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Week
of April 1 |
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Friday, April 7, 2006
Cash Guzzler at the Pump!
This time last week I paid $2.49 for a gallon of
low-test gas at a station on the outskirts of Philadelphia. This
week, it’s up to $2.69, leaving me wishing I’d topped off my tank
last week. After all, when you’re trying to save money, every penny
counts! Doesn’t it seem like gassing up our cars has become a lot
like playing the stock market lately? I feel like I’m playing the
odds every time I fill ‘er up: will the prices be lower—or
higher—next week? Even on any given day, prices vary from
neighborhood to neighborhood. After I’d filled my tank this
afternoon, I drove about 10 miles and found a station that was
selling gas at $2.39—30 cents cheaper than I’d just paid for my
go-go juice. Once again, the Internet comes to our rescue. Check out
www.gasbuddy.com to compare
prices in your neighborhood. And to try to understand what’s driving
this price schizophrenia, visit
http://money.howstuffworks.com/gas-price.htm.
For some inside info on what’s going on
behind closed doors on Wall Street, surf on over to
www.dealbreaker.com, a new
blog that debuted this week. There you’ll find juicy gossip and
insights into what’s driving the financial markets. The Fresh Bread
Money Blog will be silent on the weekends, but next week we’ll be
back with a list of great sites for first-time business owners,
among other things.
Prosper & enjoy,
Gail Harlow |
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Thursday, April 6, 2006
Disturbing Sign of the Times?
I was passing through New York’s Penn Station today and noticed more
than a handful of homeless people who’d come in from the cold,
huddled along the edges of that cavernous space, trying to look
inconspicuous. For years I commuted to New York every day and
witnessed the ebb and flow of the less fortunate. There were fat
years, when few homeless were seen on the streets or in large public
spaces like Penn Station, and lean years, when they seemed to be
everywhere. Was today’s sighting a disturbing sign of the times,
belying this headline in The New York Times: “Welfare Rolls in New
York Falling Again”? Or just a weather-related phenom—the unexpected
April snow causing them to seek shelter? One woman seated on the
floor next to the rest room asked for help to get something to eat,
and I gave her $3. “Thank you, sweetie,” she said. And I got more
pleasure out of spending those three dollars than I’ve gotten paying
any of my other bills this month.
Prosper & enjoy,
Gail Harlow |
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Wednesday, April 5, 2006
In a League of Their Own
Good news for the parents of some
high-school graduates applying for college next fall: following the
lead of several other Ivy League schools, including the University
of Pennsylvania, Yale and Princeton, Harvard University has just
announced that it won’t require parents who earn less than $60,000
to contribute to their children’s education (the students themselves
will be expected to make some payments from salaries earned).
Parents of students already attending Harvard whose parents make
less than $40,000 will receive the same exemption. Princeton is
converting loans into grants for students whose families earn less
than $45,500. It’s a win-win for prospective students and the
schools in question, promoting a more diverse student body and
making an Ivy League education attainable for those who have the
smarts but not the dough.
Another institution, The New York Times, is offering a chance
at some free on-the-job training this summer: the
winner of the “Win a Trip with Nick Kristof” essay contest will earn
an all-expenses-paid trip to Africa with Pulitzer Prize winning
Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, where s/he will be able to report
on some life-changing experiences. “You won’t be practicing tourism,
but journalism,” promises Kristof. If you know any budding
journalists, let them know about this opportunity. Visit
http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/winatrip/
for more details, official rules and application. Entries must be
received by April 20.
Prosper & enjoy!
Gail Harlow |
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Tuesday, April 4, 2006
Can You Hear Me Now?
I was taking a walk in the glorious
spring weather this past weekend, the air cool and fresh as pool
water on my skin. As I passed a roadside barn, a woman came out,
cell phone pressed to her ear. “Would you believe I’m talking to my
husband . . . in the house?” she asked, laughing at herself as she
pointed to the house only a few yards away.
