David G. Mitchell

Why You Should Put Your Kids in Private Schools

March 22, 2017 By David G. Mitchell 30 Comments

There are a lot of discretionary expenses that we incur every day. Whether we spend more for a brand name product or save money on a generic product is entirely up to each individual buyer. Whether we should buy a new car or a used car or go without a car is also an individual decision. Indeed, personal finance sites are largely devoted to helping readers find ways to reduce discretionary spending without sacrificing quality of life.

So today you may find it odd that I am going to make the case for spending a lot of money for a service that you can otherwise get for free – private or parochial school for your children. I would have been surprised by such a notion until a few years ago, too. When my kids were young, I vowed that they would never go to a private school. Public education was rock solid in my opinion and I was willing to make that case to anyone who would listen. I was misinformed and my concept of public education was many years out of date.

Before I go any further, let me also add that my criticism of the public school system is not based on criticism of its teachers. Although both of my children now attend parochial schools, they did attend public school for a few years and we were generally very impressed with the quality of the teachers. Unfortunately, that was the only thing that impressed us.

Of course, I also would not criticize any parent who truly favors public school over a private or parochial education. Parenting is a very personal decision and I respect that. Nevertheless, if you are considering educational options for your kids, you might also want to consider the following reasons that we have for making private/parochial education our single greatest expense after our mortgage.

Less Violence: Our local public schools are “A” schools, as rated by our state. They also have very disruptive environments and, often, even violent environments. With larger class sizes and a wide range of academic abilities represented in each class, it is much harder for teachers to keep control. Harassment and bullying are very common. By comparison, we have found that in our local parochial schools, harassment and bullying are virtually non-existent. This results in a much better learning environment because there is no environment of intimidation.

Uniforms: Because private and parochial schools require students to wear uniforms, there is no arguing in the morning about whether clothing is appropriate for school. There is also no competition among the students to look the best. Uniforms make shopping for school clothes much easier and they cut down on the cost of clothing because a child wearing a uniform to school usually only needs two identical outfits (with one being worn and the other in the wash each day).

No State Mandated Testing: Private and parochial schools do not typically give the same assessment tests that many states (perhaps all) mandate for their public schools. As a result, private and parochial schools do not have to “teach for the test” and can emphasize a broader based curriculum. This allows each student to perform to his or her level without being held back by students whose performance has not yet reached its potential.

Improved College Transcripts: Based on the colleges that have accepted students from our local private schools, college admissions people give added weight to attendance at competitive parochial and private schools. Also, because private and parochial schools tend to offer a more rigorous curriculum than public schools, students attending private and parochial school should be better prepared for the demands of college.

Money Spent on High School can be saved When in College: We have neighbors who are not happy with the local public schools but they are adamant that they will not move their kids out of the public school system. Instead, they have saved a HUGE amount of money (with a goal of $500,000 by the time their two young sons are 18) so that they can send their boys to private colleges. We take a very different approach and would rather spend money (but much, much less than $500,000 – an amount that I cannot even begin to fathom) on primary and secondary education.

That is not to say that we don’t plan on helping our boys with college, but college can be much less expensive than private and parochial high school. We pre-paid our sons’ tuition in our state’s pre-paid college program many years ago. As a result, they can attend any of our state’s public colleges or universities without paying any tuition. Our pre-paid cost was about $7,000 per child and for that each will be able to attend a good four year undergraduate school, several of which are highly competitive. (Of course, they need to be accepted for admission, and that we will learn pretty soon!). Ultimately, we would rather pay for a solid education before college because we believe that without it, they will not be able to perform as well in college.

More Involved Parents: At our parochial high school, the parents are much more involved than the parents at our local public high school. The classes are also much smaller so it is very easy to get to know the parents and the other children. Of course, there are also a lot of great communities where the public schools can result in close-knit associations, but it is much easier to foster a sense of community in a small parochial or private school than in a larger public school (our local high school as 8,000 students as compared to 1200 at the local parochial high school).

One Free Night Per Week (Maybe!) When our sons were in elementary school, they had to attend religious education one night per week. After they left the public school, they received their religious education in class and thus we all got a free night that we otherwise would have spent driving kids to class. Religious education cost about $200 per year so that amount was also “saved” and could be applied to their tuition.

