This Guy Makes Six Figures as an Electrician — No College Degree Required

Yes, We Know it’s Not 1987, but You Still Need to Know How to Write a Check

Writing checks: not really a popular pastime anymore.

We live in a world where we can pay with a debit or credit card for just about everything — and in some cases, simply swipe a phone over a payment terminal before whooshing out the door. Sitting down every month to write out checks for your utility bills? A thing of the past.

But while we wouldn’t exactly encourage a resurgence of check writing, we would advise you to learn how to write a check. Many people don’t learn how to do this until college, so don’t feel bad if you’re turning to us for help while shielding your computer screen from passersby.

The chances are good that the time will eventually come when you need to write a check. Maybe it will just be a monthly rent check. Maybe it will be a down payment for something exciting, like a car or a house. Maybe you’ll be feeling benevolent and want to write up some snazzy-looking birthday gifts.

Go wild. After all, it’s your checkbook — and your money.

Are you wondering how to write a check? It’s easier than you may have worked yourself into thinking. We’ll show you the parts of a check and how to write one.

Here Are the Parts of a Check

What are all these lines, boxes and numbers? Stop guessing. We’ll tell you!

1. Your info, including your address and sometimes your phone number
2. The check number for your reference.
3. The date line
4. The recipient line
5. The payment amount line
6. The payment amount box
7. Your bank information
8. The memo line
9. Your signature line
10. Your bank’s routing number
11. Your checking account number

How to Write a Check

Writing a check is easy if you know these steps.

1. Write the Date in the Upper Right Corner

Note the month, date and year. Usually, this will be the date you are writing the check.

If you want the recipient to wait until you have money in your account before depositing the check, you might postdate the check. This is probably best served in personal situations.

You might also postdate a check if you’re paying ahead of time for a service. For example, if my rent check is due on the first of the month, but I mail my check on the 15th of the previous month because I’m going on vacation, I would postdate my check for the first of the next month.

2. On the Line That Reads ‘Pay to the Order of,’ Write the Name of Whomever You’re Paying

If you’re not sure of the correct title or business name, ask before writing out the check to ensure they can deposit it. Never leave this line blank when you write a check — you risk someone taking the liberty of finishing writing that check out to themselves!

3. Write the Amount You’re Paying by Check

This will take place on the line directly below the payee name. You might write “twelve dollars and eighteen cents,” or “twelve dollars and 18/100” — either is fine as long as it’s clear how much you’re paying. If your writing doesn’t take up the whole space, draw a straight line through to the end of the field so no one else can edit what you wrote down.

By the way, you’re doing this in pen, right? Pencil is too easy to alter. We used to be advised to write checks in cursive, but now, writing in pen is enough to indicate legitimacy.

4. Write the Same Amount in the Box on the Right Side of the Check

Yep, it’s time to write that payment amount again, this time in digits. Noting the amount in two ways ensures it’s correct.

Be sure to fill the whole box so the amount can’t be altered. It’s more important to align your amount all the way to the left side of the box so no one can change your $12.18 to $112.18.

5. Write a Memo, if You Choose

In some situations, the recipient may ask you to provide identifying information on your check, like an account number.

6. Sign the Check in the Bottom Right Corner

Your recipient can’t deposit the funds unless you’ve signed!

Lisa Rowan is a writer and producer at The Penny Hoarder. She still writes a lot of checks, but never (ever!) in public.

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, one of the largest personal finance websites. We help millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. In 2016, Inc. 500 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the No. 1 fastest-growing private media company in the U.S.

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Can This Simple Mathematical Rule Minimize Investing Regret?

I recently read a great book called “Algorithms to Live By” by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. It’s a fascinating look into how computer scientists have been devising solutions for life’s thorniest conundrums.

Some of the most interesting – and most difficult – problems ever solved dealt with what’s called “optimal stopping.” The answers help us figure out when to stop a search, be it for a romantic partner, an apartment, or even an investing strategy.

How Optimal Stopping Problems Work

Imagine you’re hiring for an open position at your company. You want to make sure you hire the best candidate possible without it consuming all your waking hours, but you also need to make sure you see enough options to be confident you’re making the best choice. By definition, the first applicant you see will be the best one so far — but that doesn’t mean you should hire him or her. There could be an even better candidate out there. But, how many people should you interview? Five? Ten? One hundred? When do you stop?

While it might be hard to imagine, there is a statistically correct answer. You should interview 37% of the available candidates, and then hire the next candidate who’s better than the rest you’ve seen. It’s counterintuitive, but the math backs it up (I won’t get into all the equations, but further reading on that front can be found here).

This answer is counterintuitive because it means that even when following the best possible strategy, you’re going to have a 63% failure rate. That is sobering. If you’re anything like me, you’re thinking that is simply unacceptable. Despite what those computer geeks say, I would just know when I saw the best person.

But, it’s been proven time and again that our intuitions are not up to the challenge. It’s a sobering realization, but an important one. We all only have so much time on this earth. We can’t spend it all trying to find “the one,” as much as we think we’d have perfect success if we were only able to see every possible candidate. That is simply an inefficient, risk-averse way to living life. We’d do better to look for a certain period of time, and then leap once we reach the 37% threshold.

How the 37% Rule Can be Applied to Investing

While learning about the 37% rule, I couldn’t help but see the parallels to investing. A perusal of personal finance message boards across the internet are filled with some version of the following question:

“I know I shouldn’t have all my money sitting in a low-interest savings account, but I just don’t know what to do with it. What investing option should I choose? There are so many options and I’m scared I’ll pick the wrong one. Help!!”

These people are suffering from “analysis paralysis,” which is the tendency to think and think and think until your brain is so jumbled that it’s easier to just do nothing and forget about the issue altogether.

Thankfully, when approaching this problem through the lens of a computer scientist, we are able to take the emotion out of it. If these people applied the 37% rule, they could ease their mental burden.

A simple way to do this would involve a bit of reading. First, they could go to the library and check out 10 of Wiley’s “Little Books” on investing. Each of these short books contain a different investing strategy.

The books will not address every contingency. But, they have one thing in common — they get your money out from under the mattress and into income-producing assets. They are also well-written and easy for the layperson to understand.

Start with something that catches your eye, and read it. It won’t take that long. The books are are all designed to be quick reads. When done with the first, move on to the next one that interests you. After the third book you’ll have both a better understanding of your options and broad knowledge of investing in general.

You are now 30% of the way through your search. That means the 4th book will push you over the 37% threshold. So, after the third book, you will officially transition from “look” mode to “leap” mode. There are seven books left in your stack. You should now implement the strategy from the next book that appeals to you. Maybe it will be the 4th, 5th or 6th. Maybe you make it all the way to the end, in which case, given the constraints of this experiment, you simply implement that strategy. Boom. Done.

That might seem scary, but again, this is not about finding the “best.” The best literally does not exist, except in hindsight. All this strategy does is get you to the “best yet,” which is all you can hope for.

There are people who will argue that, “Sure, it’s easy when dealing with hypotheticals, but this is my life savings we’re talking about here! I can’t just read a couple short books with that kind of money at stake.”

We nerds have empathy for that type of thinking. It’s trickier to apply the 37% rule to problems that have many variables and which are tremendously important. But, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. You just have to do the best with the knowledge you have, which, surprisingly, is all that even the most advanced computer algorithms are doing.

Kind of like how the famous Dr. Strangelove “learned to stop worrying and love the bomb,” we must “learn to stop worrying and love the math.” If you’re behaving rationally and leveraging over 70 years of knowledge from some of the greatest mathematical minds of all time, what is there to regret? Nothing is ever perfect, and the perfect is the enemy of the good.

