Following my highly anticipated* return to blogging, I decided to tackle a classic personal finance topic- a daily cup of coffee shop coffee Telling people to forego their daily store-bought coffee used to be popular advice. It was the common example used to show how small savings add up over time. You could take $3/day, save it, and have an extra $1095 at the end of the year. Then you can feed it into investments…
The Commonwealth of Tax-achusetts has given us a sales tax free weekend every year since 2018. The name is pretty misleading, because there’s a whole host of purchases that are still taxed. And anything more than $2500 is also still taxed. Unfortunately, Tax Free Weekend for Cheapish Things Only doesn’t have the same ring to it. I read a few local news articles on the event and they all talk about saving money. Or flat…
I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich almost every week day for lunch from high school through grad school. I loved them. Through high school and college (as a commuter), my parents supplied me with plenty of food. Even though I had other options, the sublime combination of salty peanut butter and sweet jelly was impossible to beat. It helped that it was also the easiest lunch to make at 6 am when I…
When I was a kid, I loved the Percy Jackson book series. It’s a great introduction to Greek Mythology with all of the action and intrigue to keep a middle school boy interested. In the first installment, The Lightning Thief, Percy Jackson and his companions end up stuck in the Lotus Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Here, the characters are convinced by the casino staff to eat a lotus flower. The lotus flower causes them…
There’s a notoriously low bridge on Storrow Drive in Boston. The clearance is only 10 ft. There are warning signs for trucks leading up to the bridge, but some drivers ignore them. And then, they get Storrowed. The lucky ones stop in time and have to back up or get wedged under the bridge. The unlucky ones have their roofs ripped off. The obvious lesson is to pay attention to road signs that warn of…
After years of bribery, I mean lobbying, a bunch of states legalized sports gambling. That includes my home state of Massachusetts, where sports gambling apps recently launched. Now wherever I go, I’m inundated with gambling ads. They play every other ad on sports radio. I see them on TV and on websites. There’s even a sports gambling billboard that I see on the way home from work. These aren’t plain ads either- A list celebrities…
The sun was about to set as my dad and I pulled into the parking lot. A dozen or so fishermen were standing on the rocks, casting plugs into the water- a good sign. This was my fourth trip to the Cape Cod Canal and hopefully, my first fruitful one. As we tired out lures onto the lines, I noticed the quiet. Looking down the shoreline, I saw that all the fishermen had left. Definitely…
We just wrapped up two years of Frugal Jon. And I’m confident that year three is going to be the best yet. I have good plans of what I want to write about. More on that later. Right now I want to step through how year two went, compared to year one. There were certain points this year when I felt like a real writer and the blog had some wins. But there’s plenty of…
My wife and I are halfway through paying off student loans. When the federal student loan payments were paused due to the pandemic, we made a different decision than most. Instead of using the money that was going towards the federal loans for something else, we added it as an extra payment towards the private student loans. We also made a couple lump sum payments along the way. This decision to pay the private loans…
I divide personal finance planning into short term, medium term, and long term categories. By thinking in different time frames, it’s easier to see if I’m meeting all my financial goals. Each time period serves as a different metric. The short term period tells me about our immediate financial health. The medium term time period is about saving for larger purchases, like a house or planning for eventual car replacements. It’s a measure of intentional…