الثلاثاء، 27 أغسطس 2019
From the Life You Have To the Life You Want
Mary wrote in with a great question:
Loved your article about personal finance and time and philosophy. I had a question about the last part, about figuring out what you want out of life. I know what I want my life to be like but it feels like an impossible leap from where my life is right now. What do you do if the life you have now and the commitments and financial situation make the life you want impossible to reach?
This is a common problem that happens to people when they start to really figure out what they want out of life. Often, they’ve already made a lot of fundamental life decisions that have given them a lot of responsibilities. They’ve committed to a career path and invested a lot of money in training for it (by going to college). They might be married. They might have children. They might have very limited financial resources.
What exactly do you do if you know what you want out of life but you’re so far away from it that you don’t know where to start?
I can really empathize with this. The point at which I really started to figure out what I wanted out of life saw me very, very far away from it. I knew what I valued most in life and what I wanted to do with my life, but everything seemed to be as far away from it as possible. I was working in a drastically different career path with an investment in education for that path. I had very little in terms of financial resources. I didn’t have a lot of great relationships in my life. In short, I felt extremely far from where I wanted to be.
I frequently hear and read stories about people who feel like their life is being swept along in a river running in the wrong direction. Many aspects of their life are very far away from where they want to be going and it feels like each day, each week, each month is carrying them further away. They’re getting older with each passing day and it makes that destination feel even further off.
What do you do first if you find yourself in that kind of situation?
The First Step: Figuring Out What You Control
The first thing you need to do is to understand what things you actually have control over in your life. That sense of being “swept along by life” or being so far away from what you want in life is a result of not taking advantage of what you have control over in your life.
I want to point out some of the big pieces. You’ll probably think of others.
The money you spend. You control virtually every dollar that comes out of your pocket. Yes, you have some required bills due to contracts you’ve signed and debts you’ve taken on, and you do have to meet some basic minimum requirements for nutrition and water and shelter, but aside from that, you have complete control over every dollar you spend.
How you spend your time. Aside from moments actively attending to basic life functions – eating, drinking water, sleeping, hygiene, and acquiring those things – you have complete control over how you spend your time.
The place you live. You chose wherever it is that you live. Sure, this is somewhat influenced by the amount of money you bring in, but for most people, all that does is set an upper bound on what you can afford and most people push that upper bound, going for the most expensive (“nicest”) place they can afford. In reality, you have a very wide range of choices, from sleeping in a car or a tent to renting a single bedroom to renting a larger apartment to having roommates… on and on and on.
The people you spend time with. Outside of your work, the only situation where you have to spend time with someone is if you’re the guardian of a child or if you’re committed in some way to someone’s care and they’re unable to do it on their own. Aside from that, you choose who you spend time with.
What you do for income. You choose what job you work at. If your current job is making you miserable, choose something different. If you “can’t” do this because of money reasons, you’re perhaps not exercising control over your spending.
The things you say and do in response to your feelings. You are in control of how you respond to your feelings. You choose what to say and whether to say it. You choose what you do. If you feel angry, it’s your choice as to whether it bursts out of you. If you feel sad, you choose how it impacts your behavior and words.
Saying and believing you’re not in control of these things is ceding control of your life to someone else. You’re ceding control over yourself to the nebulous idea of what other people might think of you. You’re ceding control over yourself to the whims of your emotions. You’re ceding control over yourself to people who just want to manipulate you for your own benefit.
And, along the way, you’re losing the opportunity to be who you want to be, because you’re giving away all of these resources. You’re giving away your money, your time, your focus, your words, your relationships, your energy … you’re giving it all away. Whenever you use those things you control in exchange for other things that aren’t in line with what you want out of life, you move further away from what you want out of life.
So, what can you do about it? You have to start trading all of those things you have for other things that move you toward your life goals, not away from them.
A Long Journey Ahead
Imagine that your life is like a giant map. Currently, you’re somewhere in the West, in some rural area, without a whole lot of resources to your name. You want to get to New York City – the life you want. How do you get there?
It’s easy to say something like “get in a car and drive there,” but that leaves out a lot of things you need to have in place to be able to do that. You need a car. You need money for gas. You need food and water along the way.
In other words, to get to where you want to be in life, a lot of pieces have to be in place. It’s not just a matter of having one giant goal. In fact, if you just look at that one big goal without having a lot of pieces in place to get there, it looks impossible.
That’s where I was at ten or so years ago. That’s where Mary is at, too.
So, the next step in the thought process is that you can make a big list of what you need and start acquiring those things. That’s goal setting, and it’s a very powerful next step.
I’ll use my own story as an example. As I said earlier: “I knew what I valued most in life and what I wanted to do with my life, but everything seemed to be as far away from it as possible. I was working in a drastically different career path with an investment in education for that path. I had very little in terms of financial resources. I didn’t have a lot of great relationships in my life. In short, I felt extremely far from where I wanted to be.”
I needed to seriously fix my financial situation. I needed to make a career change. I needed to make a lot of relationship changes. I needed to make a lot of other changes, too.
That translates easily into a list of medium-term goals.
I needed to build an emergency fund and pay off my debts in 18 months.
I needed to come up with a plan to move from my current career – data mining (which I did enjoy when I was actually doing the data mining work, I had just become disillusioned with the bureaucratic and peripheral issues) – and move to the career I wanted since I was a kid – writing.
I needed to build a lot of social relationships in my community, ones that weren’t built on unsustainable spending habits.
I needed to build a really strong marriage with Sarah.
I needed to build a really strong parental relationship with my young son and with the kids that were about to become part of my life.
There you go – some very powerful medium-term goals, all of which fed into the life I wanted to lead.
Each of those goals can be broken down into a progressive series of smaller and smaller goals and tasks until I have something I can work on today for each of them. I’ve written about breaking down goals in this way many times before, but suffice it to say that this type of breakdown, in which those big lifetime goals translate directly into things on my to-do list for the day, is a huge part of my journey from the place I was to the place I am now, which is a lot closer to the life I’ve always wanted than I would have ever thought possible ten years ago.
It goes a little further than that, though, and it wasn’t something I really realized until recently.
What Does the Person You Want to Be Do Today?
When I look at the big vision I have for my life, it really breaks down into fulfilling several roles really well.
I want to be an excellent husband. I want to be an excellent father. I want to be a pillar of the community with a strong social network. I want to be a writer, writing things that have an impact on readers. I want to be a healthy person. I want to have the financial stability needed to nurture and protect all of those things. I want to do all of those things with a very strong sense of values.
This breaks down into a series of interesting questions.
What would an excellent husband for Sarah do today?
What would an excellent father for my children do today?
What would a pillar of the community do today?
What would a great friend do today?
What would an excellent writer do today?
What would a very financially responsible person do today?
In each case, those people would do good things in those roles as a matter of course.
