Hard Way Frugality

I remember it just like it was yesterday. It was on a hot summer day many years ago and a 14-year-old Joey traded 5 hours of back-breaking labor-intensive yard work for about $90 of cold hard cash. This newly obtained wealth was glorious.  A little suburban yard work was always a piece of cake for me. This is because the average lot size of a suburban yard in my neighborhood was just a tiny fraction when compared to the 10 acres of property I had to maintain growing up in the South East.  But I am getting ahead of myself. Here is a little context first. As a teen, I had a little side hustle lawn business in addition to my McDonald's job. I was killing it financially. I also played a little football in the neighborhood from time to time. Here is where things started to get a little tricky. One day, I was playing wide receiver. I had just caught the ball after an amazing throw. I then started running towards the goal for a touch down full speed ahead! One kid grabbed my arm ...

Greetings my financial cave dwellers. Today we tell a tale of a three-headed Dragon so deeply entrenched in our personal data we aren't even aware that we are being spied on without our consent. Yes, unlike the temptations of American consumerism, this fleecing of our personal data starts when we enter the world. The recent discoveries of the Equifax hack  where over 143 million people get their personal data compromised are just a preview of whats to come should the other two heads of this credit beast ( Trans Union, Experion ) get hijacked by the clever sorcerers of the internet also known as hackers.  And in some cases, these companies stand to profit by leaking your private information. For example,  Equifax has a "free" credit monitoring service. While the service is free for the first year, if you forget to cancel the service, Equifax will auto-bill you $17 per month. I could only imagine that millions of people will flat out forget th...

Hello Everyone,  Today's writing will be about gold. More importantly, is gold a wise investment alternative?  Instead of just writing about gold's performance, I am also going to dabble in a little speculation. This can be a risky subject because I am going to make a prediction based on history.  My prediction is strictly for entertainment purposes, please do not use my discoveries as a rational to gamble your hard earned dollar. Only time will tell how my prediction holds up. So I guess we will check back here in a few years and share my discoveries.  The purpose of this post:  Education is the focus here. I am writing about gold's performance over the last 100 years. The idea behind this post is to get us thinking about non-traditional ways of investing. Yes, investing in the Stock Market is generally a wise move. I personally have some of my retirement in the Stock Market. But I believe, we are due for another recession soon. I am not saying...

  So I saw that the new iPhone whatever is out. And the price tag is, hold your breath, $1000. Wow.. That is crazy. Keep in mind that I have already shown you that a more than capable smartphone can be purchased for $150 . Why it's a mistake to buy any smart phone for $1000:  It's simple really, sinking that much money into a depreciating asset is insane from a mathematical perspective because you are putting LOTS of money into something that is NOT going to accumulate value. Yes, you could make the argument that due to the nature of your work the device will enable you to earn more money than $1000 and you'd probably be right. But on that logic, you might as well buy a Corvette to drive to work since that can also help you earn money. So why don't we all buy cars we cannot afford? Well, aside from bankruptcy, we know it's not reasonable to buy a car with the Corvette price tag when we could simply purchase a Toyota Corolla or similar car. Yeah, t...