You Can Still Be Flexible

Optimal stopping doesn’t end with your choice of investing strategy. If you choose a path and your circumstances change, then by all means, change your approach. Depending on your age and risk tolerance, your new strategy can take many different forms. You might be excited by the high risk and high returns of a 100% stock portfolio, you might crave the security of investing in U.S. Treasurys, or maybe you want to use an established “robo-advisor” that will create and manage a set-it-and-forget-it portfolio for you. Low-cost target-date funds are another solid option for people who don’t like monitoring their finances.

But, as you try new things, the same optimal stopping formulas apply. If you’re quite experimental, and you have it in your head that there are 20 strategies you want to try, then pick the next strategy that fits your temperament after having tried seven options (as 37% of 20 is 7.4).

Changing investment strategies means incurring costs. The taxes and fees associated with switching things up will eat away at your investment returns. That’s why it’s common advice to pick something and then stay the course. If you’re applying optimal stopping principles, you should stay the course after you’ve considered 37% of a selected group of options.

Summing Up

Every day spent living in fear of the financial markets is a day you could be earning interest on your money. Sure, there are strategies in hindsight that could have earned you more money had you adopted them, but by definition you can’t know that in advance. All you can do is trust the process. The one surefire way to lose is to do nothing at all.

If you think about things as if you were solving a thorny computer science problem, you might be able to see that there is an optimal time to end any search. The 37% rule can help you both get started on your investing journey and let you know when it’s time to stop tinkering and enjoy the ride.

Related Articles:

• Seven Reasons You Need to Start Investing Right Now
• 10 Things You Need to Do Before You Start Investing
• Seven Books for Building a Whole-Life Perspective on Your Money

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How This Mom is Helping Others Find Legitimate Work-at-Home Jobs

Sara Sutton Fell has more than 20 years of experience in the online job market industry. She is the CEO and founder of FlexJobs, an innovative career website specializing in telecommuting, flexible, freelance and part-time job listings. Sutton Fell is a graduate of UC Berkeley and currently lives in Boulder, CO. Find out how Sara got started […]

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10 Fun and Frugal Ways to Beat the Rain on Vacation

You’ve spent months planning the perfect vacation, and it’s finally here. Your bags are picked, the kids are bouncing off the walls, and you’ve finished up loose ends at work. Once you make a final trip through the house, you can pretty much lock up and go.

Unfortunately, bad news is on the way in the form of inclement weather. Upon checking the forecast, you find out there’s a good chance of rain for much of your trip.

I’ve been there – you’ve been there – we’ve all been there: Dreams of sun, sand, and surf washed out by pouring rain. But what do you do? Pack up the car and head back home? Or, do you forge ahead and have fun anyway?

Obviously, most of us would choose the latter. After all, imperfect weather can’t take away from the fact that you’re away from work and spending time with the ones you love.

The best anyone can do is find some fun and frugal ways to kill time and have a blast until the weather cooperates. This can be a little tricky, though, when you’re away from home – and your go-to rainy day activities, like art supplies and video games. Here are some of my family’s strategies for having fun on vacation, regardless of what’s going on outside.

#1: Visit the public library.

Believe it or not, you can find public libraries away from your hometown. Nearly every place you’d visit in the U.S. has one, including coastal resort destinations, big metropolitan cities, and rural areas.

While you can’t check out books without a library card, you can browse what’s available, find a cozy nook and read, or even watch movies at some libraries. Better yet, most libraries have free Wi-Fi, and many have free audio books.

Check out the local library website to see what’s going on, including special activities for kids, film screenings, or even concerts or speaker sessions. While you may not want to spend your entire vacation at the library, many locations offer enough interesting activities to keep everyone occupied for a few hours at a time.

• Related: 6 Money Lessons I Learned from My Kids

#2: Swim indoors.

Does your hotel have an indoor pool? If your kids are like mine, they are more than happy to kill a few days swimming and playing water games with each other or with new friends.

If your hotel or condo doesn’t have a pool, you can also look to see if there are any water parks or public swimming pools nearby. If you can find an affordable water park or pool that’s indoors, you’ll have no trouble keeping the kids busy and entertained.

But what about the adults? You can swim, read a book, or sit back and watch the kids have fun.

#3: Visit a local museum or aquarium.

Most major tourist areas offer a handful of museums and aquariums. If the weather isn’t great, either of these options can offer a fun way to spend the day.

While museums can introduce your children to science and nature, different types of art, parts of our history, or local culture, aquariums can also be educational and awe-inspiring. Better yet, both of these options can be affordable, depending on where you are.

If you’re a member of a museum or aquarium back home, check to see if the one you’re visiting has a reciprocal arrangement with your hometown institution before you pay full price. For example, members of the Museum of Science in Boston can get free or discounted admission at more than 400 other science centers, aquariums, and zoos across the country by flashing their membership card.

#4: Visit an arcade.

Arcades can help you kill time for sure, but they may not be cheap. Depending on where you’re at, it’s fairly easy to spend $20 or more per kid on tokens or tickets for games.

When we wind up in an arcade for a few hours, I try to turn it into a miniature money lesson. I usually give the kids $5 to $10 apiece to spend on games, while imparting the idea that, once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Since different games can cost different amounts to play, the kids can learn to stretch their budgets to play games longer. Or, they can blow through their stash of coins right away. Trust me, both of those things have happened!

The rest of the lesson comes when they go to redeem their tickets for those cheap prices I can’t stand. Once again, the kids have the opportunity to stretch their tickets to try to get the best “prize” they can.

While visiting an arcade isn’t the world’s most frugal activity, it can sure salvage an otherwise bummer of a rainy day in a touristy vacation spot. Set spending limits before you go, and you should be okay.

#5: Take the family rollerskating.

A few years ago, we took our kids to a skating rink during the rainiest day of our beach vacation. While it took my husband and me a while to figure out how to skate without hurting ourselves, the entire experience was a blast!

It was also inexpensive, even though we bought drinks and snacks while we were there. If your vacation destination has an old-fashioned roller rink, you should definitely give it a try.

#6: Go to the movies!

Whenever it rains on vacation, the local movie theater is usually our go-to activity. There’s something especially fun about seeing a movie on vacation – when there’s no work or chores waiting at home. The best part is, this is an activity the whole family can do together.

To make it more affordable, avoid the pricey snacks at the theater and bring your own instead.

#7: Play cards.

A deck of cards is small and lightweight – easy to pack on any trip – but holds everything you need to play literally hundreds of different games, from simple, kid-friendly classics like Go Fish or Slapjack to Rummy, Hearts, or Bridge. Care to make it interesting? Play poker with pennies, or bet with little snacks like Goldfish or Skittles. UNO, which uses its own deck, is another great card game for families with young kids.

#8: Go out to eat.

Going out to dinner is a time-honored tradition on most vacations, but it’s also a good way to kill time when the weather isn’t great. If you’re looking for a fun way to spend an evening eating up food and time, try a restaurant with an especially lengthy dinner presentation. For example, look for a hibachi restaurant where your food is cooked live in front of the table. Or, try to find a dinner theatre where you can see a show and enjoy a meal at the same time.

#9: Go bowling.

I always ask my husband why we don’t go bowling more often. Not only is it fun, but it’s cheap, too! We’ve gone bowling on several different trips, both because the weather was bad and because the kids love it so much.

The best part about bowling is that it’s usually inexpensive. Plus, everyone can play regardless of their skill or ability.

#10: Relax.

Here’s a final activity that’s therapeutic, good for the soul, and free. For once in your life, sit back and relax. Watch movies or television with the kids, or sit back with a cup of coffee and do nothing at all. While this might sound boring, name the last time you just sat around with your children for an entire day. If you’re like most busy parents, it’s probably been a long time!

So, sit back and do a bunch of nothing. You’ve got your entire life to run errands and do housework and chores, but your vacation time is ticking away.

Instead of feeling compelled to fill every day of vacation with a new activity, set aside a few rainy hours to play a board game or sit around and talk with the kids.