An excellent husband pays attention to how his partner is feeling and responds accordingly. An excellent husband knows the ways his partner feels love and touches on those ways. An excellent husband appreciates his partner, privately and publicly. An excellent husband makes his partner feel desired and loved and attractive. Most importantly, these are the natural things an excellent husband does every day.
By doing those things every day as a natural course of habit, I’m developing into an excellent husband. I might be “faking it until I make it” at first, but if I stick to doing those things every day, I’m taking steps every single day toward being an excellent husband.
Let’s look at the money side. A financially responsible person spends significantly less than they earn. A financially responsible person puts money away for the future. A financially responsible person keeps the bills paid and keeps an emergency fund. A financially responsible person knows how to control their spending impulses.
By doing those things every day as a natural course of habit, I’m developing into a financially responsible person. Again, at first, I might be “faking it until I make it,” but I’m moving each and every day toward being a financially responsible person.
These things are more like systems rather than goals. They’re usually oriented toward behaviors and extremely regular habits rather than a concrete checklist of things to do. As of late, I’ve been using many of the strategies in Triggers and Atomic Habits to get better at this approach.
You Need Both Goals and Systems
The truth is that some things in life work better as a set of goals, while other things work better in life as a system.
There are some aspects of good personal finance behavior that work wonderfully as goals, like breaking down a debt repayment plan into actual tangible things you should be doing today.
At the same time, there are some aspects of good personal finance behavior that work wonderfully as systems, like simply mastering control over your spending impulses.
What they have in common is this: they both represent positive daily effort in an area of your life that you need to improve. That’s what really matters, that you’re doing something today that moves you closer to the life you want to live in every area that needs change and that you’re not doing other things to undo that forward progress.
In general, I think goals are really good for the “doing something” part, particularly when that thing is relatively standalone, while systems are really good at the “not undoing it” part and also the “highly repetitive steps” part.
Changing Your Life
So, if you want to change your life, you have to consider all of the things that you can control – your time, your spending choices, your emotional responses to things, your work, and on and on and on – and ask yourself how you can use them to move in the direction of the life you want.
Again, this is going to be a mix of the tools above, but I highly recommend trying to use lots of tools and see what works.
Try defining some big goals, then breaking them down into daily tasks.
Try figuring out what roles in your life need to be front and center in that “best life” you envision, then aim to be excellent in those roles.
Most importantly, try to do some things every single day that move you in that better direction and do your absolute best to not undo them with other behaviors.
This needs to be a constant force, like waves lapping up on a beach. It doesn’t have to be perfect force – you don’t have to be amazing and perfect every single day – but it has to be constant. If you have an imperfect day, shrug it off and go back the next day. If you have a few imperfect days, spend some time thinking about whether the things you’re doing are actually a good fit for you and whether you’re really using the resources in your life that you control.
You can build practically any life that you want. You can’t have everything, of course – not everyone can be, say, an NFL starting quarterback or something like that – but if you have goals, break them down into bits, and strive to be an excellent version of what you want to be in life, and you consistently do that every day, you will move in a direction you’ll be happy with. It won’t be tomorrow or the day after that, but you’ll start waking up and realizing that your life is better, and suddenly that amazing life you’ve dreamed of won’t feel so far off after all.
Good luck.
The post From the Life You Have To the Life You Want appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
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19 Ways to Make Money from Home with Paid Surveys
One of the questions that I frequently get from readers is, “Can you really make money from home by taking surveys?” and the answer is YES! There are many legitimate websites where you can offer your opinion in exchange for money, rewards, and sweepstake entries. While you're not going to get rich from participating in […]
The post 19 Ways to Make Money from Home with Paid Surveys appeared first on The Work at Home Woman.
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Should you join the electric car revolution?
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My mother wants to give money and gifts to family. What if it leaves her short?
My mother recently received an inheritance from my late father, and also has some money from her late mother. This money was left directly to her, but with an informal understanding that some of it would benefit her children and grandchildren. Taxes have been paid on these sums.
She wants to give quite a large sum to her children and grandchildren. If she dies within seven years of the gift, inheritance tax (IHT) wouldn’t be a problem as she doesn’t own property and her entire estate is worth less than the £325,000 IHT threshold.
She also wants to buy her children gifts including televisions and holidays. My worry is that giving all this money away could affect her in the future. She has no income apart from her state pension so if she runs out of money, she would need to claim housing benefit to help with her rent. What would you advise she does?
Before your mother makes any gifts to children or grandchildren – or indeed buys them expensive items – she needs to consider her own financial position, which sounds a little precarious.
She should work out how much she wants to live on each month. Notice I said “wants” rather than “needs”: it is all about determining her desired lifestyle. How much of this is provided by her existing income? Assuming there is a shortfall, how much would then have to be provided each year from the capital available to your mother from the two inheritances?
Then she needs to work out how long that capital would last her if it is used to make up this shortfall. In other words, a cashflow based on reasonable assumptions about inflation, life expectancy, and returns on the capital. Your mother should also keep a contingency fund in case of any unexpected or emergency spending.
Without going through this exercise, it is impossible to say whether there is scope to make gifts to children and grandchildren during her lifetime, or what amounts these could be.
There is no point in her giving money and gifts away and then having to rely on benefits. In any case, the gifts could mean she is not eligible for certain means-tested benefits if they are construed as “deliberate deprivation”. This means deliberately giving away or spending assets in order to fall below a threshold at which benefits normally become available.
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الاثنين، 26 أغسطس 2019
BBMC Mortgage Rates Reviews: Today’s Best Analysis
BBMC Mortgage has worked alongside homebuyers across the country for just under ten years, yet in that short time, it’s earned a positive reputation as a national online lender.
The company offers a standard selection of home loan products, including conventional fixed and adjustable-rate mortgages, along with government-backed programs like FHA, VA, and USDA. BBMC’s commitment to moderate-to low-income borrowers and homebuyers with limited credit histories makes it unique among its competitors. If you’re looking for a fully online home financing experience, BBMC has the financing options and streamlined interface you’re looking for.
BBMC was formally accredited by the Better Business Bureau in 2012, earning an A+ BBB rating for its customer-focused approach to home lending. Despite its strong performance, the company will soon be taken over by new management as part of an ongoing merger. Synergy One Lending acquired BBMC in 2018, which is an owned subsidiary of the Mutual of Omaha Bank.
This acquisition has caused a good deal of disruption to the company’s website, which will sometimes redirect users to Mutual of Omaha Bank. Overall, this business activity is not expected to impact BBMC’s product offerings or its origination process significantly.
BBMC Mortgage Facts
- Recently acquired by Synergy One Lending, an owned subsidiary of Mutual of Omaha Bank
- Offers a standard variety of conventional and government-backed mortgages, including fixed- and adjustable-rate, jumbo, FHA, VA, and USDA loans
- Website can be confusing to navigate due to BBMC’s ongoing merger
- Facilitates FHA loans with down payments as low as 3.5 percent
- Formally accredited by the Better Business Bureau in 2012, with a BBB score of A+
- Provides inadequate information on credit score requirements, down payment minimums, and debt-to-income standards on its website
Overview
BBMC Mortgage was founded in 2009 as a division of Bridgeview Bank Group, serving as its national home lending firm for almost 10 years. In 2018, BBMC reached a merger agreement with Synergy One Lending, an owned subsidiary of Mutual of Omaha Bank, and has begun transitioning its services and assets over the past year. BBMC is a mortgage banker that helps borrowers find affordable mortgage and refinance rates across all 50 states.