Each of us has reasons for the educational decisions that we make for our children. I do not stand in criticism of any decisions that you or your family members may make, but I do hope that if you can find a way to afford a private or parochial education, you will at least consider it. My wife and I make sacrifices to ensure the best possible education for our kids, and we are convinced that we have made a sound decision.

What do you think? Are private and parochial school worth the investment? Do you live in a community with public schools that are strong and that you would not consider leaving? Have you had a bad experience with a private or parochial school?

Photos: Public School Review and The Advocates

Who Should Pay When Eating Out?

February 13, 2017 By David G. Mitchell 16 Comments

I just enjoyed a delightful lunch with an old friend. I drove to her office and we walked to a nearby seafood restaurant where we were able to relax and catch up. It was quite a pleasure and I had a completely and thoroughly entertaining meal with her.

After we had finished our lunch, the server brought the bill over to our booth and presented it directly and undeniably to me. The server let there be no doubt as to who she expected to pay and it was clearly the male in attendance. On the one hand, I did not mind receiving the bill because I had fully intended to buy lunch since my friend had paid the last time we got together (and I don’t forget these things). On the other hand, I really felt that the server’s implied sexism was a bit out of date.

After my friend and I negotiated for a moment over who would pay — my friend arguing that the employed person should pay and me arguing that the person with custody of the tab should pay — I paid the bill (since possession always wins), and we strolled back to my friend’s office. As I drove home, I recalled a few amusing anecdotes that my friend had shared but my thoughts kept drifting back to the restaurant bill.

As a person who is supposed to be thinking about ways to save money, was I foolish to turn down my friend’s offer to pay? No — I did the right thing, but there are plenty of scenarios in which I would have allowed a friend to buy me lunch. If you have never thought through your strategy of “who pays?” here is how I break down payment obligations when two or more people dine out.

The Business Lunch

This is an easy scenario. Each party should pay his or her own way unless one party expresses otherwise. A service provider trying to court a potential client should certainly offer to pay and can probably justify the cost as a client development expense. A client who wants to reward a service provider for a job well done might also offer to buy lunch (or dinner) as a reward for a job well done. The assumption going into any business meal, however, should be that both parties pay their own way.

The Date

This is another easy one. Whoever asks another person to dine out as part of an established or desired romance should also bear the cost of paying. Personally, I understand that philosophy but I have never lived by it. I am perhaps a bit old-fashioned (and some would say sexist) in that regard but any time I went out on a date, I always insisted on paying. Fortunately, it has been twenty years since I was in the dating world so my attitude in this regard, even if it is old fashioned, can only get me into trouble on these pages.

Friends Getting Together

When friends get together for dinner or drinks or whatever, they need to find the payment model that works best for them. When I was in school, I ate at the same diner every night. My room-mate and I got the same meal every night and we took turns paying. If some nights one of us ordered a little more or a little less (appetizers, drinks or whatever), it did not matter, as we knew it would wash out in the end. At the same time, I had a famously cheap friend who (despite being wealthier than any of my other friends) always found a way to avoid paying when it came time to pay a bill. After about three months of his payment avoidance, I learned that we needed to ask for separate checks or I was going to be feeding him for the rest of his life.

Parents and their Children

Parents should pay for their kids until the kids can support themselves and then they should treat the meal as they would treat it among friends. I love to be able to buy things for my Dad but I know that he also likes to pay my way, too. When we golf — about 8 times per year — we alternate payment. Of course, he would like to pay every time, but at 82 years of age, he can’t beat me up the hill to the pro shop anymore.

What other scenarios do you encounter when you dine out? Have you ever been “stung” by friends and forced to pay for a bill that you had not expected — or wanted — to pay? When do you expect someone else to pick up the tab and when should you pay?

Photo: Martin Cathrae

Places Where You Can Score Free Coffee

December 12, 2013 By David G. Mitchell 5 Comments

When people talk about making small changes that can save a lot of money over time, the daily cup of coffee is often the example used. If you skip that $4 morning cup each day, you save $20 a week which comes to over $1000 saved for the entire year. The thing is, even if you skip out on buying the cup of coffee, your body is still going to crave it.