Chances are, spending time with your family was the main goal of vacation anyway.

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

Related Articles:

• 50 Free Activities for Kids
• Why I’ll Never Feel Bad About My Vacation Spending
• Start Saving for Your Summer Vacation Now
• 12 Frugal Summer Vacation Strategies from Our Family’s National Park Vacation

How does your family kill time on vacation when it rains? What would you add to this list?

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12 Things You Can Do With Dryer Sheets Besides Use Them for Laundry

Pub, eatery coming to Mohegan Sun

A new pub and eatery is coming to Mohegan Sun Pocono in Plains Twp., according to an announcement for employees posted on a Facebook page by president and general manager Tony Carlucci.Its name is still being finalized, Mohegan Sun Pocono spokesman Cody Chapman said.It will open near the main valet and will feature Irish fare, “premium beverages, unique Celtic decor and an open air ambience” and entertainment on the weekends, Carlucci said.According to his [...]

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To Eliminate ObamaCare Stress the Three Cs: Choice, Competition and Cost Reduction

How do Republicans get a hold of the three keys they need to oust ObamaCare?

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Nine Skills Worth Teaching Your Children to Build Personal and Financial Independence

Two days ago, I posted an article entitled Nine Skills Worth Learning for Any Career – and How to Learn Them. The goal of the article is to point to some fundamental skills that have value in almost every professional situation and offer some suggestions in how to cultivate them for yourself.

As I was putting the finishing touches on the article, my oldest son walked up behind me. He’s a middle schooler these days and is beginning to really think about the world and his place in it in many interesting and surprising ways. Anyway, he asked me what I was writing about and I summarized it for him – it’s all about skills that are useful in professional life, regardless of your job.

He looked at me for a minute with that look in his eye that he gets when he’s thinking, and then he started asking questions. In his roundabout way, the idea he was trying to seek out was this: what skills should a kid growing up have to be able to be a successful adult? He didn’t state it in those words, but that was the output of the conversation.

I gave him some ideas and then turned back to my laptop to finish the article, but in my mind, that question started to float around. What skills should he really be learning to be ready to become a successful, financially independent, and personally independent adult? Even more than that, what can I be doing right now to start teaching him these skills?

After some thought, I came up with a healthy list of skills that I felt I could help build in my children (or, more accurately, I am actively helping them build) with the end goal of helping them to develop into financially and personally independent adults. As with the previous article, I combined them down into nine skills that can be built in older children, preteens, and teenagers, each of which sets them on a path to financial and personal independence from their parents.

What’s the value in this? If you are a parent, the independence of your children has a huge bearing on your financial future. If you continue to provide housing, clothing, food, and utilities for your child into adulthood, you’re incurring a great deal of financial expense during the years when you’re really going to need to be preparing for retirement. This is true even if it extends to “financial outpatient care” – in other words, giving your children money during their early professional life.

The best possible financial outcome for a parent is a fully independent child who may actually be able to aid the parent in the future. To achieve that, parents should be taking action now to develop traits of independence and self-sufficiency in their children.

Here are nine skills that you should be helping your children and teenagers to master, along with two or three specific tactics for bringing out those skills.

Skill #1: Project (and Time) Management

This is simply the ability to take on a task that will take longer than one work session. It’s something that you’ll have to put down and come back to later, and perhaps come back to again and again.

To an extent, children get a taste of this through things like music lessons and sports training, but it doesn’t prepare them for things like writing a report (in college or in an office environment), finishing a work project, or taking on a home improvement task.

This ties deeply into time management, something which will come somewhat naturally once they have a grasp on the idea that big tasks should be broken down into smaller ones and tackled one at a time. Once that concept becomes second nature, time management fits well right on top of it.

So, how do you help your children develop project management and nascent time management skills?

Strongly encourage them to take on large scale challenges in their hobbies and areas of interest.
If your child has a particular area of interest, encourage them to take on a project within that area of interest that’s bigger than what they can finish in a single sitting. This requires them to break down the project into smaller pieces to be able to complete them successfully. Using a hobby or area of interest helps your child find the focus and purpose needed for such a project.

For example, all of my children have taken on large-scale LEGO building projects. My daughter has taken on some elaborate art projects that have taken several sessions to complete. This summer, my son is taking a course on his own – without parental or classroom encouragement – to master cursive handwriting. Those types of things encourage the ability to handle large projects and break them down into simpler pieces.

As they grow older, give them large scale tasks to work on and let them develop a plan on their own (with some gentle guidance from you).
For example, I might give one of my children the task of redecorating and cleaning their room so that guests could potentially sleep there. I might give one of them a task such as reorganizing the children’s book collection and figuring out which ones to keep and which ones to donate to the library such that the collection fits on one shelf. At that point, I leave the child to complete the task on their own, letting them know that if they run into difficulty, they are quite welcome to ask for guidance.

With those kinds of tasks, they become responsible for coming up with a plan for success on their own. The solution is not ready made for them and the plan is going to take some time to complete.

The interesting part? They’re drawn to these kinds of independent tasks. They’re almost always much more interested in taking on tasks that allow them to be independent and to effectively control this larger task. This teaches them the value of autonomy and also helps them master it in an environment where they can ask for help easily if they get stuck.

Skill #2: Work, Money, and Negotiation

The basic concepts of working to earn money, paired with the fact that negotiation is a key element of improving the work environment and improving one’s pay, is a key part of a financially and professionally successful life. Money will not be handed to you in life, and the financial rewards you get for your work will be low if you don’t advocate for yourself.

Putting your children in a position to intimately understand the connection between hard work and reward is a key part in helping them build a work ethic. Encouraging them to negotiate on their own behalf and giving them opportunities to do so is helpful, too.

How do you help your children develop these kinds of professional skills?

Give your children the opportunity to earn a little money by taking on additional chores beyond the normal requirements.
One great way to do this is to have a “jobs board” where they can take on tasks that you list for a financial reward. These should be tasks that go above and beyond normal household chores – you shouldn’t be rewarding them for taking out the trash or loading the dishwasher. Instead, rewards might be put in place for weeding the entire tomato patch or paring down their toy collection or thoroughly vacuuming and dusting a room and cleaning the windows.

If they take on such a job, you can and should judge the results for quality, pointing out areas where they need to improve. In fact, most of the time, the first result isn’t “accepted” unless they did a truly stellar job. The purpose is to teach them that a quality job is necessary to earn pay.

Encourage them to negotiate better terms on their own behalf, and give them a mix of successes and failures.
When you offer a task for a certain pay level, that should be the starting point most of the time. Your children and and should negotiate for a better rate, because being advocates for themselves is going to be vital in navigating the adult world.

Encourage your children to negotiate for a better rate. Guide them when it comes to negotiation, using techniques such as basic persuasion and use of evidence that they deserve a better rate. They don’t always have to be successful here, and they shouldn’t be, but they should see some success when they come up with a persuasive argument. You should also counter-offer sometimes, adding additional factors to a chore for that better offer they’re seeking.

Enforce some basic budgeting constraints on all money that they earn (and allow those to be a bit negotiable, too).
When they earn money, this is a perfect time to teach the basics of budgeting and the value of saving. Rather than simply allowing them to spend the money freely, you should act as a “401(k)” for them and put some of the money away for a future goal. Perhaps you can incentivize this and offer matching funds for what they save out of their income (though my children really figured out how to maximize that one).

You can also use this opportunity to encourage self control by encouraging them to save money for short term goals in a piggy bank, so that they know there’s money sitting right there and have to exhibit some self control to achieve the goals they want. My oldest son’s experience in saving up for a Nintendo 3DS was very valuable in this regard, as was my daughter’s efforts in saving up for a tablet.