Current BBMC Mortgage Rates
BBMC Loan Specifics
BBMC offers a standard selection of conventional fixed and adjustable-rate mortgages, along with several government-backed programs, including FHA, VA, and USDA loans. This lender does not provide any specialty home loans for first-time homeowners, nor does it provide any discount programs. However, BBMC does excel in its commitment to help moderate-to-low income borrowers find affordable financing solutions and competitive interest rates.
Fixed-Rate Loans
This mortgage type is heavily geared toward homebuyers who plan to commit to a single property long term. Eligible borrowers can lock in consistent interest rates and monthly payments for the full life of the loan, which can be negotiated as 15 or 30 years.
Although fixed-rate loans typically feature higher interest rates than their adjustable-rate counterparts, they provide maximum stability. Fixed-rate mortgages will not fluctuate even during large-scale downturns in the housing market.
Adjustable-Rate Loans
In contrast to fixed-rate mortgages, this variable lending option features low starting rates that will automatically adjust after an initial rate-locked period. Borrowers can select a fixed-rate term of five, seven, or 10 years, during which their interest rates and monthly payments will not fluctuate.
Once the initial term has elapsed, adjustable-rate loans will adjust according to market performance. This makes it a solid choice for homebuyers looking to invest in property over the short term. This mortgage type is great for borrowers who plan to move within five years or who expect a significant income boost.
Jumbo Loans
This specialty loan helps homebuyers purchase properties that exceed the maximum conforming limits set by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which currently stands around $484,350. This loan limit tends to vary between states and can range from $453,100 to $679,650 depending on the home’s precise location.
Due to the high loan amounts, jumbo mortgages typically feature strict eligibility guidelines. Lenders will heavily scrutinize your credit score, credit history, income, and employment status before moving forward with the origination process.
FHA Loans
Unlike conventional mortgages, this government-back program has low down payment minimums and flexible credit score requirements. FHA loans are sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. They were designed to help first-time homebuyers and borrowers with less-than-perfect credit histories obtain affordable home loans.
Qualified applicants can put as little as 3.5 percent down and are allowed to use gift funds toward upfront costs and closing fees. This mortgage program is particularly suited to low-to-moderate income borrowers and those without a robust credit history.
VA Loans
Eligible military veterans and service members can take advantage of this no money down home loan program, which is federally insured by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.
VA loans benefit from lower-than-average interest rates, monthly payment amounts, closing fees, and credit score requirements. To qualify, applicants must provide documentation concerning their military service. This 100 percent financing option is unique, as it does not require borrowers to secure mortgage insurance, regardless of how little they put down upfront.
USDA Loans
This government-backed mortgage type is tailored to moderate-to-low income borrowers who are interested in purchasing property in a rural or suburban area. Homebuyers who are unable to meet the qualification guidelines for conventional mortgages are encouraged to apply for a USDA loan. These home loans come with a 0 percent down payment option and flexible credit score requirements.
The United States Department of Agriculture launched this program to encourage homeownership in underdeveloped regions of the country. They created strict income limits to ensure low-income borrowers have priority access.
BBMC Mortgage Customer Experience
BBMC Mortgage is a nation-wide online lender with the stated focus of providing affordable interest rates to low-income borrowers, who may not be able to qualify for conventional loan programs. The company does not operate any physical branches, instead offering an entirely online loan application and origination process that is quick and easy.
Homebuyers interested in working with BBMC can contact a lending agent by phone, email, or by filling out a web form on the company’s website. If you’ve decided to partner with BBMC for your home financing needs, be sure to check out the company’s online pre-qualification feature, though personal information like name, address, phone number, and Social Security is required.
BBMC’s website is filled with useful resources that can help you come to a complete understanding of the mortgage process, including FAQ pages, timely articles, mortgage calculators, and a step-by-step guide to the application process. Borrowers can use the website to compare rates, browse home loan programs, or apply for a mortgage directly.
Unlike most lenders, BBMC is quite upfront about the impact of credit score and down payment amounts and lists many useful tips to help you during the negotiation process. Unfortunately, the company’s recent acquisition activity has made browsing its website a bit confusing, as many of the links will redirect you to Mutual of Omaha Mortgage’s website.
While most of the home loan products are identical, this website integration may disrupt your research and application efforts.
BBMC Lender Reputation
Although BBMC Mortgage will soon become a part of Synergy One Lending, the company built a markedly positive reputation during its short nine years of business. The BBB formally accredited BBMC in 2012 and awarded the company an A+ BBB rating. On the other hand, BBMC’s profile currently displays a 2.5-star customer review score with a total of 41 complaints filed against it.
- Information collected on Feb. 18, 2019
BBMC Mortgage Qualifications
|
Loan Type |
Rate Type |
Down Payment Minimum |
|
Fixed-Rate Loans |
Fixed |
10 – 20% |
|
Adjustable-Rate Loans |
Variable |
10 – 20% |
|
Jumbo Loans |
Fixed or Variable |
10 – 20% |
|
FHA Loans |
Fixed or Variable |
3.5% |
|
VA Loans |
Fixed or Variable |
0% |
|
USDA Loans |
Fixed |
0% |
BBMC Mortgage’s home loans feature a range of different eligibility guidelines, though there are a few areas of overlap that you should consider. For example, the company’s conventional fixed- and adjustable-rate mortgages have identical qualification criteria, as both require down payments of at least 10 to 20 percent.
Additionally, homebuyers must enroll in mortgage insurance for any down payment amount below 20 percent, which may lead to higher than expected monthly payments. Borrowers who are unable to make a large down payment should consider one of BBMC’s government-backed programs, as an FHA loan can be secured with as little as 3.5 percent down.
One limitation of shopping with this lender is the lack of specific credit score qualifications listed on the company’s website. BBMC’s rate estimates mention a score of 780+, which is well above industry standard. According to FICO, the average credit score sits at around 740, though some lenders are more than willing to work with borrowers who fall below this mark.
Luckily, eligible homebuyers can qualify for an FHA loan with credit scores as low as 500. As a result, their quoted interest rate will likely be well above average due to the associated financial risks. It is unclear whether BBMC considers non-traditional credit history when determining program eligibility or interest rates.
Another downside is that BBMC does not mention anything about loan-to-value criteria or debt-to-income standards, which may force borrowers to apply to find out more formally. Information on this lender’s government-backed programs can be found on the corresponding agency’s website, so be sure to do a good deal of research before applying.