No doubt about it, cell phones have
changed the way we communicate. (Those harrowing cell phone calls to
loved ones from the unfortunate victims trapped in the World Trade
Towers come unavoidably to mind, since some of them have been
released this week.) Thanks to cell phones, barring dead zones (“Can you
hear me now?”), we are always connected. I had to confess to the
woman that I was packing a phone on my walk. Somehow, we’ve managed
to crunch our budgets to afford the added monthly expense. As costs
have come down and pay as you go “Go Phones” and phone cards have
become readily available only those who want to make a statement by
not carrying one don’t have a cell phone anymore.
Cell phones are great. But beware the
coming onslaught of mobile services: Already we can download ring
tones, games, music videos, I-Tunes, e-mails, web casts and more—for
a price. And more are planned. Some of them will make our lives
easier, more convenient, more enjoyable. Others will just pad our
bills.
For instance, the current “Deal or No
Deal” game show invites viewers to play the game by text messaging
up to 10 guesses for the winning number during the show. Cost: 99
cents per text message. Ok, that’s a penny cheaper than a Powerball
ticket. What they don’t tell you is that your phone will forever be
bombarded with text message reminders to keep playing next week and
the week after. Who’s paying for those messages? You, of course.
Solution: text “STOP” back to them and they will cease and desist.
How’d I learn this lesson? The hard way. By playing their game. So
far, I haven’t guessed the winning number.
Prosper & enjoy!
Gail Harlow |
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Monday, April 3, 2006
Contests We Love
I recently rented the movie “The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio,”
starring the incomparable Julianne Moore as Evelyn Ryan, a 1950’s
housewife and mother of 10 who repeatedly saved her family from
financial ruin by winning mail-in contests with her clever jingles.
Today, she’d
make partner at Ogilvy & Mather. Rent the
movie; you’ll like it for its loving portrait of a mom determined to
make lemonade out of lemons. It’s based on a true story, written by
one of Ryan’s daughters.
Contests that required some skill (as
opposed to the sweepstakes of today, which merely require the price
of a stamp) were staples back in the ‘50s. But we’ve found two
contests that you can enter today, using your creativity to give you
a shot at a big payday. Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, in collaboration
with Finish Rich Media, the company owned by author David Bach (“The
Automatic Millionaire Homeowner”), is sponsoring a “Take the
Challenge” essay contest. Write a short essay explaining what it
would mean to you to be a homeowner (there are two other related
topic options, as well) and you might win $250,000 toward the price
of a home. Entries will be judged on relevance, creativity, and
poignancy, among other qualities. In other words, it’s not just
luck; skill matters. Go to
www.finishrich.com/wellsfargohome or
www.wellsfargo.com/challenge for more information.
The online bank, ING Direct, meanwhile,
has a mortgage contest that’s even more challenging: write a short
essay explaining why ING helps you save your money and why you
deserve it and (for extra points) submit a photo of yourself
getting your “Orange” on. (No, that doesn’t mean dressing like
Ronald McDonald.) The grand prize is $15,000 in mortgage payments;
25 others will win $1,500 a piece. Go to
www.ingdirect.com for the details.
I bet Evelyn Ryan would be jumping on
both of these contests—and she’d probably win. If anyone else knows
of contests worth entering, send them to
gail@makingbreadmagazine.com and I’ll post them on this blog.
Prosper & enjoy!
Gail Harlow |
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Sunday, April 2, 2006
Saving $$$$, Losing ZZZZZZ’s….
Daylight Saving Time begins today. I heard on the news that this
theft of an hour of precious sleep saves millions of dollars in
energy costs a year. Given the increasing threat from global
warming, I’m willing to do my part to make this zzzzzacrifice. Guess
it proves the adage, time is money. There’s another kind of
“daylight saving time” that we could all benefit from. David Bach,
best-selling author of “The Automatic Millionaire” (if you haven’t
already read it, you should pick up his latest book, “The Automatic
Millionaire Homeowner,” published last month and already climbing
the charts), recommends saving the salary you earn from the first
hour you work everyday. “Pay yourself first” is his mantra and one I
enthusiastically endorse. I say, “Think of your savings as a bill
from your future self to your current self, and pay it first.”
You’ll thank yourself later. If I had done that starting with my
first job, I’d be a very wealthy woman today.