Skill #3: Character and Integrity

Having a good reputation is priceless, and character and integrity are the foundation of a good reputation. Having character and integrity means that you don’t have to “fake it,” but that a good reputation comes completely naturally.

A good reputation makes it easy to fit in well in the community. It becomes so much easier to make new relationships, to find help when you need it, and to help steer a broader community in a positive direction when needed. It can keep coworkers on your side, encourage positive office politics, and make it much easier for you to earn raises. Plus, it simply makes the world a better place.

It’s up to you as a parent to teach your children integrity and character. Here are two key things you can do to relay those characteristics.

Value elements of strong character – honesty, empathy, responsibility – over perfect obedience and perfect choices, and don’t punish when those elements are present. When your child shows character, reward it. When they’re honest in the face of being in trouble for a mistake, be lenient with the punishment and laud the honesty. When your child mildly disobeys you in order to show empathy for others, like being slow in returning home because they were helping someone in the moment, compliment the empathy rather than punishing the tardiness. Put a heavy value on responsibility and reward it when they show it.

Be an example of character and integrity in your own life so that your child sees character and integrity at work. Children learn many elements of character from their parents, as you’re their primary adult role model whether they directly admit it or not. Thus, it’s up to you to demonstrate character and integrity in how you live your life. Strive to be the best person you can possibly be in all avenues of life so that when your child is looking for an example of how to act, they see a person trying – and often succeeding – to act with character and integrity. Be honest. Be empathetic. Be courteous and polite to others. Be responsible. Own up to your mistakes. Be the person you want your child to be as an adult and they’ll do their best to mimic you, even if you don’t always see it.

Skill #4: Physical and Mental Health

Physical and mental fitness simply means taking regular action to maintain and improve one’s physical and mental state. You can always improve your body and your mind by taking action to exercise each of them and to remove burdens of stress from them.

Not all children are made the same way, of course, and your individual child may have different needs and standards for physical and mental fitness. Your goal should merely be to encourage their own efforts in improving and maintaining their own physical and mental health and fitness.

Here are three things you can do to encourage both physical and mental fitness in your children.

Encourage your child to participate in some type of regular physical activity as well as some type of intellectual hobby. For example, my oldest son enjoys taekwondo, soccer, and reading, a list that’s mirrored by my daughter, who also chooses to practice the piano. You’ll often find them practicing taekwondo forms on their own or practicing their soccer moves or curled up somewhere reading a book of some kind. We encourage these hobbies and try to discourage ones that are less mentally and physically engaging, like watching junk television programs.

Avoid overburdening them with too many activities. It’s easy to get into a pattern of “oversubscribing” your children, either to bolster a resume or to have them try lots of things. Having some free time and down time – and learning how to self-manage that free time and down time – is also a vital element of mastering the autonomy of the adult world. Rather than oversubscribing your child, limit the activities they’re in and encourage excellence in the areas they choose. This also eliminates a lot of stress from their life – and from your life, too.

Teach them how to accept and use failure rather than fearing it. It is often tempting to protect your children from failure, but learning how to fail is perhaps one of the most beneficial lessons a child can learn. When they fail, don’t try to remedy that failure, but also don’t strictly punish that failure. Instead, talk about what can be learned from that failure. You can teach this all the time. I often do it when we play a game together, for example. If I lose, I’ll actually say out loud, “Hmm.. why did I lose? What did I do wrong?” This encourages thinking and self-improvement rather than disappointment and self-doubt. It moves the locus of control inwards, which is a key part of managing successful independent adult life.

Skill #5: Social and Relationship Skills

One of the most powerful skills that a child can build is social skills and relationship skills. How do you go from a room of people you don’t know well to a handful of strong relationships?

In school, children often form friendships simply because of forced time together. They eventually have to get to know each other a little bit because they’re forced to do so by the constraints of school. To a somewhat lesser extent, this happens at college and in some workplaces, but in many careers and especially in the community, people are often left on their own.

Knowing how to build relationships and maintain them, whether it’s professional relationships or friendships or romantic relationships, is a skill that people often don’t master. For some, it comes naturally, but for many, it’s a challenge. One of the most powerful skills you can build in your child for a successful professional, personal, and romantic life is the ability to build relationships from scratch.

Teach by example by putting yourself in social and relationship situations with your children and show best practices in those situations.
You can start doing this by actually going to community events with your children and meeting people there. Go to a church and get involved, or find a civic group where your family might be welcome. Take that first step yourself, with your family in tow, and start building those relationships. One good way to do this is to explain, on the way, what it is that you’re going to do there, and encourage your child to watch. “I’m hoping to get to know some people in the community today. I’m going to do that by introducing myself to people and having conversations and, hopefully, connecting well with a few of them.” Then, actually do this. Your children will view this practice as normal and it will serve them well in future social situations.

Talk through common relationship and social situations at the dinner table, at bedtime, on car trips, and other situations. How do you handle abrasive people at work? How do you handle a friendship that’s drifting apart? How do you handle a dispute between lovers? Don’t be afraid to talk about these situations with your partner and with your family. Bring them up, go through some potential solutions, and talk about how they might and they might not work. Put those solutions into practice, if needed, and then relay the results later. These types of conversations can be the basis for powerful learning.

Skill #6: Emotional Awareness and Self-Control

One of the most challenging areas in adult life is emotional control. As we’ve all witnessed, many adults often fail in this area, but those that master it (at least most of the time) tend to find success financially, socially, and personally. They learn how to keep their emotions in check and make decisions rationally rather than emotionally.

This is a skill that children can and should begin to develop early on. Most parents do this to a certain extent to avoid things like tantrums, but that’s just the beginning. Learning emotional awareness and self-control is a lifelong journey and it’s valuable for parents to help their children on that journey beyond the toddler tantrum years.

Here are two simple strategies you can use to build this skill in your children.

Encourage them to step back when they’re feeling an emotional rush (whether positive or negative) and practice this yourself.
This is a practice I’ve found incredibly useful with my daughter, whose emotions often come right to the surface in many situations. I simply gently encourage her to “time out” of the situation for a bit; sometimes, I’ll go sit down with her somewhere, while at other times I’ll encourage her to just chill out by herself. This isn’t really a “time out” in that I don’t treat it as a punishment in any way, just a moment to calm down and make a better choice. She’s started to actually do this on her own, and I have spoken positively about her doing this on her own many times and have even lightly rewarded her for doing so.

Strongly encourage them to actively postpone decisions that are full of emotion so that they can be considered with a cooler head.
This is something of an extension of the above practice. Basically, if you’re in a situation where you’re making a decision and you feel a strong emotion – anger, desire, frustration – then it’s an indication that you should step back from that decision if at all possible and make it later after giving it some thought. Again, I do this myself in front of them when possible and I strongly encourage them to do it as well. My oldest son has become a master at this – he rarely makes any sort of meaningful choice until he’s had a chance to calmly think about it. This didn’t come automatically for him – it’s something he’s learned and built over time – but it’s something that’s going to be very valuable for him going forward.

Skill #7: Shopping

This skill is a highly practical one, but simple mastery of this skill will save your children a tremendous amount of money in their life. Simply knowing how to plan ahead a bit for shopping and how to shop around and compare items on the shelves (virtual or otherwise) is an invaluable skill to have, one that will keep you from buying a lot of unnecessary things and will help you find good prices on the things that you want.

Shop together for things and use smart shopping techniques so they can see the benefits of them.
Quite often, I take my kids to the grocery store on small trips and literally talk through the entire process. I explain why I’m going to the store, what items are on my list, and how I decide which ones to buy. This is a great time to show off comparison shopping, like comparing two boxes of garbage bags in one store and then comparing that price to the price in another store to figure out which one gets us the cheaper bags.