BBMC Mortgage is best suited to moderate-to-low income borrowers and those that may not be eligible for traditional home loans from other lenders. The impact of the company’s acquisition by the Mutual of Omaha Bank is still to be determined. It is likely the merger will not significantly change its products or its approach to online lending.
BBMC Phone Number & Additional Details
Homepage URL: https://www.mybbmc.com/
Company Phone: 1-800-247-2837
Headquarters Address: 100 W. 22nd St. Suite 101, Lombard, IL 60148
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It’s National Dog Day — Here Are Ways to Make Pet Ownership Less Pricy
News flash: Today is National Dog Day!
If this esteemed holiday escaped your notice as you were setting out the water bowl and kibble this morning, you might consider picking up a bag of treats on your way home. We all know the price of forgetting important dates and anniversaries with loved ones, and frankly, there’s no more wounding side eye than canine side eye.
While you’re celebrating your love for the four-legged friend in your life, you might be thinking about how rewarding dog ownership is. How fulfilling. How endearing. How sweet.
And how expensive.
But there are legit ways to save money on your dog — or cat, bird, fish, snake or emotional support ferret. Here are a few.
Quick and Easy Ways to Save Money on Your Pet
1. Join Pet Store Loyalty Clubs
Signing up with programs like PetSmart’s Treats loyalty program and Pet Supermarket’s VIP Rewards can pay off in the form of deals and discounts on items like food and services like pet washes. If you prefer to shop local, independent pet stores offer their own frequent customer rewards.
2. Use Discounted Gift Cards
You can buy discounted gift cards on a number of websites. Most carry cards for more than one pet supply chain.
For example, you’ll find Petco on ABC Gift Cards.
3. Watch for Pet Food Sales
Every pet owner — and pet — has their preferred food brand, and the high-quality ones aren’t cheap.
But even the best pet foods go on sale, so why not stock up when it costs less?
You can find weekly ads for pet supply retailers online. You can also link your email address to your customer loyalty card to get sales alerts.
Check out this handy list for even more ways to save money on your pet.
Get Smart about Pet Insurance
Unexpected vet bills can be the most expensive part of having a pet in the family.
Pet insurance for dogs, cats and even birds can keep the costs of pet care reasonable. While the monthly premiums are an additional expense on top of food, toys, treats and grooming, pet insurance is worth it for medical emergencies, especially serious illnesses or injuries.
Like all insurance, it’s a gamble. You will likely spend more over the course of your animal’s life on monthly premiums than the cost of regular veterinary care if your pet is healthy.
But if your best friend is dealt a bad hand, it’s reassuring to know you have insurance to take care of the problems.
Here’s how to choose the best insurance for your pet.
Thinking of Adopting? Read On
If National Dog Day has you thinking (again) that you really do want to bring a pet into your home, it’s worth considering which breeds are generally the healthiest, and therefore less likely to run up big vet bills.
You can, of course, work to keep your dog healthy by feeding it a well-balanced diet with a top-rated food, giving it plenty of exercise, socializing and playing with it regularly and keeping up on vet visits, vaccinations and medications.
To further reduce potential medical costs for your dog, you can adopt a breed that is specifically known for having fewer medical problems during its life. (Just keep in mind that there is never a guarantee.)
Check out our rundown of dog breeds known for having low medical costs throughout their lives.
Turn Your Love of Dogs into a Money-Making Venture
Don’t just save money on your own pet. Make money by loving on all the pets!
You can start a dog-walking side gig by offering your services to friends and family who don’t have the summers off. They may jump at the chance for someone to take their beloved pups out for a walk on long work days.
You can also sign up for Rover. The online network connects dog walkers and sitters to local dog owners through its 4.9-star-rated app, so you don’t have to staple flyers on every utility pole across town.
Rover says top sitters earn an average $450 per month.
Rover dog-sitter requirements vary by location. In general, you must:
- Be 18 years or older.
- Pass a background check.
- Have access to the Rover app (iOS or Android).
Here’s how it works: You’ll create an online sitter profile where you’ll answer questions about your experience with puppers and your schedule availability.
You can choose to offer a variety of services, including dog walking, overnight boarding at your home or theirs, and daycare. Boarding is the app’s most popular service, so offering it can get you more gigs. You set your own rates. (Rover keeps a small percentage as a service fee.)
Dog owners will reach out to you. Accept which gigs you want, then start snugglin’ pups. As soon as you complete a service, you’ll be paid within two days.
And if you don’t want to just stick to dog walking, you can expand your services and become a full-blown pet sitter.
Molly Moorhead is a senior editor at The Penny Hoarder.
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.
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Questions About FAFSA, Lunch Containers, Robocalls, Philosophy, Comic Sans, and More!
What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to summaries of five or fewer words. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. College and parental assets
2. Best containers for simple lunches
3. Playing the lottery
4. Envelope budgeting without cash
5. Workplace ending 401(k) program
6. Planning ahead for upcoming move
7. Recommended squirt bottle for shower
8. Annoyed by robocalls
9. Time management, philosophy, and money
10. Coworker uses Comic Sans
11. Old magazine conundrum
12. Good audio for sleep?
Last week’s mailbag was kind of a downer, with several heavy questions about families and lives in disarray. As a counterbalance, this week’s mailbag is intentionally filled with some lighter questions about more positive situations, product suggestions, and a couple of really lighthearted things near the end. In the future, I’ll aim to make sure mailbags are more balanced.
On with the questions!
Q1: College and parental assets
My daughter is 12. My wife and I have a lot of money in various investment accounts and are wondering already about college. We have been saving in a 529 for her to pay for some of her college but we want her to be responsible for some of it too. However, we are pretty certain that our investments will make her ineligible for student aid. What should we do going forward?
– Mark
It depends upon what kind of student aid you’re hoping to get. If you want your daughter to be eligible for grants and other need-based financial aid, you’re going to have to move that money into assets that aren’t considered in the FAFSA, like retirement accounts and your primary home.
On the other hand, if you’re hoping that your daughter will be responsible for her part through merit-based scholarships and student loans and you plan on co-signing on those loans, your income level largely won’t matter. You’ll still have to fill out the FAFSA, but your financial aid awards will be very loan-heavy rather than grant-heavy.
The question is whether the difference is worth it to you. Do you want to tie up your investment funds in a home or in retirement accounts? If that’s not a problem for you, then doing this will definitely improve your daughter’s chances of getting grants, which will reduce the amount of actual post-college debt she has. If it is a problem for you, leaving the money where it is won’t prevent your daughter from going to school or put you in a financial pickle.
Without a much clearer financial picture, I can’t even begin to guess which choice would leave you and your daughter collectively in a better financial position ten years from now, and even if I did, there would be a lot of guesswork and predicting the future involved.
Q2: Best containers for simple lunches
What do you suggest for containers for simple lunches, usually a sandwich and some carrots and an apple and maybe some chips, and once in a while some leftovers? I have a little reusable lunchbox and I have a leftover container that I use for leftovers but I just use baggies for the others and that seems wasteful.
