortgage lender: Get pre-approved for a loan, and check out options for first-time homebuyers.
You can get pre-qualified for a mortgage. That’s an estimate of how much a bank might be willing to lend you, based on your income and debts.
It’s better to go a step further and get a pre-approval letter. That’s when a lender goes over your finances in depth, then outlines in writing how much it’s willing to lend you.
This way you’ll know what your price range is, and you can narrow down your search. And when you find the house you want, you’ll be ready to make a serious offer.
As a first-time homebuyer you may be eligible for various government loan programs. Ask your mortgage adviser about this. Here are some options:
With a credit score of 580 or more, you can qualify for an FHA loan with a down payment of 3.5% of the home’s purchase price, according to the FHA. If your score is lower than that — between 500 and 579 — you’ll have to put 10% down.
Don’t just look at houses at the top of your price range. Look lower, too.
Keep in mind that you’ll need to have enough money for:
(Your real estate agent typically gets paid by the home’s seller when the sale goes through.)
We’d recommend going with a fixed-rate mortgage instead of an adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM). With an ARM, you might have lower monthly payments at first, but they’ll get more expensive later. A bank that sells you an adjustable-rate mortgage is betting that interest rates are going to rise and make your payments go up.
If you want the smallest mortgage payment possible each month, get a customary 30-year mortgage. But if you can afford higher mortgage payments, think hard about getting a 15- or 20-year mortgage instead. You can get a lower interest rate that way, and you’ll pay off your house a lot sooner.
Talk to your real estate agent about the likely cost of property taxes and home insurance in your area.
This is crucial. Get an agent you’re comfortable with. Think of your agent as your guide through this whole process.
Your real estate agent will help you find homes that fit your needs and your price range. They’ll tour these homes with you. When you find a home you like, they’ll help you make an offer, and they’ll negotiate on your behalf. They’ll even guide you through the paperwork blizzard that follows.
Your agent will calm you down if you feel like you’re going to puke.
There are approximately eleventy bajillion real estate agents in the U.S., so how are you supposed to choose one? Ask for recommendations from friends, relatives and co-workers. A whole lot of them own homes, after all.
Finally, you get to the fun part! Woo-HOO!
Your real estate agent can find you plenty of homes for sale. Also, feel free to drive around your favorite neighborhoods, scanning the yards for “For Sale” signs.
There’s also this thing called the internet. Every year, sites like Zillow and Realtor.com are posting more and more information online about homes for sale. And first-time homebuyers are more likely to use the internet to find the home they’ll eventually purchase, according to the National Association of Realtors.
When you’re touring houses, keep your eyes open and ask a lot of questions: How old is the roof? What about the air conditioning system? Those are super expensive! Most American homes have shingle roofs that last 20 to 25 years and central AC units that last 15 to 20 years, according to most of the experts we’ve seen.
When first-time homebuyer Timothy Moore went house-hunting, he was wowed by homes with fresh paint and new laminate flooring. But his partner knew to look for what really indicated quality: solid construction, good insulation and windows, a newer or good-condition roof, and a new or well-maintained HVAC system.
If you look at a lot of houses, they tend to blend together in your mind. Snap photos as you tour homes. At each new location, take a photo of the house number so you’ll know which place was which later on.
Adria Rebbecchi, the Tampa marketing coordinator, found house-hunting to be exhausting: “After a while, it did get to be frustrating. I had a hard time remembering which houses I had already looked at, and why I did or didn’t like them.”
You’ve found the house you want? Make an offer on it. Don’t dawdle.
Your real estate agent can help you figure out how much to offer. The home’s sellers will either accept your offer, take someone else’s offer, or get back to you with a counter-offer.
If you and the seller agree on a price, you’ll hand over what’s called an “earnest money deposit,” showing that you’re committed to buying the house. It’s typically 1% to 2% of the purchase price.
A title company will hold the money in reserve, explains Zillow, in what’s called an “escrow account” while the house is taken off the market and you prepare to buy it. The deposit will eventually go toward your down payment and closing costs.