There are a number of ways to save money on coffee. I often carry a thermos of coffee (or tea, which I actually prefer) when I leave my house. A thermos provides me with about eight cups of coffee and that is more than enough to last as I do my daily errands. Nevertheless, sometimes a thermos of coffee is just not enough to satisfy my desire to get a hot beverage that I do not have to make for myself, so I decided to do some exploring. Surely there must be ways to get a free beverage somewhere nearby. Fortunately, I found several.

Bank or Credit Union

Local banks and credit unions often have coffee brewing in the morning. Some larger banking institutions do as well, but it seems to be more common for the smaller ones to do this than the larger ones. My local credit union even serves free doughnuts on Saturday morning which is a double savings bonus.standard

Library

While this isn’t a standard service that all libraries do (and they do offer a lot of other free services), I have been to more than one where there is coffee served in the morning. It’s great to be able to wake up with a fresh cup in hand as I browse through different books to see what I want to take home to read.

Local Bookstores

Much like the library, many local independent bookstores offer a pot of fresh brewed coffee each morning if you happen to still have one in business in your town. The larger chain bookstores tend to have chain coffee shops in them these days instead of free cups. Again, it’s a great way to get your morning fix and to spend some time looking for books that you might be interested in purchasing.

Hotels

Most hotels will have coffee brewing in their lobby in the morning, and many of them will have it available all day. You can go in and ask them about their rates and grab yourself a cup on your way out. Hotel lobbies are also a great place to get free wifi if you need it. If it is pass code protected, you can usually get the password from the person at the front desk if you ask nicely.

Building Supply Stores

Many building supply stores such as Home Depot and Lowes will have free coffee available in the morning for their customers. It makes sense. Most construction workers have coffee running through their veins. While it might depend from store to store if they actually serve it, my local Home Depot does.

Work

if you happen to work in an office where they offer free coffee, be sure to take advantage of it. While it’s not as common as it once was, there are still a lot of office coffee pots that run each morning. If the reason you avoid the office brew is because you never know if it’s fresh, use this easy cup/time trick that everyone in the office will greatly appreciate:

Restaurant Promotions

While you won’t be able to walk into a restaurant everyday and score a free cup of Joe, free cups are often a popular way to promote new promotions that restaurants are having. There are also holiday celebrations and specific days of the year that many fast food chains will promote free coffee. Stay on the lookout for these promotions and you can get free cups a number of times a year this way.

Grocery Stores

My local grocery store (Publix) has two large urns of freshly brewed coffee (regular and decaf) at the entrance to each store. I spend a lot of time shopping for groceries, usually visiting Publix at least 4 or 5 times per week as my first chore of the day. Conveniently, I can start my day with a cup of Publix coffee at no charge. My son will stop into Publix just to get a cup of coffee if he is walking by the store. Who says there no such thing as a free cup of coffee.

Decor Stores

This may seem a bit strange, but some furniture and decor stores will sometimes offer free coffee and tea samples. World Market is one that comes to mind. It make sense. With a free coffee in hand, you are more likely to stick around a little longer to look at what they have to offer. Just make sure you don’t buy anything that you weren’t already going to buy or that no-cost cup will quickly be quite expensive.

Gyms

Our local YMCA has an urn of coffee available to members every morning. I stop by on Saturday mornings especially (but I confess I have not worked out in a long, long time) and enjoy a cup while I am on my way to watch my sons play baseball nearby. The coffee tastes good and the price is just right!

Churches

When I was a young man, my friends and I mapped out all of the churches at which we could get free food on different nights of the week. At one point, a friend who was particularly aggressive in getting free meals managed to get a free dinner from the Hare Krishnas on Fridays, a vegetarian meal at a local Seventh Day Adventist church on Saturdays and another meal from yet another church on Sundays. I was less aggressive in that regard, but I did always manage to find churches that offered free coffee (and often ended up visiting events at a Unitarian church because they had the best coffee). Today, I can stop by the parish life center at my local church and find a free cup of coffee many days of the week.