– Daisy
Pretty much any reusable sandwich sized container will work for a sandwich, and two more can hold your carrots and chips. Assuming you’re not wanting to carry anything that needs to be completely watertight (meaning it’s holding liquid and might wind up upside down), pretty much any container of that size will do. The items you’ll find at the dollar store will be perfect for this.
If you intend to just start using reusable containers for everything, I strongly suggest just getting a lot of the same type so that there are no issues with matching lids to containers and you know everything works. Just get a bunch of these in two different sizes, or else go to the dollar store and get a bunch of identical containers in an appropriate size. Don’t mix up the container types or you’ll just have headaches.
Personally, we’ve started to spend more on containers in order to get ones that have tight fitting lids and are microwave, dishwasher, and freezer safe and very, very reusable. We’re trying to gradually migrate all of our containers to the same model for lid consistency, and we’ve decided on Rubbermaid Brilliance.
Q3: Playing the lottery
My grandpa has bought a lottery ticket twice a week since at least the 1980s. I was figuring up how much money he had spent on lottery tickets since 1985 and if he bought a $1 ticket twice a week for those 34 years, he’d have $3,500, and if he invested that money each year in pretty much anything, he’d easily have $10,000. I brought this up to him and he had a great answer. He said that he didn’t play the lottery as any kind of investment, but as something fun to look forward to. He got to chat with the cashier at the gas station where he always bought his ticket. He got to daydream about having a chance to win enough money to change his life and help his kids and grandkids. He got to look up the numbers each Sunday and Wednesday morning and see if he won. And he actually did win a couple of thousand several years ago, so that actually took care of most of the $3,500. While I think playing the lottery is a waste of money, that actually is a pretty good answer and I wanted to share it with you.
– Brian
This is a good story, and it makes the point that lottery tickets fall into the same category as the short-lasting treats that we buy for ourselves. Is this really any different than spending $5 on a coffee at a kiosk, or buying a pack of gum in the checkout? You’re basically spending money for a burst of pleasure and then it’s gone.
In the end, that’s what this guy’s grandpa is doing, too. He’s spending a few bucks a week on a burst of pleasure, and then it’s gone.
The important thing is to realize that it’s not the lottery ticket or the coffee itself that’s problematic, it’s that we often get into routines of relying on those bursts of pleasure in a continuous cycle, like a treadmill. We’re wired that way for survival (this is why food tastes good), but when you’re spending money to stay on that treadmill, you’re asking for financial trouble. The best approach is to make sure that a lot of those bursts of pleasure are free ones so that the whole thing doesn’t become a road to financial ruin.
It sounds like your grandpa has enjoyed those lottery tickets. Sure, he might have been better off seeking out free bursts of pleasure, but this one’s not that bad in the big scheme of things. It only becomes problematic if the amount he’s spending starts to escalate.
Q4: Envelope budgeting without cash
Love the idea of envelope budgeting but I just use my debit card for everything. How can envelope system work without cash?
– Erika
You can basically do the same thing by making up a handful of small sheets for each category that you would have an envelope for.
Let’s say that you were going to do the “envelope” system and you had one envelope for rent, one envelope for car expenses, one for utilities, one for food, and one for fun. (This is hypothetical.) If you were doing the full envelope system, you’d put a certain amount of cash in each, then pull cash only from that envelope if you had an expense for that purpose. So, if you needed to pay rent, the cash comes from the rent envelope.
If you’re not using cash, the money stays in your checking account and instead of an envelope for each category, you have a sheet. On each sheet, you start off the month with a total – you might write, say, “Food, Total: $400.” Whenever you want to spend money on food, you look at that food page and ask yourself how much you can spend right now. If you decide to spend $50 at the store on food, you write “Groceries, -$50” and then next to that you’d write your new total, which would be $350 if this was your first food expense of the month.
Basically, each “envelope” transforms into a tally of spending in each category. You just have to work on the habit of not spending money unless you’ve written it down on one of those sheets first.
Q5: Workplace ending 401(k) program
It was recently announced that our workplace will be ending the 401(k) program at the end of the year. I consider such a plan to be a nice workplace benefit. How much value should I assign to this if I were to negotiate a raise or move to another employer? I’m going to start a Roth IRA next year but this just feels like a salary cut.
– Jon
If your workplace wasn’t matching any of your contributions and your total contributions each year are less than what you could contribute to a Roth IRA (around $100 a week), it’s not going to make much of a financial impact.
Where it might really matter is if you were contributing more than $100 a week to the 401(k) plan or, even more than that, if the employer was offering matching funds. Obviously, the value of any matching funds is a direct loss, but there’s also a small loss if you no longer have a place for some of your intended retirement savings.
This would not be a “quit my job” change, but it would slightly negatively shade my current job, and I would definitely consider any loss in matching funds as equivalent to a loss in salary. As someone who was actually using the 401(k), I would definitely bring it up the next time you ask for a raise. If your boss doesn’t take this into account, it can be another reason – but shouldn’t be the only reason, by far – to consider shopping around for another job.
Q6: Planning ahead for upcoming move
I am planning on moving from Minneapolis to Chicago in November. I will be moving to a similarly sized apartment so I plan on taking a lot of my stuff along. I have a friend coming to help me move. What can I start doing now to keep costs low?
– Gerald
First of all, start hunting for large, sturdy cardboard boxes. Ask at local stores for extra shipping boxes – ask at several stores now, then hit some more in a month or so. This will keep you from buying boxes when it gets close to moving time.
Start packing stuff now, especially stuff you won’t actively need in the next two months. Use found materials as you go as packing materials – if you come across bubble wrap and cheap packing paper and other things, use that for packing as you go along. Again, this will save you on last minute purchases.
Depending on how many larger pieces of furniture you’re moving, a simple U-Haul truck will probably handle the move for you. I strongly recommend getting it the day before you move and loading it in advance so you can get an early start the next day or you have some breathing room to handle an issue. Give yourself more time than you need. Have your friend drive the truck, or you can drive the truck while your friend drives your car behind it.
Those strategies will save you a ton over various other approaches to moving. The more that you can do yourself, and the more moving supplies you can come up with for free, the cheaper the whole thing will be.
Also, thank your friend profusely, cover all of your friend’s food and drink during this process, and give that friend a nice thank you gift for this effort.
Q7: Recommended squirt bottle for shower
You’ve mentioned a couple of times that you use a squirt bottle for liquid soap in the shower to keep yourself from overuse. Thought about that this morning when I saw a bunch of excess soap going down the drain when I squirted some on my hand! Got a bottle recommendation?
– Adrian
I use two of these. One holds liquid soap, the other holds the shampoo-conditioner mix that I use. Whenever I buy a new big bottle of liquid soap or shampoo at the store, I just refill this pump dispenser. Works like a champ. I use a single squirt at a time and rarely waste any at all.