I often do the same thing when shopping online, especially when it’s a purchase that may be relevant to them. For example, if we’re selecting a gift for their mother on her birthday, we’ll discuss what to buy first and then look for that item in various places to compare prices. Sometimes we find a new idea, but we don’t impulse buy – instead, we research the new idea a bit and shop around for that item. My favorite result here is showing them how much money we’ve saved by shopping around rather than just clicking buy or heading to the checkout at the first store.

Openly discuss purchases before going into a store so that you have a plan before you ever enter the store.
This is the “grocery list” part of going to the store. Before we ever set foot in any store, whether a brick-and-mortar grocery store or Amazon or anywhere else, we have a plan for what we’re going to buy. We’re going there for a purpose, not just to browse, and that purpose is set before we ever visit the place, ideally with some specific detail of what we’re looking for.

Why? Doing this cuts off a lot of impulse purchases. When you go to a grocery store with a list, your focus is on the list, not on the variety of items on the shelves. If the list is thoughtfully created, it contains everything you need so you don’t have to debate whether you should buy some random item you spot on the shelves. This is something I point out to them – if they spot something on the store shelf that’s not a part of our plan, I can simply say that we didn’t plan for that item and maybe we can think about it and get it next time.

Skill #8: Meal Preparation and Planning

This actually runs in parallel with the above skill. Again, I consider this a skill of high importance during the early stages of independence – knowing how to feed oneself inexpensively can make an enormous difference when it comes to surviving independently on that first entry-level job, and it can make a huge impact on financial success later on, too. It’s a skill that will serve them throughout their independent life, and it’s one you can start teaching at home right now.

Doesn’t this fall into typical household chores? For some families, it does, but for many families, the routine is oriented around going to restaurants, picking up takeout food, or making prepackaged meals. That’s an expensive (although convenient) routine to fall into, one that will add greatly to the burden of the early steps of independent living. If your child knows how to prepare meals efficiently and at a low cost, they’re going to have a much lower food budget and will find independent living, particularly in the early stages, much easier.

Here are two things you can be doing right now to teach this skill to your children.

Let them handle meal planning and preparation entirely on their own (within a reasonable budget).
Just hand the entire meal plan over to them for a week and see what they come up with. Guide them through the general process – look at a grocery flyer, see what ingredients are on sale, think of meals that use those ingredients, find recipes, plan the meals, make a grocery list from that meal plan, buy the groceries, make the meals – but let them handle all of the specifics along the way. Give them a reasonable budget to work with.

This is a great exercise for a week during the summer when your children may have more time for pulling these things off. Naturally, you can help as much as possible, particularly in terms of suggesting recipes or showing them how to find recipes, and also in some of the food preparation.

Let them try doing this with some budget constraints or ingredient constraints once they become adept.
Once they’ve managed to pull off the previous project a few times, add a few constraints. Make them come up with meals that take fifteen minutes or less to prep. Have them use a slow cooker. Have them use some of the ingredients already in the pantry to base their plan around. Have them make a meal plan on a very tight budget.

All of those things are valuable learning experiences. They’ll learn to be resourceful with their food. They’ll learn lots of ways to cook different things. They’ll end up feeling like they can handle almost any food situation. When you feel like that, dinnertime becomes inexpensive and rather fun.

Skill #9: Self-Reflection

This is the last skill on the list (well… sort of), but I consider it to be the most important. It’s a skill that my parents and my grandmother embedded in me in their own way growing up and it’s the single most powerful skill I learned from them.

Self-reflection simply means that you are willing to step back from your life regularly, look for areas where you can improve without beating yourself up, and then strive to improve upon them. It’s a constant honing of yourself into a better person, step by step. It’s a way of evaluating your mistakes and making sure you don’t repeat them and making sure that they don’t turn into large disasters.

Here are two techniques you can use to turn this into a regular practice for your children (and for you).

Have thoughtful dinner table and bedtime conversations that encourage introspection.
Almost every dinner we have together as a family involves some sort of introspective question. “What was something you wish you had done better today, and how can you do it better next time?” “What did you do today to make yourself better?” “What relationship in your life did you improve today and how did you do it?” Everyone shares something around the table and it ends up being a learning experience for all of us because many of the stories launch great conversations.

If you’re not sure how to do this, just think of something you’d like to reflect on a little bit in your own life, reform it into a question, then ask it at the dinner table and get it rolling by volunteering your own story. I often think about this before dinner, where I come up with this kind of introspective question and my response to it. Responding first gives people an example to think about and gives them time to think about their own life a little bit.

Encourage setting aside a bit of time for daily self-reflection.
Most nights, I encourage our children to each write in their journal for a little bit before bed. I often do it with them, if it works out. I just have them write down a couple of things they’re grateful for, one thing they messed up on today, and how they can do it better going forward, and one thing they want to remember about today if they want. Four or five sentences is plenty, because the valuable part is the thinking.

Simply add this into your nighttime routine. Your children really don’t have to write much here, just enough to record a piece of their thinking. It’s the reflection that counts.

The Final Lesson: Less Helicoptering, More Free Range

If you hope that your children will one day be truly independent, you need to give them progressively more control over their choices, their actions, and their day-to-day lives. They need to learn how to manage their own time, make their own choices, set their own priorities, and navigate their own difficult situations. As they grow, you need to gradually become the copilot and then the flight instructor and then something more akin to the air traffic controller, and the earlier you begin that transition, the better.

Yes, they’re going to fail. Yes, they’re going to make mistakes. Your role should be to show them how to make better choices and how to stand back up when they make mistakes and fail. You should not give into the temptation to make those choices for them or to shield them from failure, because if you do that, they won’t be prepared for the real world.

Here are five things you can do to foster that kind of independence and self-reliance.

Let them handle the details as much as possible, only asking you for help when they need it. Let them dress themselves. Let them manage their own laundry. Let them manage the state of their own room, only requiring a cleanup when presenting it to guests. Let them decide how to manage their homework, only requiring them to have a homework “session.”

Encourage them to ask you for help, but don’t provide that help unless they ask, even when they seem to be headed for failure. Naturally, you’ll want to teach them at first, like a child learning how to ride that bicycle, but when you start removing your hands from the handlebars, let go. Don’t keep holding on because it feels good to you. Let them ride freely.

Don’t punish them for honest questions. Encourage them and reward them instead.
When your child tackles a challenge on their own, figures out where they’re stuck, and then independently asks for help, that’s a moment to be rewarded because that’s a moment they’re acting like a functional adult. That’s the model of behavior you want to encourage.

Don’t ever discourage them from coming to you when they run into a difficult situation. Never, ever turn a request for help or a sincere question into punishment, even if it’s a confession of a transgression of some kind. The fact that they understand that they’ve made a mistake and they’re trying to fix it is evidence that additional discipline is probably unhelpful.

Rely on natural consequences as much as possible.
Quite often, parents rely on discipline of various kinds to enforce certain behaviors. The truth is that those disciplines rarely work in terms of correcting those behaviors. What truly works is the natural consequences of bad choices.

This isn’t to say that discipline isn’t sometimes warranted, but quite often the natural consequences of a bad choice, on their own, serve as punishment enough for a bad choice. Many children (including myself, when I was a teenager) are more bothered by the fact that they’ve disappointed a parent than they are by any punishment that’s doled out.

The most effective punishment that was ever given to me wasn’t a punishment at all. I borrowed my parents car one evening and stayed out far later than I should. Rather than grounding me, my parents simply showed their disappointment. When I asked to borrow the car the next time, they simply said no, because they didn’t trust that I would bring it back when I said that I would and that they couldn’t trust my word now. That made me rethink things far more than any “punishment” ever could. Why? They treated me like an adult and let me see the consequences of violating their trust as an adult, rather than resorting to “grounding” which amounted to treating me as a child.

Have lots of open and honest conversations about how to navigate daily life as an adult.
Don’t be afraid to talk through your thought processes as you figure out how to handle something in your life or as you work through a normal process. When they’re younger, talk through the steps of doing dishes or doing laundry. When they’re older, talk though the thought process of paying bills and whether or not you can afford to go out to eat.

