By Jennifer Derrick
Now that it’s spring and the government rebate checks are starting to roll in, many people are sounding like that old Super Bowl commercial:
“You’ve just received your rebate check! What are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to Disney World!”
If you decide to go to WDW this summer and you want to […]

By Jennifer Derrick
A friend and I were talking the other day about jobs and money (actually, we were whining about our jobs and money) and he brought up the concept of Voluntary Poverty. I’ve never heard of voluntary poverty outside of certain orders like monks and nuns, so I asked him to explain.
Turns out […]

By Jennifer Derrick
When many people today think of frugality they think of a life filled with deprivation and sacrifice. They think of people who are living on the fringe of society; people who make all their own clothes, eschew modern technology, aren’t knowledgeable about popular culture, and mail-order worms for their compost heaps.
While some […]

By Jennifer Derrick
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that gas prices are soaring sky high. As a result, many people are rushing out to trade in their older, larger, inefficient cars for newer smaller, more efficient models. But is this rush to trade really necessary, or even a good thing?
Certainly if you’re […]

By Jennifer Derrick
I’m a huge fan of daylight savings time. I hate the long dark winters and get excited when we make the transition to longer days. But beyond my joy at more daylight, the transition to daylight savings time also saves me money. When we moved to the longer period of daylight savings time […]

By Jennifer Derrick
This week I got sucked into jury duty. The last time I did it I was very young and didn’t really care about giving up a whole day to sit in a courtroom for just a few dollars. Heck, at that age they could have given me anything and I would have thought […]

By Jennifer Derrick
A neighbor recently announced that she was getting serious about getting out of debt and saving for her family’s future. “Good for you,” I said and meant it, right up until she started detailing her plan for becoming more frugal.
“We need to start staying home more,” she said. “We waste too much […]

By Jennifer Derrick
Even though I don’t watch a lot of television I, like everyone else, have had to look into converting my TV to digital so I can continue to receive my local networks after February 2009. While I don’t watch much, I do like to be able to see the news or PBS every […]

By Jennifer Derrick
A lot of people ask me: “If you don’t watch TV and you choose to limit movies, clubs, restaurants, etc. in order to save money, what do you do for entertainment? Aren’t you bored?” I usually look at them, dumbfounded, because to me there is too much to do and boredom is never […]

By Jennifer Derrick
I know several people who, rather than trying to deal with their finances, have simply thrown up their hands and declared that it’s impossible, so why bother. They say things like, “I owe so much I’ll never get out of debt so why pay anything?” or, “I don’t know where to start; it’s […]