I will mention that I have a friend that swears by this mounted dispenser that has three different dispensers in one unit. You mount it on your shower wall and then just push a button of the right type to dispense soap, shampoo, or conditioner. I am very hesitant to switch to this because if I’m not literally screwing this to the side of the shower, I wouldn’t trust it to bear the weight of the soap, shampoo, and conditioner it would hold.
I think both will work fine, but I prefer the standalone bottles. Get three if you use a separate shampoo and conditioner.
Q8: Annoyed by robocalls
Do you have any tips for dealing with annoying robocalls? Both me and my mom get these calls from random numbers that say that our Social Security number has been terminated and there is a warrant out for our arrest, which is obviously nonsense, but I’m so sick of getting the calls. How do you get them to stop?
– Thomas
The best advice I can give is to talk to your phone provider. I’m assuming this is occurring on your cell phone, so call your cell phone provider and ask if they have any tools that can help with this.
If they don’t have any tools, the best thing you can do is just spend some time ignoring any calls that aren’t from known numbers. Make sure that you have everyone you know or who might call you in your contacts list and when there’s a call that’s not a known contact, just ignore it.
It’s very annoying, but there is no simple solution. Eventually, however, they’ll stop wasting time calling you if you’re not answering because it’s a small but real waste of their resources.
Q9: Time management, philosophy, and money
I find it interesting that you write about things like time management and philosophy on a personal finance site. The connection seems thin at best to me. I’d love to see a post talking about it.
– Eric
I don’t think there’s a full post in this subject, but there are certainly a few paragraphs.
For starters, I think about frugality in terms of managing all of the resources we have in life, not just money. Frugality means getting the most benefit out of something based on the amount of resources you invest in it. That means your money, obviously, but also your time, your energy, your health, your skills, and your focus, among other things. Having good habits for managing each of those often means that you are more efficient at applying them and, over time, it feels like you have more of them to spend.
For example, if I’m more focused during my workday, I’m done with my work much earlier in the day, which means that I have time to make a healthy, homemade meal for my family, which is much cheaper than ordering takeout or delivery (and healthier, too). I’m spending more focus and less time on my workday, which means that I have more time later in the day for other things. When I have more time available, I can do things like make dinner, which eats more time but costs much less money and hones my kitchen skills. I think all of that comes together in making a good life – it’s about finding the right balance of using all of those resources you have to maximum effect. In the modern world, I think the average person struggles with their “money” resource the most, but there is a lot of struggle with time and attention, too, and they’re all related.
Thus, I’ll occasionally write about time management practices that work for me, like using a task manager, and about focus practices that work for me, like meditation and writing in a journal and making checklists. Those things vastly improve my usage of non-money resources so that I can be much more thoughtful about my money use.
All of this is pointless, of course, if you don’t have a purpose behind it. Why am I not just playing video games all day long? Why do I want to retire early? The “why” of all of this is the philosophical part. Not only does it tie into motivation for our actions, it also delves into the broader purpose and reasoning for the things that we do. Why do I choose to save for the long term rather than spending it all in the short term? Why don’t I sell all of my possessions and live in a van? In many ways, those questions are pure philosophy, and everyone is going to have their own answer, but I’ve found that the better you understand your own answer to those big “why” questions, the more it impacts the choices and decisions you make every day. Knowing that there are real reasons for why I’m saving for the long term, and knowing those reasons with depth, makes it easier to make strong personal finance choices every day.
So, when you see articles about time management on here, or about things like meditation, or when I get very philosophical, these are the kinds of things that I’m driving at. It’s all about using the resources we have in life to do things that truly mean something to all of us, and there’s no easy path to get there. It’s a journey I’m on – it’s a journey we’re all on.
Q10: Coworker uses Comic Sans
I have an older coworker who uses Comic Sans font in all of his emails and documents. I know that he does it to seem friendly and approachable, but it comes off as unprofessional especially when emailing customers and several people in the office make fun of it. Is there a tactful way to talk to him about this? He’s a great guy and I know he’s sincere and I don’t want to hurt his feelings.
– Mary
I think the best way to approach this is to suggest the idea of having a “best practices” document about things to do when talking to customers. One of the items could be an appropriate professional font choice for customer emails and include some recommended fonts (or even choose a standard font for your organization). That way, your coworker is nudged into switching to a different font for customer mail and there’s a good likelihood he’ll just start using it on all emails. (My approach is usually to just send plain text emails anyway, so the recipient can use whatever font they want to display it, and it’s easier for some accessibility issues.)
As for the office joking, as long as it isn’t cruel, I wouldn’t worry about it. The humor is likely more oriented toward the sometimes-less-than-respectable nature of Comic Sans in a professional environment than toward your coworker. If the jokes are mostly limited to the font, don’t sweat it; if it’s bleeding into more general insults about the person, then there’s a bigger problem.
I think the best approach here is to just go with establishing a standard for customer and perhaps in-house communication, and that includes font selection. This just makes the business as a whole look more professional and should solve this issue entirely.
Q11: Old magazine conundrum
I have a ton of cooking magazines that I’ve saved but I haven’t touched in years but when I think about tossing them I get worried that I’m going to toss some recipes that I really want to make.
– Adrian
This was part of a much longer email on subjects that probably weren’t a good fit for the mailbag, but I thought this was worth responding to.
If you have a ton of old magazines, just set aside a day to deal with some of them. Grab a big pile of them, sit down, look at the table of contents of each one, and ask yourself if you’ll ever have any reason to look at any of this again. If you can’t immediately say yes, toss it. If you do immediately say yes, tear out the pages for that specific article, put them aside, and toss the rest.
If you have a bunch of saved pages at the end, just get a three hole punch and put them all in a three ring binder. That way, your huge magazine collection boils down to a small binder of stuff that’s actually relevant to you.
Q12: Good audio for sleep?
Recently moved and I’m now in a very quiet neighborhood. Used to live in a noisy area with cars driving by all night and occasional sirens and stuff. Now it’s too quiet and I can’t sleep so I’m reading The Simple Dollar at 2 AM.
– Derek
My suggestion is to find some audio that’s similar to the neighborhood where you used to live. For example, you might find this hour-long track of ambient city noise to be useful. Turn it up to an appropriate volume on a speaker across the room as you’re going to bed, or play it on your phone next to your head. Here’s a similar two hour track.
If you have Spotify, you might try playing this compilation in a repeat loop as you sleep.
What I would do is that I would do this for several nights, and then lower the volume by a couple of percent the next night, then leave it at that new volume for several nights, then lower it again, and again, and again, so that you gradually adjust to the new quieter sounds of your neighborhood. It’s the radical shift in sound that’s probably making the change difficult.
Got any questions? The best way to ask is to follow me on Facebook and ask questions directly there. I’ll attempt to answer them in a future mailbag (which, by way of full disclosure, may also get re-posted on other websites that pick up my blog). However, I do receive many, many questions per week, so I may not necessarily be able to answer yours.