The next important step will be the home inspection.
Hire a licensed home inspector. (Your real estate agent can hook you up.)
This trained professional will examine your dream home, looking for any defects. The most common problems they find are things like faulty wiring or plumbing, poor ventilation, clogged gutters, mildewy basements or missing roof shingles, according to the National Association of Realtors.
If the inspector finds serious defects that weren’t disclosed, you can take back your offer or renegotiate. Sometimes the seller will agree to make repairs.
Tagging along for the home inspection is highly educational — you get to learn about everything that’s wrong with your new house! (Spoiler alert: There’s always something wrong. It’s usually not a deal-killer.)
Pay attention, because this knowledge will be super useful once you actually buy the place. You should also get a written report, so you’ll have a permanent record that you can refer back to.
At this point, you’re still not locked into one mortgage lender. Even if you’ve been pre-approved for a mortgage, you can still switch lenders in search of a better deal.
Getting quotes from multiple lenders puts you in a better bargaining position, says the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If you prefer one lender, but a different lender offers you a better rate, show the first lender the lower quote, and ask for a match.
“Essentially, you can start a mini bidding war,” first-time homebuyer Lana Axelrod says about her experience.
Finally, it’s time to close the deal. This is when you officially sign up for the mortgage, and the ownership of the property is transferred to you.
Closing mostly involves going through a thick stack of paperwork and signing your name over and over and over again. Professionals will walk you through the process. Your real estate agent will be there and probably a loan officer from whichever bank is giving you a mortgage. If you hired a mortgage broker, they’ll be there too.
No lie: Getting ready for closing is a lot of work.
Before her closing, Rebbecchi put in a lot of time gathering all the documentation she needed: “I have moved a LOT in the past few years and had a variety of jobs — so providing all my income tax returns, proof of employment and justifying previous addresses was exhausting.”
As a rule of thumb, closing costs run from 2% to 5% of your loan amount. This pays for things like having a property appraiser assess the value of the home, as Realtor.com explains, and having a title company do a title search to make sure nobody else has a claim on the property.
(You don’t have to find these people. Your lender will choose the appraiser. Your real estate agent will hook you up with a title company.)
Alternatively, you can negotiate with the seller to cover all or part of your closing costs. One common method is to have your closing costs added to the home’s purchase price, and ask the seller to pay them. That way, the seller nets the same amount of money, but your closing costs get included in your mortgage. Talk to your real estate agent about it.
Now that you own a home, you’ll likely need to insure it.
It’s mandatory if you have a mortgage — when you borrow money from a bank to buy a house, it’ll require you to insure that asset. In fact, your insurance premiums will be included in your monthly mortgage payments.
Homeowners insurance covers the cost of repairing or rebuilding your home if it gets damaged by fire or the kind of natural disaster insurers call “acts of God” — earthquakes, lightning, etc. It typically doesn’t cover damage from flooding or hurricane winds, so you may need to purchase separate insurance policies for those, depending on where you live.
To find affordable insurance, shop around.
Start by getting a free quote. We recommend the online insurance company Lemonade, where homeowners insurance starts at $25 a month. Instead of profiting extra when it doesn’t have to pay out claims, the company keeps a set 20% of your premium for itself, and 80% goes into a pool for paying claims and charity.
Lemonade offers homeowners insurance in New York, California, Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Arizona, Rhode Island, Georgia and the District of Columbia, and it’s expanding to other states.
If your down payment was less than 20% of your home’s value, you’ll be charged an additional monthly fee: private mortgage insurance (PMI). It protects the lender if you stop making payments.
Once you’ve made enough mortgage payments to reach 20% equity in your home, you can cancel your PMI. You might have to keep after your mortgage lender to actually stop charging you for PMI.
After it’s all said and done, bask in the glory of home ownership.
Follow the example of Rebbecchi, who put a lot of work, strategy and shoe leather into finding just the right house. Even though home ownership has been a bit more work than she bargained for, she’s still glad she made the move.
“I love my house,” she said. “It’s small and quaint and has a great vibe.”