Bring your children into these decision-making processes, too. Don’t just provide an answer; let them make up their own answers and then talk through them, whether they’re right or wrong. Let them see the results of their attempts at solutions to adult dilemmas, as often as you can.

Be a “good adult” yourself.
This is the best advice of all. Even when you think they’re not watching you, your children are observing you and using you as a role model for adult behavior. What kind of model are you?

Be the kind of adult you want your children to become, as often as you possibly can. If you’re doing something that would bother you if you saw your children doing that same thing as an adult, stop doing it. That’s an indication that you’re not acting like the kind of adult you want your children to be.

Be the person you want them to become and they’re much more likely to become something like that person.

Some Final Thoughts

The key thing to remember about this list is that it’s intended to give children the functional foundation they need to be financially and personally independent. There are many life lessons that they will still need to learn to achieve a high level of financial and personal success, such as money management, retirement savings, and so on.

The important thing to remember here is that with these skills, they’re going to be prepared with the underlying elements they need to want to learn things like money management, like retirement savings, and so on. These skills are all about introspection and independence and planning, which are the bedrocks of personal finance. Once those things are at the core of who you are, the ideas of budgeting and saving for retirement come naturally.

My goal, as a parent, is to raise truly independent children, both for my own sake and for their sake. This means leaving them in a position where you feel as though they’ll make it just fine when you drop them off at the door of their first apartment. Will they have mastered everything they need to know? Of course not. Your job was to give them the tools they need to survive at first and also to pick up the other things they need as they go.

If you can do that, you’ll have independent, successful children. My own experience with my parents, my own experience so far with my own children, and the research I’ve done into successful parenting points me toward these strategies as being the most efficient way of achieving that goal.

Good luck on your own parenting journey!

The post Nine Skills Worth Teaching Your Children to Build Personal and Financial Independence appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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25 U.S. Cities That Millennials Can Afford — and Actually Want to Live In

Meal Kits Are Basically a Terrible Deal for Anyone Who’s a Vegetarian

Meal kits don’t necessarily save you money in the long run, but they do save you time, which could be just as valuable.

But what if you’re a vegetarian? You may think you’d end up saving some money compared to your carnivorous friends, but that might not be the case.

According to a Time MONEY study, if you want to get the best value ordering meal kits, you might want to think twice about that vegetarian meal.

Vegetarian Meal Kits Don’t Save You Money

MONEY tested six of the most popular meal kits to determine which one provided the best value. The meal kits were from Blue Apron, Green Chef, Martha & Marley Spoon, Plated and Sun Basket.

All six meal kits allow customers to pick between meat and vegetarian meals. Taking a closer look, though, MONEY found the meal kit companies didn’t adjust their prices to compensate for the lack of meat in the vegetarian kits.

The article cites a study by the Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition that found that vegetarians typically save a minimum of $750 on food compared to people who eat meat.

When it comes to meal kits, though, there are no savings. MONEY reports consumers pay about the same amount ($10 to $15 per person) for a meal kit regardless of whether it includes meat.

So, if you’ve been trying to hack the system by ordering vegetarian kits and adding your own discounted meat at home, you’re not helping yourself any. And if you’re a vegetarian, you might want to think again before ordering meal kits.

Kelly Smith is a junior writer and engagement specialist at The Penny Hoarder. Catch her on Twitter at @keywordkelly.

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, one of the largest personal finance websites. We help millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. In 2016, Inc. 500 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the No. 1 fastest-growing private media company in the U.S.

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Using Venmo to Receive Freelance Payments? You’re Risking Everything

If you’re using the same Venmo account to repay your friend who covered the tab after a night of drinking and to request payments for your side gig clients, you might want to stop. Immediately.

According to a report from Consumerist.com, skirting the rules laid out in the terms and conditions of peer-to-peer apps could mean losing out on cash with no protection if you’re ever a victim of a scam.

The Verge laid out a perfect example of how this can happen through a story about a group of California photographers who were scammed out of $25,000 in camera equipment.

A scammer, who went by the name Andy Mai, used Venmo to pay for cameras the photographers were selling online. Likely using stolen credit cards, the scammer transferred thousands of dollars into the victims’ Venmo accounts. Once the victims saw the money, they thought it was OK to hand over the equipment.

Within 24 hours, the cameras were gone, the Venmo accounts of the scammer and the sellers were suspended, and Venmo stopped the stolen money, some of which had already been transferred to the sellers’ bank accounts.

And the sellers had little recourse.

“Venmo is designed for payments between friends and people who trust each other,” a representative told The Verge. “We strongly caution Venmo users to avoid payments with people they don’t know, especially if it involves the sale for goods and services (like event tickets and Craigslist items).”

“These payments are potentially high risk, and can result in losing your money without getting what you paid for.”

Got a Side Gig? Here’s What This Means for You

Here’s the deal: If you’ve got a side hustle or you’re a full-time freelancer, the idea of giving up a percentage of your hard-earned cash just to use a merchant app like PayPal or Venmo’s business tool can seem unfair.

You worked hard for this money. The 2.9% plus 30 cents PayPal wants from you can feel like too much.

But according to Consumerist, it’s simply the cost of peace of mind. When you use a peer-to-peer payment app instead of a merchant app — even if it’s just to sell your old camera after upgrading to a new one — you’re taking a risk that could cost you big.

Here’s the bottom line: A good Penny Hoarder saves where they can, but it’s not really saving if you’re risking your cash with every transaction.

Desiree Stennett (@desi_stennett) is a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder.

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, one of the largest personal finance websites. We help millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. In 2016, Inc. 500 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the No. 1 fastest-growing private media company in the U.S.

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Here’s What Happened When One Woman Faked Engagement Just to Get Discounts

Two of my best friends are engaged. I’ve seen them get fawned over in public by pretty much everyone: servers, cashiers, retail workers.

“Oh my gosh!! What a gorgeous ring!!”

“So who’s the lucky fella?”

“Here’s 10% off — congratulations!”

I usually sit there feeling awkward when this happens. I’m not engaged. I’m also stumbling financially (thanks, student loans), so seeing them pay less for the same things I’m buying just because they have rings on their fingers baffles me.

One lady had an idea, though: She pretended to be engaged to reap the benefits that come with it.

How One Woman Faked an Engagement to Get Discounts

Lisa Ryan’s article “I Faked Being Engaged for the Discounts” is quite the conversation starter.

Ryan chronicled her experiences buying a fake $15 engagement ring and pretending to be engaged so she could get discounts on group exercise classes. According to Ryan, boutique fitness establishments offer bridal discount packages to help brides-to-be get in shape for their big day.

To make it as believable as possible, Ryan even went as far as making a fake wedding page on The Knot. She was committed.

Her fake engagement got her $100 off a membership to barre fitness classes.

While a fake engagement could seem like a harmless, fun way to cash in on some discounted goods, some people might not find it so amusing.

Branndon Coelho, lead developer at The Penny Hoarder, compared it to pretending to be a student or teacher or saying you’re in the military just to get a discount. In his eyes, doing that would would be looked down upon — so Ryan’s stunt should be, too.

“I don’t really care what others do,” Coelho wrote. “But I’d prefer they were honest.”

Gretchen Lidow, Pinterest specialist, felt a bit differently. She agreed that it probably isn’t ethical, but she found it amusing, nonetheless.

“I actually think the whole extravagance surrounding weddings is appalling,” Lidow wrote.

Is Our Obsessions With Weddings Out of Control?

While it’s interesting that Ryan easily secured the $100 discount (all she did was call and say she was getting married), her experiences wearing her fake engagement ring bring forth deeper issues.

The obsession with weddings in our society, in general, is a hot topic, and those who are married or engaged are often treated differently.