Barber Shops

If you have to pay to get your hair cut, look for a barber shop or salon that offers perks such as free beverages. We have several local barbers who offer coffee, soda and even beer or wine while patrons are getting their hair cut. Admittedly, a patron has to be waiting for a haircut to get the free coffee, but if you have to spend money, you might as well get as much as you can for it!

Aveda Beauty Stores

If you are wandering around in a shopping mall and you have a thirst that you need to quench, Aveda beauty stores offer complimentary tea to patrons even if they are merely browsing.

Teavana

Teavana is a tea retailer with stores in thirty states. Although Teavana does not sell tea by the cup (bulk teas only, at least at my local store), they do offer several complimentary cups of tea in their stores.

Where do you go if you want a free cup of coffee or tea? Are there any stores near you that offer complimentary beverages while you browse?

(Photo courtesy of AtOMiCNebula)

Free Can Mean A Lot Of Things

October 12, 2010 By David G. Mitchell 3 Comments

Free can mean a lot of things. There are the free things that people leave outside their homes with signs that read “Free — Take Me Home.” I see a lot of those things in my subdivision, especially when people want to get rid of basketball hoops, but do not want to disassemble the pole, stand and backboard.

Then there are the things that your friends and family might offer you before they donate them to charity or throw them away. When people give you their junk, it serves two purposes. First, they get to eliminate junk from their home. Second, they know where they can find it if they ever need it again.

You can find free things by the side of the road, on CraigsList or outside of the English Department office at your college. Free things are everywhere.

Then there are the sort-of-free things. Those are far more intriguing, at least to me. For example, I recently went to Office Depot. I needed ink for my printer (always an unpleasant purchase because I print so much) and while I was there I picked up the weekly flyer. I was pleased to find that I could purchase a stapler ($13.99) and a set of magic markers ($7.99) and that both were subject to a full rebate.

Free. Right?

Not really.

Although I might be getting a $13.99 rebate for the stapler, I am still going to have to pay about $1.00 in tax and another fifty cents for postage and an envelope. Accordingly, my “free” stapler will still cost me about a buck fifty. That is still savings of over 90%, and a great deal, but it is not free. That said, I actually needed a stapler so I was eager to purchase the last one on the rack.

A lot of stores now offer “free” items that they advertize in their Sunday circulars. CVS seems to have a few free items every week. Recently, for example, I was able to purchase Right Guard Body Wash for $4 but my receipt, as advertized, included a $4 reward coupon that I could use on my next purchase. I still had to pay for the body wash but I was able to use the $4 reward coupon for something that I otherwise would have had to buy with cash so the effect was almost the same. Of course, I used my $4 coupon to buy another body wash and received, in turn, another $4 coupon. When I was done, I had purchased six packages of body wash for a total of $4 plus the tax on all six packages and I still had a $4 reward coupon to use on my next purchase. So that was almost free, except for the realization that I had still spent $4 plus tax, even though I could use a $4 coupon later on.

Stores use freebies to get buyers in the door. For that reason alone, it is well worth checking out the flyers in your Sunday paper to map all the freebies that you can get at area stores, especially drug stores and office supply stores — stores in which you may not regularly shop. Before you “buy” a free item, ask yourself whether you really need it. Spending $1.50 on a stapler that you will never use is a waste of $1.50, after all. Also, ask yourself if you have the discipline to mail in the rebate forms that you need to complete and to keep track of money saving reward coupons that you might not be able to use right away. If the rebates or the reward coupons expire before you take advantage of them, you may find that you have wasted a lot more money than you expected.

Where do you find freebies at your area stores? Do you take the time to find them each week?

Penny Experiment

October 5, 2010 By David G. Mitchell 2 Comments

Each time that I sit down to write an article, I never really know how it will turn out or whether it will be published. That sense of unknowing always takes me back to junior high school when I was always convinced that my papers just wouldn’t measure up to expectation. So far, I have been fortunate and almost every article I submitted here has been accepted (with the sole exception being an article I wrote about sex and money which, as Jeffrey explained it to me, was just too boring — a comment that troubled me for about six months after he shared it with me!)