Mike Brassfield (mike@thepennyhoarder.com) is a senior writer at The Penny Hoarder. He has bought two houses in his life, and he hopes that’ll be it.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
The entire tour was self-guided, and we managed to see much of the countries on a strict budget. But before we converted our dollars to euros and pounds, we made a few sound investments back home that made traveling much easier, and more comfortable.
These are the smartest investments to make before an extended trip abroad.
When you’re exploring a new country, your smartphone becomes a crucial resource. We used our smartphones for navigation (you can download offline maps to Google Maps to save on the cost of a navigation system in your rental), to browse reviews of restaurants and pubs when we found Wi-Fi and to check in on our friends, family and pets back home.
To ensure we never lost power, we purchased a portable charger (also called a power bank). This awesome tech is small and lightweight yet can offer multiple charges throughout the day. Whenever we had downtime – while driving, in a hostel, even sometimes at a pub – we would charge our phones. This Anker-brand model is relatively cheap and offers nearly four charges, depending on your phone model.
Most nights, my friend and I stayed in hostels (this is the most affordable way to see major European cities), which meant our beds were frequently far away from outlets. Even in some of the bed-and-breakfasts we stayed at, the outlets were few and far between. Having 10-foot charging cables made the distance manageable. This five-pack included one 10-foot charger and did the trick during my time abroad.
Total Cost: $45.98
Your phone charger, and other electronics, will be useless unless you pack the correct adapter. Research the countries you’re visiting to determine which kinds of adapters you’ll need. You can also purchase universal adapters that should work in all countries.
Luckily, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland all use the same type of outlet, so I was able to purchase a single cheap adapter.
Total Cost: $12.89
Before flying to Europe, my longest flight was a four-hour journey to Mexico. It was in the morning, and I was too excited to sleep. My flight from Columbus, Ohio, to Dublin, Ireland, however, was six hours and overnight. I successfully slept a few hours of the flight thanks to the high-quality neck pillow that I purchased.
Even more fortunate? My neck pillow included a sleep mask that blocked out all light. While this was nice on the flight (especially since we flew into the future, where it was bright out), I found it even more useful in hostels – for when roommates kept the lights on past bedtime or showed up a little inebriated in the middle of the night stumbling to bed with their flashlights. (Again, I highly recommend hostels for affordable lodging, but they do come with their downsides.)
Total cost: $19.95
We had roommates in most of the hostel dorms we stayed in, so it was important to lock our bags up in the hostel-provided lockers. These lockers were able to fit my very large duffel bag, but they did not come with locks.
I suggest purchasing two TSA-approved locks — one to use on your locker back in your room, and a second to put on your backpack when walking through the city. In most major cities, you need to protect yourself against pickpockets. I found the lock on my bag to be an extra layer of comfort, especially if I had one too many Guinnesses at the pub.
Total Cost: $11.99
Much of our trip included hiking, especially in the Scottish Highlands, but even our days in big cities involved a lot more walking than you’d do on the average day. If you don’t already own a comfortable pair of walking shoes (or, ideally, hiking shoes), invest in a nice pair. If staying in a hostel, you should also bring a pair of flip-flops for the communal shower; you can purchase a pair for as cheap as $1 if you head to Old Navy on the right day.
Because I am a regular hiker at home, and own an embarrassing amount of flip-flops, I decided to invest in waterproofer for my shoes. The waterproofer is a simple spray that puts a protective layer on your shoes to keep the water out, though you will need to reapply it throughout your trip. Surprisingly, it only rained a few times during our trip, but on those wet days, the waterproofing spray was a lifesaver.
Total Cost: $8.00
Staying organized when living out of a bag for three weeks can be challenging. Packing cubes make the task much more manageable. These are pouches of different sizes that allow you to organize your clothes and keep them separated in your bag.
I used a cube for casual shirts, sweatshirts and shorts (roll your clothes to save on space and prevent wrinkles); a cube for pants and dress shirts; a cube for undergarments and a cube for dirty laundry. This made finding clothes (even in the dark) and fitting them into my bag convenient and simple.