Ryan describes interactions with complete strangers as suddenly full of kindness and genuine interest. Her recollection of a conversation with another woman at a fitness club about her “engagement” says it best.

Ryan writes: “At first, it felt like an interrogation — When are you getting married? Where are you getting married? How’s planning going? — until I realized that, no, she was actually just being nice, a phenomenon I’m not used to in New York. As it turns out, once you’ve got a ring on your finger, people are simply nicer to you in general.”

I’ve written before about the financial disparities single people face. However, while we aren’t showered with free gifts or handed tax breaks, we still save a bit because we aren’t forking over $35,329 on average for a wedding or a lump sum for a ring.

However, Ryan’s casual willingness to fake her relationship status shows that the obsession with marriage is now falling outside of the soon-to-be bubble.

She even goes as far as trying on wedding dresses and starts wearing the ring more often, even in places where she couldn’t get discounts. At one point, she describes watching the ring glisten when the subway car broke down.

At first glance, this article is a humorous account of a single woman ridiculing society’s obsession with marriage. Taking a deeper look, though, shines a light on the pressure single people face in day-to-day life — both financially and socially.

Socially, our worth is still partially measured by whether we’re married. Millie Kerr explains it best in her article “Single People Should Get to Have Weddings, Too.”

Ryan’s example of being treated more kindly by random strangers attests to this — what would they have said to her if she didn’t have a ring? Would they have even reached out to make a genuine connection with her? Also, would she have gotten free drinks at the bar if she wasn’t wearing her fake engagement ring?

So, if you were quick to decide that Ryan was wrong for lying about her relationship status, you might want to reconsider: Is it really her lying that’s wrong, or is our obsession with weddings and marriage the real culprit here?

Kelly Smith is a junior writer and engagement specialist at The Penny Hoarder. Catch her on Twitter at @keywordkelly.

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, one of the largest personal finance websites. We help millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. In 2016, Inc. 500 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the No. 1 fastest-growing private media company in the U.S.

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This Is the Class-Action Suit Nickelback Fans Everywhere Have Been Waiting for

If you and your friends were shakin’ it to Britney Spears in concert in 1999, those tickets may pay off again. Can you say “Hit Me Baby One More Time”?

Ticketmaster has just released free ticket vouchers for Live Nation concert events, as well as special discounts, to customers who bought tickets from its website between Oct. 21, 1999, and Feb. 27, 2013.

Sound familiar? Ticketmaster announced a similar voucher-based settlement last year, but this is a new one with vouchers that are good through June 2020. Otherwise, it has the same lackluster benefits.

Because Ticketmaster charged exorbitant fees and had other shady practices that made you pay far too much for your tickets, you may get these benefits:

• A discount code worth $2.25 off future ticket purchases.
• A discount code worth $5 off your shipping if you have UPS deliver your tickets. (Hello. It’s 2017. No one does this anymore.)
• A voucher good for two tickets at select Live Nation-sponsored concerts.

OK, at least you get two tickets out of it. Well, sort of. The vouchers work for very few shows in each market, and each show has only a limited number tickets you can get with a voucher.

What does that mean? It means you won’t have many shows to choose from, and you’d better be quick about it because free tickets will run out fast.

So what kind of shows are out there? If you want to see a show in Phoenix, you can choose between Matchbox Twenty on Aug. 2, Foreigner on Aug. 9, and Nickelback on Sept. 9.

Other venues look better with four shows in Dallas, and nine in Detroit. But if you’re looking for a show in Minneapolis, Chicago or Los Angeles, you’re out of luck.

The show list does get continually updated, so it pays to keep checking until you find a show that you like.

To find your vouchers, log in to your Ticketmaster account, head to “My Account,” and look for “My Vouchers.” If you qualified, you should find your freebies there.

The settlement may seem weak compared to the money Ticketmaster pilfered through those transaction fees, but at least it’s something. Keep your eye out for an artist you like, and rock out in concert for free!

Tyler Omoth is a senior writer at The Penny Hoarder who loves soaking up the sun and finding creative ways to help others. Catch him on Twitter at @Tyomoth.

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, one of the largest personal finance websites. We help millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. In 2016, Inc. 500 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the No. 1 fastest-growing private media company in the U.S.

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We Need to Talk About How Families Afforded $24K for College Last Year

My grandmother graduated from college 50 years ago and remembers paying $400 per semester in tuition.

Fast forward.

The average amount spent on college this past school year was $23,757, according to a recent Sallie Mae report.

That’s 38% higher than it was just 10 years ago.

How are families and students paying for this? Sallie Mae, a largely known student loan company, took a look by conducting phone interviews with 800 undergraduate students and 800 parents of undergraduate students.

Here’s How Families are Paying for College

We were wondering where that nearly $24,000 was coming from, too.

Here’s the breakdown of how American families paid for it:

• Students relied on scholarships and grants the most, raking in an average $8,390 to foot the bill.

• Another chunk of funding comes from the parents’ income and savings: $5,527.

• Shortly behind that was student borrowing at $4,551 per school year. Think: The $1.4 trillion dollars we currently owe in student debt.

• Rounding out the last bit was $2,569 from student income and savings, $1,819 from parent borrowing and $901 from relatives and friends.

All of that adds up to $23,757.

Have a College-Bound Kid? Here are Some Resources

If you’re wondering how you’re going to afford that hefty bill when your kid heads off to college, we don’t think you’re the only one.

We’ve got a couple of resources:

• Many students relied on scholarships and grants. Go ahead and send this list of 100 scholarships over to your student. Have them comb through and apply to anything and everything. Seriously.

  And apply for FAFSA. The student aid form’s completion rate actually continues to rise each year. Last year 85% of families filed. This year, it was 86%. If you don’t know where to start, here’s a guide that walks you through the process. If you qualify, this could be free money.

• Some parents start saving early. According to the Sallie Mae report, 13% of families use 529 plans. These are the prepaid plans you strike up when your kid is an infant, ideally. The amount amount of money families spent from 529 plans was $10,031 last year. That’s about half of tuition.Don’t worry. We explain 529 plans, too, and how to find the best fit for your kid.

• On student borrowing… Well, that’s been a popular topic lately, especially since we’re about $1.4 trillion in student debt. Let’s spend a little more time on this one.

Are You a Former Student Already in Debt? Consider This

Students are having to borrow more and more money.

In fact, students borrowed $1,375 more this past year than they did in 2015-16, according to Sallie Mae.

If you’re on the other side of those college gates and have your own stack of student debt, you’re probably cringing a little.

One fairly easy way to cut down that bill is to refinance or consolidate that debt, which will help with those crazy interest rates.

Here’s an example: John DePrato had $65,000 in student debt. He was paying $850 a month until he decided to refinance through a student loan refinancing site called Credible. It works like a online marketplace in that DePrato was able to shop around for the best rate.

He found it.

He cut his monthly payments down from $850 to $400.

More people out there have done the same, too. In fact, the average Credible user has $60,000 of loans and an interest rate of 7%. Once they refinance, they have an average savings of $18,668 over the life of their loans.

If you want to explore all your options to pay off your student loans, here are seven other strategies to consider.

Carson Kohler (@CarsonKohler) is a junior writer at The Penny Hoarder. As a former out-of-stater, she wished she only had to pay $400 in tuition…

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This DirecTV Code Will Let You Watch ‘Game of Thrones’ for Free for a Month

Have you felt left out when your friends, family and co-workers dish about the latest episodes of “Game of Thrones”? Now you can get in on the action — for free.

DirecTV Now, which usually offers weeklong trial periods for its packages, has a new promotion that stretches that free period to an entire month. At first blush, it seems like a deal that only applies to Roku users, but it’s actually for everyone.

Yeah, we definitely signed up. It’s free TV after all, and you know we love free stuff.

