Great article.   Growing your own food is great, it’s sustainable (though I think people throw this word around too much), and it’s a fun hobby.  But from a purely financial viewpoint, it often costs more to grow things yourself than it does to just buy them at the store.  Other reasons aside, people don’t always understand that.  This article helps make sense of it.  I can’t wait to be in the new house and start growing veggies and herbs again.

5 foods it’s cheaper to grow – MSN Money.

I have a couple thoughts on this, the first one being that if it were up to me and I had some 15% interest debt and $500, I’d be paying off the debt before I’d be putting it aside for emergencies.

Thanks to Lifehacker, of course, for pointing me to this site.  Pretty cool!

GE’s Home Appliance Energy Use page

You might not have much ‘stuff’, or you might not THINK you have much stuff, but if you add up the replacement costs of all your clothes, electronics, and other household items, you’d be surprised how much it would cost to rebuild your life.  A good way to help get you going is to have a good renters insurance policy on your apartment.  A typical policy in Boston / Cambridge with ~$15,000 of coverage will cost you well under $400 a year (don’t quote me, but get a quote!), and most places let you pay monthly.  Remember to get a rider on top of that if you have any valuable items, such as jewelry or anything like that.  Ask your agent for info about this.

As for where to go for this, check out Yelp!.  I use a national company (Progressive) for my car insurance now due to my local place not being able to get close to their price after MA de-regulated their auto insurance market, but Progressive couldn’t touch the price I pay for my renters through my local agent.  My local agent is also wicked helpful and great in the customer service department.

Trust me when I say that this is one expense that is worth every penny in the long run.

I have never had to make a claim (knock on wood), so I don’t really know that procedure, or how you prove what you own &tc.  I need to do more research about that, and also how to properly document my belongings in case of the need to make a claim.

Your things aren’t the most important thing.  You have yourself, your loved ones, your pets, and everything else.  But at the end of the day, you need your clothes, and eventually, you will WANT to have all of your stuff.  Protect it.

FYI, also, use Mozy to do your data backups.  I’ve lost all my financial data before, and Mozy has saved my butt.  It’s free and worth it.  More on this subject later.

I know if the past I have praised Bank Of America for the Keep The Change program, as well as just sheer convenience to be able to move money to / from the account to other peoples’ BoA accounts.  I can simply move money from my Wainwright accounts to my eTrade online savings account, the back over to Bank Of America if necessary.  That kind of transfer could take a few days, but it’s free and it solves my problem.

I need to think about it some more, but there are a lot of reasons in the ‘Move My Money’ column.  I also just really like Wainwright Bank – great customer service and very community oriented.

There is a website mentioned in the Huffington Post article, and I’ve embedded the video from ‘Move Your Money’ here:

I have been wondering for a while if I could set price alerts on Amazon for items that I wanted to buy but only at a particular price point.  The short answer that I found was that no, I can’t do that directly on Amazon’s website.  That’s okay though, there is another service named WishListBuddy that helps with that.  You just sign up for the site (free), and add your Wish List to it, and you can set up price alerts for you Wish List items on Amazon.  I don’t want to pay more than $150 for the boxed set of The Wire, so we will see how this whole alert thing works.  I’m hopeful, though!

First off, if you have multiple check deposits, you cannot deposit them all at once. This is no big deal most of the time, but the other day we had to stand in line for over 5 minutes while a guy deposited many checks. This is a nuisance for me but I can see it becoming a big issue for big ATM check depositors if all the BoA machines are converted this way.

More importantly, it DOES NOT LIKE ALL CHECKS! My house mate is currently unemployed and we have both been trying to deposit her first unemployment check (before direct deposit kicks in) on many of the new Bank Of America ATM machines. The machines will not accept the check at all. After multiple tries on three different machines (Framingham, MA, Allston, MA, and Brighton, MA.) It’s very frustrating and we now need to seek out an older envelope-based BoA ATM to do the deposit, or manually make the deposit at a branch when it is open, which is a PITA.

This is just crazy, and I would think that Bank Of America has heard about this issue already. I did some Googling and haven’t seen anything, though. I assume they tested these new ATMs thoroughly before deploying them, but I’d think that this craziness of depositing an unemployment check here in MA wouldn’t be so difficult.

Has anyone else had problems with the new ATMs? Any idea what number to call at Bank Of America to notify them of this issue?

About ten seconds after that rather unhelpful conversation, i called RCN, the other cable provider in our area.  They were more than happy to give me a current promotion of cable TV + Internet for $80 / month for a year!  With free HBO for three months!  And double the Internet speed (for the whole year).  I switched as fast as I could and they were here to install the stuff two days later.  Oh yeah, we also got a free 2nd converter box (non DVR) for the second tv.  Not necessary, but totally free.  So that saved $60 / month.  Yaay.  Oh yeah, RCN’s DVR / cable box interface is a lot more sophisticated than Comcast’s was – just newer software I think.

Second thing to save money: car insurance.  I have been with Commerce for years and have never had a problem with them.  They told me rates went up when I renewed my policy a few months ago and I believed my agent over in E. Cambridge.  They have always been nice to me and never steered me wrong.  Last week, someone mentioned that I should check Progressive, and I did.  And their rates are SUBSTANTIALLY lower for me.  I felt bad losing my insurance agent but their hands are tied with the choices they can offer me here in MA.  That said, I am saving $44 / month ($530 / year!!) by switching to Progressive, and I’m getting better coverage.  Another big yay.

THIRDLY, I’ve quit smoking, more or less.  It was too much, and I’m too old and know better.  I’m not saying I won’t have a cigarette or two while out at a show from time to time, but none of this smoking every day BS.  I’m tired of it and it wasn’t a big deal to stop a couple of weeks ago.  This will save approx $150 – $200 / month.  I’ll average that out to $175.

All in all, I’ve managed to chop $279 / month from my expenses.  That’s a freaking ton!  That $$ will not go to waste, as it will be used to pay off my credit cards and loans.  I need to be relatively debt free before starting a good eFund.  Planning for that will be next.