Total Cost: $25.98
If you intend to stay in a hostel, keep in mind that most do not provide towels (or only do so at a cost). That means you will need to bring your own towel — and it needs to be fast-drying, so you can pack it up when you leave. I showered at night, toweled off with a fast-drying microfiber towel that I hung from my bed and packed it in the morning before hitting the road. It was dry every time.
Total Cost: $14.99
I didn’t get everything right when purchasing supplies before my trip. Here are a couple things I wish I wouldn’t have spent the money on.
Multiple friends told me that I would regret taking my rolling luggage to Europe, because it would be a pain to lug it most places. However, the duffel bag I bought instead mostly sat in the trunk of our rental car or in a locker at the hostel – meaning I purchased this extra bag for no reason.
I can see the merit of a hiking backpack or a duffel bag on wheels – I did have to carry the 45-pound duffel about a mile through Dublin due to a navigation error, and oh, how I wish it had wheels! – but if you already own a piece of luggage that can fit your belongings, you probably don’t need to invest in a new bag specifically for your trip abroad.
You should pack a small backpack to take with you on daytime excursions – whether hiking, walking through the city or exploring an historic site. This will allow you to carry along your essentials while leaving most belongings safely behind.
Call me old-fashioned (most people do), but I was rather proud of the road atlases I purchased for my trip abroad. I highlighted the exact routes we would take as we circled each country and packed them away in my backpack before our flight.
And then I never opened them again.
Instead, we relied on Google Maps’ offline mode. If, by some strange circumstance, our phones had died (which shouldn’t have been an issue with that portable charger), the roads were marked well enough that we could have made our way into town to purchase a map as a last resort.
If foreign travel is on your horizon, invest now in quality supplies. You will typically pay a much higher price at your destination for anything you wind up needing (my friend dropped £40 on a scarf on a cold day in Edinburgh). Your investments will pay off in the long run — and make your trip much more worry-free and enjoyable.
Timothy Moore is an editor and freelance writer living in Germantown, Ohio, with his partner and their two dogs. He has traveled to lots of cool places, including Mexico, Scotland, Ireland and all over the US, but his favorite vacation is, and will always be, to Cedar Point in his home state.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
As tariff tiffs ratchet up between the United States and its key trading partners, especially China, economists are warning of the potential for a full-blown trade war and global economic crisis — and everyone from American manufacturers to farmers are increasingly on edge about what the future holds. But consumers ought to worry, too.
President Trump announced Monday he would press ahead with tariffs on another $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, on top of $50 billion already taxed earlier this year — meaning nearly half of all goods imported from China will be subject to trade duties. This new wave of tariffs will start at 10 percent on Sept. 24, before climbing to 25 percent at year’s end. Experts expect China will take retaliatory action on American exports, though Trump threatened to slap tariffs on another $267 billion in Chinese goods in response.
What does this escalation mean for you? By many accounts, a heightened trade war would not only increase costs for U.S. businesses, it would also hurt the average American consumer by way of increased prices and even jobs losses.
A trade war would impact Americans in a number of ways. Perhaps the most obvious is that U.S. tariffs on goods from other countries increase the prices of products we import from that country.
But those aren’t the only price hikes you can expect. “There’s also an incentive for domestic producers to raise their prices to a level just under the adjusted tariff amount,” explained Mark Harvey, director of graduate programs at University of Saint Mary, where he teaches international political economy and global management. “So, costs of goods tend to increase whether they’re domestic or foreign made.”
In addition, anything in the supply chain that’s hit with a tariff will result in prices being nudged upward. “So, if we put tariffs on steel or aluminum, any product with steel or aluminum increases in cost,” continued Harvey.
One reason countries raise tariffs on imports is to make goods produced at home more price-competitive with those made elsewhere, to try and boost domestic manufacturing and in turn create more manufacturing jobs.
But even if the tariffs are ultimately successful, resulting in the relocation of production away from an overseas facility where labor is cheap and back to the United States, the cost of production will increase and still hit consumers hard.
