By Cortni Marrazzo
I am simply amazed at how much money certain “business opportunities” can end up costing. I put the term “business opportunities” in quotes because what I’m really talking about are multilevel marketing plans that disguise themselves as “business opportunities.” I am most familiar with one particular company (though I won’t name […]

By Shannon Christman
Big companies pay big bucks for advertising because they know it works. If you have a small business — whether a hobby business that earns you a little mad money or a full-fledged company that employs several people — you know advertising works, too. But you might not have enough money […]

By Shannon Christman
Creativity is vital for frugal living. No, you don’t need to be a poet or a sculptor to save money, but you do need to look at life a little differently from how most people do. One of the ways creativity comes into play when saving money is in problem solving. […]

By Shannon Christman
A number of people have pointed out that advertisements that insult consumers use these ads because they work and that I must be affected by ads, too. I agree with these comments. I never said that those particular ad strategies are ineffective, only that they are insulting. I also have nothing […]

By Cortni Marrazzo
Why is it that we can hear that promise again and again for different products, yet we still perk our ears up to find out what it is that is being advertised and if it really will change our life? We all want the magic cure to the inconveniences we face in life, […]

By Jennifer Derrick
I know most people are not techie geeks like me. They don’t want to get involved with the “guts” of their computers and the software that runs on them. However, if you do any shopping online, you need to know about cookies and how they can cost you money.
Cookies are tiny files, […]

By Shannon Christman
Advertising sells products. Yet, for all the time advertisers spend trying to make their products stand out, many ads don’t seem to be very well thought out. In fact, many of them have the opposite of the intended effect on me. More often than I would expect, I see an advertisement […]

By Meredith H. Kaiser
I, like every other teenager in America, learned about subliminal messages in high school. Determined not to be influenced against my will, every time I entered a dark movie theater I would steel myself against advertisers’ sly tactics. I was certain that “Buy Massive Amounts Of Buttered Popcorn And Obscenely Large […]

By Shannon Christman
My brother-in-law, whom I called “a bachelor with expensive taste” in a previous article, wants a retraction. He says “bachelor” is a slur. He prefers to be called “a single, successful marketing genius.” I will call him single and successful, but “genius” is pushing it. Yes, he does well […]

By Wixx, special contributing writer
I am sure that I am not the only person who did not bid on your auction because of one of these reasons. That means that you may now be relisting your item, or selling it for a lot less than what you could have. The following is a rant. […]