How to Snag This Free DirecTV Now Promotion

Don’t break out your Valyrian steel just yet. To take advantage of this deal, first you have to sign up for DirecTV Now service (again, ignore the Roku stuff). After you enter your email information, it’ll ask you to choose the package — pick the best one, because you can always just nix it next month. Also make sure to add all those premium channels, including HBO, Cinemax and Showtime, because they’re free for the month too.

Finally, enter your credit card information and the promo code ROKU1MONTH, and watch the total drop to $0. And don’t worry: We promise it’s easy to cancel online.

Now you can throw your own epic “Game of Thrones” party on a budget — minus that pesky cable bill.

Alex Mahadevan is a data journalist at The Penny Hoarder. He was way more excited to see Mastadon’s drummer than he was to see Ed Sheeran in “Game of Thrones.”

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, one of the largest personal finance websites. We help millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. In 2016, Inc. 500 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the No. 1 fastest-growing private media company in the U.S.

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Here’s How to Perfectly Optimize Your Infographic for SEO

Infographics are amazing!

Besides being one of the best ways to explain a complicated topic with ease, they make information come alive.

Research found,

people following directions with text and illustrations do 323 percent better than people following directions without illustrations.

Maybe that’s why “infographics are ‘liked’ and shared on social media 3x more than any other type of content.”

And the concept of relaying information through visuals is nothing new.

If you think about it, cave paintings and hieroglyphics dating back to 30,000 BC accomplished the same thing.

They were far less sophisticated but demonstrate just how hard-wired we are when it comes to visual information.

So it’s easy to see why infographics have become so ingrained in content marketing.

They get results!

Unbounce even went so far as to say “infographics are the most powerful tool in your content marketing arsenal.”

And like with any piece of content you create, you’ll want it to be SEO friendly.

But here’s the thing.

Doing SEO for an infographic demands a slightly different approach than the one you would use for a conventional blog post.

In this post, I explain the most vital components of infographic SEO to ensure yours gets proper visibility in the SERPs.

The biggest hurdle

Let me start by saying infographics are technically just images.

They are typically saved in image formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc.

Of course, they’re much more robust and contain far more information than a regular image, but that’s how Google views them.

This is important to know because Google can’t “read” images like it can text-based content such as a blog post.

Fortunately, there are several other elements that you can optimize.

Start with keyword research

You won’t be able to take advantage of keywords in the actual body of an infographic, but there are a few areas where you can insert keywords.

That’s why you’ll still want to do some keyword research to identify a primary keyword phrase as well as a couple of secondary phrases to target.

Let’s say I was planning on creating an infographic about productivity hacks.

A quick search on the Google Keyword Planner shows me that “productivity hacks” is low competition, which is good.

The only issue is that it’s a short-tail keyword with only two words.

But I could still probably make it work, especially if I added “infographic” to the end of “productivity hacks.”

In terms of secondary keywords, there are a few possibilities.

The bottom line here is to perform keyword research like you would for any other type of content.

The only difference is how you go about inserting those keywords.

File name

Selecting the right file name is vital.

This is one of the main factors that Google will analyze to determine what your infographic content is about.

You need to get it right.

I shouldn’t even have to say this, but you’ll obviously want to stay away from anything generic like Image001.png.

This tells Google absolutely nothing and is going to be a strike against your infographic SEO.

A better choice would be something like productivity-hacks-infographic.png.

It’s short and sweet and lets Google know exactly what your content is about.

Just make sure you’re not doing any keyword stuffing, using the same phrase multiple times or anything else that’s spammy.

But you already know that.

Alt text

Equally important is your alt text.

This is the text alternative of an image that lets someone know what an image contains in the event that it doesn’t load properly.

Screen readers for the blind and visually impaired will read out this text and thus make your image accessible.

More importantly, this gives you another opportunity to explain to Google what’s in your infographic.

Just follow best practices for your alt text and describe as succinctly as possible what your infographic is about.

In this case, I might want to use “Infographic explaining 15 productivity hacks.”

URL

Your URL is important for obvious reasons.

As I mentioned in a post from NeilPatel.com that referenced Google’s top 200 ranking factors from Backlinko, when it comes to the significance of URLs, here is what we know:

• URL length is listed as #46
• URL path is listed as #47
• Keyword in the URL is #51
• URL string is #52

I’m not going to cover the nuts and bolts of URL optimization here.

You can find that in the post I just mentioned.

But I will tell you that you want to aim for a short URL that contains three to five words and a max of 60 characters.

This advice comes directly from an interview with Matt Cutts, so you know it’s gold.

When it comes to keywords, be sure to include one or two of them in your URL.

Research from John Lincoln and Brian Dean found that this is the sweet spot and considered as part of URL keyword best practices (at least for the time being).

H1 tag

Although you can’t capitalize on the H1 tags (or H2s, H3s, etc.) in the body of your infographic, you can still place one above your infographic so Google can “read” it.

Here’s an example:

See how the same keyword phrase that’s in the actual infographic is used as an H1 tag at the top?

This is a simple yet effective way to give your infographic a bit more SEO juice.

While H1s may not be as big of a ranking factor today as they were a few years ago, they certainly don’t hurt.

And they can be especially helpful for infographics where you have a limited amount of text to work with.

Meta description

Ah, the good ol’ meta description.

Here are a few best practices to adhere to when creating one for your infographic.

• It should be between 135 and 160 characters in length.
• It should include your keyword phrase (once).
• It should accurately describe the content within your infographic.
• It should have a CTA at the end to encourage search engine users to click on your content.

Getting it just right should make your infographic go further with Google and help you rake in more organic traffic.

For more on creating a killer meta description, I recommend reading this post from Yoast.

Supporting text

I really like hacks, shortcuts, loopholes, etc.

Call them what you will, little tricks like these are what help you gain the edge on the competition.

And there’s one specific hack I would like to point out in regards to infographic SEO.

It’s simple. Add some supporting text at the beginning.

Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about:

Notice that it’s nothing fancy.

It’s just a few paragraphs that expound upon the infographic and offer a quick preview of what it’s about.

This is helpful for two reasons.

First, it provides a brief description for human visitors, which should hopefully pique their interest and make them want to check out the infographic.

Second (and more importantly), it supplies Google with additional text to crawl and decipher meaning from.

This helps your infographic get found and increases the likelihood that it’s indexed under the right keywords.

So it’s a win-win situation.

There’s no reason to go overboard and write 1,000 words of supporting text, but 100 words or so can be a great help.

An added plus is that you can throw in a couple of internal links to relevant pages on your website.

Don’t force it, but try to work in some internal links as well.

Load time

Back in 2010, Google announced that page speed was a ranking factor.

Content that loads quickly will get preference.

Not only that, a faster load time tends to translate into a lower bounce rate, more time spent on your site and so on.

The point I’m trying to make here is that you should be conscious of how long it takes your infographic to load.

Keep in mind that infographics are fairly bulky images, so this can definitely be a concern.

Generally speaking, PNGs, GIFs, JPEGs, BMPs and TIFFs load the fastest, so keep this in mind when choosing a file format.

You can also test the loading speed of your infographic with this free tool.

Just type in the URL.

Then click “Analyze.”

Google will analyze it and grade it.

If there are any issues, Google will provide you with specific advice for speeding it up.

Conclusion

Doing SEO for an infographic isn’t dramatically different from doing SEO for any other type of content.

It incorporates many of the same techniques and strategies.

The main thing you have to work around is the fact that an infographic is an image and therefore Google can’t “read” it like it can regular text-based content.

Fortunately, there are several ways to get around this and ensure your infographic is perfectly optimized for search engines as well as humans.

By covering all the bases, you’ll position it to climb the rankings and achieve maximum visibility in the SERPs.

Do you have any other recommendations for doing SEO for an infographic?

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