“There’s a reason companies relocated — to save money by taking advantage of cheaper resources, labor, or to tighten up a supply chain,” Harvey said. “If tariffs increase the costs so substantially that these businesses permanently come home, it more permanently raises the costs of production.”
Ryan McMunn, CEO of U.S.-based Tricam Industries, has been watching the heated trade war rhetoric with growing concern. McMunn, who as president of the company’s China operations helped grow Tricam into one of the largest manufacturers of ladders in this country, suggests consumers should be worried as well.
“The trade war will affect manufacturers of almost every product imaginable and, in the end, the American consumer,” said McMunn. “Manufacturers already run on razor thin margins. They cannot possibly absorb the tariffs, nor can the retailers. So, unfortunately, the cost increase will most likely be passed on to the American public.”
To be clear, however, it’s not just consumers and the prices of consumer goods that will feel the pinch. McMunn says that, in the end, a trade war will result in lower sales for businesses — including his own, when the costs of ladders and garden carts go up. The average American consumer is not necessarily going to be able to afford the higher prices.
And already, American farmers are paying the price, said McMunn. China has retaliated with tariffs of its own on some U.S. agricultural exports such as soybeans, which has hurt farmers from Colorado to Nebraska to Idaho and prompted President Trump to issue $12 billion in emergency aid to farmers hurt by the tariffs.
“It’s making it harder for our farmers to sell in China. They are basically shutting off imports of soybeans in China, which definitely did not help the American farmer,” McMunn said.
Not all economists and political experts are critical of Trump’s expanding tariffs. Some believe the president’s tough stance, after years of the U.S. liberalizing trade far more than our partners, is the correct approach.
“Raising tariffs is a tool that the United States is using to get parties to the table, and to pressure them using this leverage to agree to better terms for the U.S.,” said Juscelino Colares, professor of business law and political science at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, who is largely supportive of the president’s efforts.
“The reason the U.S. needed to do this is because our tariffs were much closer to zero then those of our trading partners,” Colares said. “We had very little to give and, after numerous trade deals and two-and-a-half decades of WTO and NAFTA, our counter-parties were not reducing tariffs and other barriers while we kept a very open market and continued liberalizing.”
Like others, Colares believes the tariffs may lead to increased prices on certain goods in the short term. But if Trump’s effort to create a more level playing field is ultimately successful, Colares expects the tariffs will no longer be necessary.
“Once we reach deals and get other countries to reduce their tariffs, then we will stop using these extra tariffs as inducers to negotiation, and we go to a new normal with lower barriers for our exports,” Colares explained.
In July, the Trump administration released a more than 200-page document detailing hundreds of Chinese goods that would be subject to 10 percent tariffs — now set to take effect next week and increase to 25 percent by the end of 2018. McMunn received an email from the government with the document and was shocked. “It was unbelievable the number of products and the specificity it goes into. It’s surreal,” he recalled.
The exhaustive document covers everything from fish imports to printer ink to shampoo. Also on the list are dozens of rubber-based products, from bike tires to transmission belts, plus handbags, luggage, leather, skis, and gloves ranging from baseball mitts to wool mittens — all of which are just a tiny sample of the thousands of items targeted (though roughly 300 items, including high chairs and bike helmets, have been removed).
Earlier Trump administration tariffs imposed on steel, aluminum, and Canadian lumber have already sent construction costs soaring; the tariffs on lumber alone can add close to $10,000 to the cost of a new home. The new tariffs on Chinese goods add to that list dozens of construction materials, from wood products to plaster to stones used in homebuilding and landscaping, such as granite, slate, sandstone, and marble. And the price of laundry equipment leaped nearly 20% in the months after president Trump first put tariffs on imported washers.
There’s no easy or simple way to avoid the impacts of a trade war. At most, consumers can be more selective about the products they buy and perhaps try to avoid those coming from countries impacted by tariffs.
“The latest round of tariffs are aimed at China, so one way to avoid higher priced goods would be buy items sourced from countries other than China,” said David Spooner, partner in the corporate department and co-chair of the international trade practice group at the Washington, D.C., office of Barnes & Thornburg.