As I write the column that I hope you are now reading, I hope that I have not found a second topic that Jeffrey will reject. That topic is Jeffrey himself.

Although we have never met in person, I’ve gotten to know Jeffrey over the past couple of years. He is a good fellow, full of ideas and has high ideals. More importantly, he takes his ideas and he executes them. As an example, he has taken his desire to be a force for positive change and turned it into Penny Experiment. Penny Experiment is an attempt to turn a found penny on the ground into $1 million worth of food for food banks. So far, Penny Experiment has turned a single penny into over $18,000 in donated food, through a combination of Jeffrey’s initiative and the efforts of the many people who have donated their time and their talent to the project.

I encourage you to visit the Penny Experiment website to learn more about Jeffrey’s effort to feed the hungry, and to learn more about ways in which you can contribute. There are many ways that you can get involved that can also help you save money yourself. Jeffrey recently spend 100 days eating well on less than $1 a day to show how he was able to get food for food banks for pennies on the dollar. He is currently writing a series on how you can use this strategy to save money on your own groceries and donate the extras you get for free to your local food bank (like many others have already done) to add to Penny Experiment donation totals.

The Penny Experiment is a wonderful example of how the simplest of ideas, coupled with vision and initiative, can give rise to great things. Even if Penny Experiment were to end today, it has already delivered a lot of meals to food banks in the USA. Whatever your reasons may be for getting involved, I encourage you to do so.

Have you ever contributed to a food bank? Has a food bank ever come to your assistance when you have needed it? Do you ever throw away food that you have allowed to expire or do you find a way to ensure that you are not wasting it?

Frugal Living Can Suck

September 28, 2010 By David G. Mitchell 7 Comments

Sitting here at my computer, late on a Saturday night, I am thinking about one thing — frozen treats, whether ice cream or gelato or frozen yogurt. About fifteen hours ago, I told my wife that if we did nothing else today, we needed to go out for a frozen treat. If I had to survive on one thing, it would be ice cream. Specifically, it would be mocha chip ice cream but I am not really that picky. If it is cold and sweet, I’m game.

I never got my ice cream. I did take my wife and one of my son’s for ice cream, but I felt too guilty to join them in the indulgence. It was not the cost of the ice cream it was the calories and the fat. I knew I did not need them so, as difficult as it was for me, I returned to my car with low fat frozen yogurt for both wife and son but nothing for me.

Later on I was grocery shopping and I picked up a quart of low fat frozen yogurt. With coupons, I would have paid about $2 for the quart of cappuccino chip premium frozen yogurt that I so longed to bring home. That is certainly a good value and I even put the ice cream into my cart and moved to the next aisle, only to return to the frozen food aisle to return the ice cream to the shelf. Again calories and fat — even low fat — deterred me.

Whether one is watching one’s waistline or one’s budget, the experience is very similar. Real thought has to go into every decision. One must ask whether he is making the most of his calories or his funds. Spend too much money and there will not be enough for the necessaries that you have to purchase. Eat a lot of empty calories and the waist will expand. Dieting and cutting costs will leave you feeling unsatisfied, unfulfilled, and often unhappy, even when you do your best to tell yourself you are making the right decision and that it will pay off in the long run.

Whatever benefits you might enjoy in the long run, however, cannot really erase the self-imposed misery that comes from sacrificing instant gratification. That is the odd thing about trying to save money or calories, when you need to do it, you know that you are doing the right thing but that does not make the decision making any easier. When you want that ice cream, knowing that you are going without the calories does not really give you a warm fuzzy feeling. When you want a new toy, knowing that you are saving your money for a rainy day does not really satisfy your desire.

To be blunt, both dieting and frugal living can really suck. They require patience, and sacrifice and deferred satisfaction. At the same time, the best part of a diet is the rare treat that the dieter is allowed as a reward. The best part of leading a frugal lifestyle is having money on hand when you really do need it. It is all a matter of convincing yourself that you are making the right choice and having both the will to stick with it and the creativity to find other ways to satisfy your need for instant gratification.

How do you satisfy your immediate wants but still save for your future needs? What is easier for you, saving your money or foregoing calories?