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الأحد، 25 أغسطس 2019
10 Legit Ways to Make Money Online and Get Paid Today
Are you looking to make extra money fast? I know asking that question may sound like a bad advertisement in the making, but let’s face the facts. Most people could use some extra cash, and there’s no time better than the present. Thanks to the internet, there are so many flexible and easy ways to […]
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US exports to lobster-loving China go off cliff amid tariffs
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السبت، 24 أغسطس 2019
Smithfield supervisors plan sixth hearing on drug treatment center
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Eleven Cookbooks I Keep on My Shelf – And Why
Jamie writes in:
What cookbooks do you recommend for someone who is just starting out on their own?
I’ve made no secret over the years that I love cookbooks, to the point that family and friends often just find interesting cookbooks (particularly ones focused on more obscure topics) to give to me as a gift. Earlier this year, in fact, I had a friend text me a picture of several cookbooks she bought for me for $0.50 apiece at a yard sale where the person had a ton of cookbooks; she went through and found some unusual ones that she thought I’d like. It took $3.50 to put a huge smile on my face.
Part of the reason that I love cookbooks so much is that I love making food items and beverage items at home. I love being able to customize them and make them the way I want, from the ingredients I want. It saves a ton of money and often results in much better food.
There are times when I’ll devote whole weekend days to making foodstuffs, but most of the time, I’m really practical with cooking. I have three kids that are in upper elementary and middle school, which means that our life schedules are entering a phase where simply having a family dinner together can be like threading a needle sometimes. I want to be able to make low-cost home-cooked meals, sometimes in very small timeframes, so that we can eat dinner together as often as possible.
What this means is that several times a week, if you peek in our house, you’ll see me or Sarah in the kitchen with a cookbook flopped open on the table as we attempt to prepare some meal. Maybe it’s me on the weekend trying to figure out how to make some strange fermented food, or on a weeknight trying to put together a casserole that can be on the table at precisely 5:45 so that we have time to eat and our two oldest ones can be on their way to practices by 6:15. Maybe you’ll see Sarah loading something in the slow cooker in the morning or trying to bake a cake on a Saturday afternoon.
I enjoy using cookbooks. I enjoy sitting down and just reading them, looking for new ideas and techniques. I enjoy having them around for reference, too.
The question that is really being asked here is this: what cookbooks do I consider to be the essential ones on my shelf, particularly ones that are useful for someone relatively new to preparing food at home?
I went through our cookbook collection and came up with a handful.
It’s worth noting that when I’m discussing these cookbooks, I strongly encourage you to check them out from the library rather than just buying them. Borrow these for a few weeks, read through some of the material in them, and try using them for a few recipes and techniques. Decide for yourself if this book works for you or not. Then, if it does click, look for it on discount. You’d be surprised how many of these can be found at used bookstores, for example, or at library book sales.
First, however, let me talk a bit about how I chose these.
What Makes a Good Cookbook?
There are really four things I look for in a cookbook.
First of all, it needs to have a technique focus. I shouldn’t be in a situation where I read a recipe and wonder, “How on earth do I do this?” If it’s a new technique that isn’t a super-common one, there should be a technique section in that cookbook or enough of an explanation right there that I’m not lost. Techniques are the key. I don’t mind it if I don’t quite understand the technique from reading it, but it should be named and identified clearly enough that I can turn to Youtube for more visual instruction, as it can be hard to describe some techniques with words and pictures. Tell me enough and show me enough that I can either figure it out with just that book or I can figure it out with a Youtube search.
Second, the recipes need to have at least something of a low cost focus with reasonably accessible ingredients. A cookbook that contains lots of ingredients that I can’t find within a twenty mile radius of my home is not very useful to me. I need to be able to find almost all ingredients in the cookbook at local grocery stores and food co-ops and ethnic groceries. There are several of these around here, but some cookbooks end up talking about things that you can seemingly only find if you know a monk in rural Indonesia, and that’s basically useless to me. The ingredients for the average recipe in the book shouldn’t cost me a lot.
Third: at least some of the recipes need to be reasonably quick or reasonably hands-free. I like having some cookbooks and some recipes that are very time and focus and effort intensive, but a good reference cookbook for general use should have a lot of quicker recipes that people can actually prepare on a weeknight evening.
Another thing: it needs to be able to physically lay flat on a table. If a cookbook can’t do this, I’m frustrated with it. This isn’t an absolute do-or-die rule, but I have passed on cookbooks that couldn’t lay flat on a table. This is important because I often have them in the kitchen, open on a table before me, and I don’t want to deal with cookbooks that won’t stay open. Spiral binding is good, as are most thick hardbacks. Paperbacks and some thin hardbacks are often terrible (but not always).
It’s worth noting that the list below is only a selection of our overall cookbook collection. We have a lot of cookbooks we’ve collected over the years and I’ve found value in all of them, but they’re not all ones I would directly recommend for someone aiming to have a few good general purpose cookbooks for a frugally-minded kitchen. They’re either incredibly focused (like Egg by Michael Ruhlman, which is more than 200 pages of incredible detail on various ways to prepare eggs) or loaded with complex recipes that I wouldn’t really recommend to someone who wasn’t at least somewhat adept in a home kitchen.
Here are a bunch of cookbooks that I recommend for any frugally minded home kitchen, even for people completely new to home food preparation.
How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman
If I were to make a single cookbook recommendation for anyone who is starting to cook at home, it would be How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, hands down. It works as a tutorial on how to cook at home, starting with extremely basic recipes and techniques that I would trust my nine year old to do and building from there. It also works as a pretty robust reference for basic techniques and recipes for a lot of things you might cook at home. The recipes are simple to follow and just work, plus any techniques are explained extremely well. I turn to this by default when I’m figuring out the basics of making something at home; there’s a decent chance that anything I can think of that isn’t really esoteric is probably discussed in this book. The ingredients are never unusual or hard to find and the recipes are almost always a breeze to follow. There’s almost nothing else I could ask for in terms of a single cookbook for the beginning and intermediate home cook.
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian is basically the same cookbook with the sections on meats removed and replaced with additional material for preparing plant-based meals. Our family mostly eats vegetarian for health reasons, so this one has actually seen more use over the last few years than the original.
The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer, Marian Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker
Our copy of The Joy of Cooking looks like it has been beat to death. It has a handmade paper “dust cover” on it because the cover was actually partially burnt while in use. It has spills on it in several places. Some of the index pages are unreadable.
How did it get into that state? It was used – hard.
I would describe The Joy of Cooking as being a similar combination of techniques and recipes as How to Cook Everything, but with a step up in complexity and with a rather quirky tone in places. While there is definitely a lot of overlap in content between the two books, The Joy of Cooking definitely gets into more complex recipes and techniques and covers some things that How to Cook Everything doesn’t touch. It also tends to make some more assumptions of the reader, assuming you know a lot of basic techniques in the kitchen. It’s not overwhelming, but it’s a good “next step” after How to Cook Everything.