Speaking of women at work: was I hallucinating or was Condi Rice,
traveling in the U.K. yesterday, accompanied by a phalanx of female
bodyguards dressed in black, long-jacketed suits, looking vaguely
like “Men in Black.” Or maybe penguins. It was very funny in a “Dr.
Strangelove” sort of way. Isn’t the idea of the Secret Service to be
inconspicuous?
Prosper & enjoy!
Gail Harlow
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Saturday, April 1, 2006
Can We Talk
About That Man on the Dollar Bill?
April Fool’s Day seems a particularly good day to start this money
blog, considering how foolish I’ve been with money over the years. I
sometimes think that starting MAKING BREAD magazine without the deep
pockets of a major investor to help cover development costs was just
another way for me to spend big money. I ran out of dough, but,
along the way, I learned some powerful lessons about saving and
spending money wisely. And I made a lot of friends. Most important,
I learned to talk about money, sharing insights and experiences with
the many wonderful women who found their way to this Web site.
Talking about it helped me to realize where I’d gone wrong and what
I wanted to do with my money from now on.
As a society, we place a very high value on money and what it can
buy, but we don’t talk about it much. Women, in particular, are
silent on the subject. It’s considered impolite to ask how much
someone makes, for instance. I learned that lesson on my very first
day at my very first full-time job. Sitting at lunch with my
co-workers, all of them female, curious about what I might
eventually be able to earn in my exalted position as fact checker
for a major magazine, I asked how much the others made. My question
was met with stunned silence, until the oldest of the researchers
informed me that “we don’t talk about money.” Oops! I’m sure my face
turned tomato red. That lack of transparency, that secretiveness, is
what makes it easier for inequities in the workplace to exist, of
course. It’s what makes the wage gap possible.
But you don’t have to talk specifics about salary (leave that kind
of “mine is bigger than yours” trash talk to the boys) to talk about
money. Eavesdrop on any cluster of men on any commuter platform,
waiting to catch their train. Betcha they’re either talking about
sports or the stock market, which they consider a macho game if not
quite a contact sport. I’d be the last person to suggest that we
women should become more like men, but in this one thing we could
learn a valuable lesson from them: by talking about money, we take
control of our financial identities. That’s a good thing.
Besides, thinking and talking about money is fun. It’s empowering.
It’s at least as interesting as what kind of dress Charlize Theron
wore to the Oscars. The more you think about it, the more
you’ll find that you have to spend or save. Talking about it is a
prelude to doing something about it. So start talking about that man
on the dollar bill with your girlfriends. Try this exercise: each of
you write down what you spend your money on this week and compare
notes on Friday. Think of ways you could cut back, and then start a
money club to look for good investment strategies to make your money
work for you. (Note to self: staying home is safer—read:
cheaper—than venturing out, as long as you refrain from shopping
online. But a girl can’t stay housebound forever. And there are so
many temptations to and from work. Thankfully, I’m getting better at
passing Starbucks without automatically entering, like a zombie,
looking for a fix of overpriced but delicious caffeine.)
One encouraging development is the increasing number of money blogs
written by women. Forget about the salary taboo, some of these women
even list their entire net worth! Those figures could serve as
inspiration to a lot of us. Visit the following sites to check them
out:
http://spaces.msn.com/MSNMoneyWomenInRed/ ,
http://www.msmoney.com/blog/index.html ,
http://nycmoney.iblogs.com/ and
http://mmb2.blogspot.com/.
I’m looking forward to adding my two cents to this online
conversation about money. I hope many of MAKING BREAD’s
readers and contributors will join me here to post entries to this
blog on a regular basis about all things money-related: monetary
ah-ha moments, financial disasters and successes, whimsical
observations about our consumer-crazy society, and fresh ideas about
saving and spending. Visit us to get your “daily bread” and serve up
some of your own. Write me at
gail@makingbreadmagazine.com, and I’ll post your comments for
others to read. The more the merrier in this conversation.
Prosper & enjoy!
Gail Harlow |
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If you like the blog, you’ll love the book.
For more savvy
finance advice, buy
“Making Bread: The
Ultimate Financial Guide for Women Who Need Dough,”
by Gail Harlow and Elizabeth Lewin, available on
Amazon.com and at your local bookstore |
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