Spooner, who represents governments, trade associations, and corporate clients on international trade matters, said that while it may be beyond the ability of the average consumer, it’s possible to look for substitutes for certain types of products. “For instance, certain types of rubber raincoats are affected by the tariffs, but only certain types,” he said.
Another option for consumers hoping to avoid the impact of a trade war is to shop now for any items on that mega-list that you may need — before the tariffs start to take effect. Or set aside money to deal with the possibility of inflation; interest rates are rising, at least, with most online savings accounts now yielding close to 2% or better.
McMunn also suggests writing to political representatives in Washington, D.C., to express concern about the tariffs.
“What we’re doing as a business is sending letters to our congressmen and senators. We have a warehouse in 12 states and we’re emailing our representatives in all of them,” said McMunn. “Our customers are doing the exact same thing, writing their congressmen and senators. Individual citizens could do that as well – pick up a pen and paper, that makes a bigger impact then just sending an email.”
Few experts can predict where this escalating trade war is ultimately headed and when, or how, it will end. For his part, Harvey suggests nothing good is likely to come of tariffs, particularly for the average American worker and consumer.
“I doubt these tariffs will cause many jobs to return to the U.S. that will benefit blue-collar workers,” Harvey said. “Profits, on balance, will decline. Unemployment will likely increase. The economy will slow down. Prices will probably go up. None of this will be particularly good for the average blue-collar worker.”
McMunn agreed, saying, “This isn’t doing anybody any favors. This isn’t bringing any jobs back to the U.S.” However, he was hopeful that, as Colares and other backers of the president have suggested, the tariffs are merely a temporary negotiation tactic. “There are meetings happening between the U.S. and China, so maybe this was just a shot across the bow and they’ll come to an agreement.”
President Trump tweeted as much Monday, saying, “Tariffs have put the U.S. in a very strong bargaining position” ahead of upcoming trade talks.
Still, McMunn questioned whether such a strategy is worth the pain of higher prices for consumers and companies. While he acknowledged that there were certainly trade imbalances that needed to be corrected in America’s favor, McMunn doesn’t believe the current approach is the best way to achieve that objective. “Even if this is just a tactic that Trump is using for negotiation purposes, it’s not a good one — it’s scaring everyone in manufacturing,” he said.
Mia Taylor is an award-winning journalist with more than two decades of experience. She has worked for some of the nation’s best-known news organizations, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the San Diego Union-Tribune.
More by Mia Taylor:
The post Now in Stock, Sticker Shock: How a Trade War Could Impact Your Budget appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
Easy-access savings rates are inching up.
Kent Reliance has launched a new issue of its Easy Access account paying a top 1.37%. It is available online and through its branches. Coventry Building Society pays a slightly higher 1.4% on its Limited Access Saver but that includes a 0.25 percentage point bonus payable for the first year and limits you to making three free withdrawals every 12 months.
On fixed rate bonds, the top rate is currently 2.02% from ICICI Bank, followed by Charter Savings Bank and Oaknorth Bank, both at 2.01%. Atom, Investec, Tandem and Zenith banks all pay 2%.
For 18 months you can earn marginally more with the 2.11% from Charter Savings Bank, while the best two-year rate is 2.25% from Investec, PCF and Tandem banks.
On easy-access Cash Isas the best rate comes from Virgin Money’s Double Take E-Isa at 1.36%, but you are limited to making two withdrawals a year. This is followed by Yorkshire Building Society with its Single Access Isa at 1.35% which restricts you to making withdrawals on just one day in a year – and you are moved into a lower paying account after the first 12 months.
The top rate with no withdrawal restrictions is Shawbrook Bank Easy Access Cash Isa 4 at 1.3%.
On fixed rate cash Isas, Paragon Bank pays 1.55%, Bank of Cyprus 1.55% with Shawbrook Bank at 1.51%.
The best two-year rate is 1.75% from Shawbrook Bank, followed by 1.71% from Charter Savings Bank.