I tend to use How to Cook Everything for a quick reference for basic weeknight meals or weekend lunches. I turn to The Joy of Cooking for weekend meals when I’m trying to make something amazing, or when a weeknight meal isn’t turning out like I want. The Rombauer/Becker clan usually has the answers I need.
The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison
Much as how The Joy of Cooking is a great “next step” all-around cookbook complement to How to Cook Everything, The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is a great “next step” all-around cookbook for vegetarian food to How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. In fact, The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is probably my most referred-to cookbook over the last few years as my family has transitioned slowly to an almost entirely vegetarian diet.
Again, what makes this book excel is the strong focus on technique, the clear explanations of everything, and the wide range of topics in a single volume. There are a ton of techniques and recipes and ideas and variations and “what to do with this ingredient” jammed into this book, and thus it functions as my default for figuring out what to do with a bunch of excess radishes (for example). While I find that How to Cook Everything Vegetarian is more accessible for quick weeknight meals, The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is invaluable for weekend cooking when I have more time.
If you’re a vegetarian (or nearly so) and at least somewhat experienced in the kitchen, this is the best single volume to have, in my opinion.
Ratio by Michael Ruhlman
Ratio is probably the most unexpected choice on this list as it is probably the least like a traditional cookbook, but I felt strongly compelled to include it here because it’s done so much to help mold how I actually cook frugally in my kitchen.
The idea behind Ratio is that almost everything you prepare in a kitchen is essentially just a proportional mix of a few things by weight. For example, pancake batter is a ratio of 2 parts liquid, 1 part egg, 1/2 part butter, and 2 parts flour. You can then vary these as you like – use whatever flour you want, use a variety of liquids for the liquid part (milk, yogurt, and so on), use butter alternatives for the butter, and so on.
Basically, the entire book is a framework to encourage you to experiment in the kitchen. It gives you a bunch of principles to stick with, then basically says “Go try this.” There are a few bits and pieces that hold your hand, but much of the rest of the book is just general frameworks and a few tips here and there.
This book gave me the courage to experiment in the kitchen, and to understand that even if something doesn’t turn out as you imagine, it’s usually good if the ingredients are good and you learn something, too. More than anything else I’ve ever read, it made me feel unafraid to try new ingredients and just start throwing together meals from the pantry in a pinch. Yeah, some of the things I’ve made have been weird and a few have been downright bad, but most have been quite good, a few have been amazing and well worth repeating, and it has eliminated most of my kitchen fears of “I can’t do this” or “This will be disastrous.” I still refer to it all the time for some starting points and ideas.
Good and Cheap by Leanne Brown
The entire purpose of this book is to present a variety of tasty and fairly healthy recipes trimmed down to the lowest cost possible, hence the subtitle “Eat Well on $4/Day.”
This is the best single cookbook I’ve seen if your focus is on keeping your food costs as low as possible. Most of the recipes are very simple and straightforward, which means that this book is really good for someone who is new to cooking at home.
I often turn to this one during times when we’re trying to really trim our food costs and “get back to the basics” for a while. I also use it as a nice parallel to Ratio, because this book does a great job of pointing to inexpensive ingredients that work well together that I can plug into some of the ratios from the other book. In other words, Good and Cheap serves wonderfully as a jumping off point if you’re wanting to keep costs low but want to start experimenting more and building confidence in the kitchen.
This one is available as a free PDF, but I have the nice compact print version on my shelf.
Love Your Leftovers by Nick Evans
This is the reference book when it comes to leftovers. How do you store leftovers? How do you cook to maximize the utility of leftovers? How do you deal with texture changes? What are good ways to remix a ton of different common leftovers? That’s what this book addresses, and it does it very well.
This book is usually the first place I turn to when I have some leftovers from a meal and don’t know what to do with them, or I have a ton of a particular ingredient that’s going to go bad and I want to have some ideas of what to do with all of this if I cook all of it.
This leads directly into a book on a similar topic…
The Complete Make-Ahead Cookbook by America’s Test Kitchen
This is the best single book I’ve found on meal prepping and preparing parts of meals in advance. I use it as a reference whenever I’m doing a big meal prep or I want to try to prepare something new for freezing.
To be clear, meal prepping means that you’re making a complete meal in advance and freezing it at a mostly-finished point so that it can easily be pulled from the freezer and popped in the oven to finish cooking. This means that, for example, you could make a few pans of lasagna on a lazy Sunday afternoon, then just finish cooking it in the oven on a busy Thursday evening, giving you a great home-cooked meal.
There are so many little useful tips in this book. It’s just full of little things that have refined what I’m doing whenever I’m making meals in advance. For example, the realization that I should put scrambled eggs in the fridge when making breakfast burritos and then pull them out to assemble the burritos cold is genius, because the eggs will “sweat” during this process and if you use a cloth or a paper towel to absorb that “sweat,” your actual breakfast burritos won’t be nearly as “wet” when you cook them later, turning them from soggy messes into deliciousness.
While we’re looking at America’s Test Kitchen offerings…
Slow Cooker Revolution Volume 2 and Healthy Slow Cooker Revolution by America’s Test Kitchen
Let’s start with the obvious question: where is “Slow Cooker Revolution Volume 1”? The reason I don’t rely on that one is that most of the recipes in it require a lot of steps, and that’s the very thing I don’t want when making meals with the slow cooker. For me, almost all of the time, the slow cooker is a tool of convenience, so I don’t want complex recipes that require a lot of steps.
On the other hand, Slow Cooker Revolution Volume 2 and Healthy Slow Cooker Revolution really nail what I want from a slow cooker reference book. It explains strategies for cooking lots of different types of things in the slow cooker and offers a bunch of simple recipes for actually preparing things.
These two books are my default reference for things to do with the slow cooker, which we use frequently during busy parts of the year.
The Homemade Pantry by Alana Chernila
This is probably the most “off the beaten path” book on this list, but I’ve used my copy so much that I feel like I almost have to include it here. It became a portal for me into a world of fermented foods, homemade condiments, spice mixes, and all kinds of homemade foodstuffs, and it’s still the best one-volume coverage of those topics I’ve found.
If you’re interested in taking your home food preparation to the next level and making a lot of the basic ingredients for meals for yourself – sauces, condiments, spice mixes, and so forth – from very basic ingredients, this is a great starting point and reference. While this can definitely save you a little money and can definitely result in some tastier dishes, this is probably not a great time investment unless you’re really into this as a hobby.
Use the Library!
To close, I want to repeat what I said earlier in the article: use the library for these books! Don’t just go out and buy them! See if your local library has a copy, take it home, go through it, and try some of the recipes and techniques for yourself. See if it clicks for you. If it does, then, and only then, look for a copy of the cookbook, preferably a used one.
That being said, these books are really the core pieces of my cookbook library and the ones I continually turn to. I have quite a few other cookbooks that focus in on narrow topics, like the aforementioned Egg, several books on fermentation, a book about sous vide cooking, and so on, but these are the ones I rely on for a wide variety of low-cost home cooking strategies. I hope you’ll find some of them to be useful, too.
Good luck!
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