The Incredible Power of Your Buy Nothing Group

Kids are expensive. On average an American family pays $15,000/year for each child they have so when Mrs. Stark and I decided we were going to become parents we knew we needed some solutions for helping to keep costs down. My wife came up with a humdinger: using a movement that already existed on social media to take care of many of the early needs for our kiddo while building community at a critical time we’d need it. All of this and for the right price: $0. How? Mrs. Stark discovered our local Buy Nothing group.

The Great Diaper Debate: Year 1 Update

Every parent in the world has a universal complaint: diapers are f*cking expensive. Just prior to the birth of our first child I wrote about the Great Diaper Debate seeking an answer to the question: Which is cheaper, cloth or disposable diapers? I’m back with an examination of the data after a year of diapers.

Can a Rounding Error Sink Your Retirement?

How often do you find yourself compelled to give a damn about something worth less than 1%? How about something worth less than .1%? For nearly all Americans math this minute is essentially a rounding error. Could it possibly be that such a rounding error could POSSIBLY impact our retirements in a meaningful fashion? In a recent conversation with a colleague I found out the answer and more...

There Are Two Types of Americans

There are only two types of people living in America: those who rent their labor for money, and those who rent their money for money. Today I explain the difference and how to become the one you want to be.

Millennials Kill Articles About Millennials Killing Things

There is a tired meme in financial articles these days and I’m f*cking through with it: Millennials are killing <insert literally anything>. Today I set aside the personal finance to put down, once and for all, the reasons why Millennials aren’t killing the thing you care about and what you can do to prevent your product or industry from dying.

How I get Paid for Going Shopping with Shopkick

I love getting paid for doing basically nothing. It’s invigorating to feel like you’ve gotten one over on the system. There are a world of apps that reward you for doing just that, going about your daily life and being paid for doing so. Today I’m going to break down one of the apps I use regularly to generate a bit of side income for very minimal effort.

Bobby Bonilla, the New York Mets, Bernie Madoff, Warren Buffet, and You

July 1^st is an extraordinarily special day in the world of sports: it’s Bobby Bonilla day. Every year the New York Mets pay former player Bobby Bonilla more than $1,000,000 despite the fact he hasn’t played for them since Bill Clinton was president. Today I bring you the tale of how an extraordinarily poor plan by a professional baseball team teaches us basic lessons for getting rich over the long-term. You don’t have to know baseball to love this astounding tale.

Get Paid for Your Groceries with iBotta

(This article discusses a shopping app and includes referral links to it. You can read my policy on referral links here. As you’ll learn in the article when you use this referral link we both get paid. If you think the app is a good fit for you but you want to use a non-referral app try this link instead. Do what works for you; the important thing is that you come out further ahead financially each month!)

I once bought over 30 boxes of pasta from my local grocer whose jaw dropped when the entire lot rang up on the cash register for a whopping $0.00. At the very end of the “super couponing” heyday I had been working on a piece as a freelance writer about the phenomenon and part of the research involved learning how it was done and doing it myself to prove it was real. While it was a rush to clear out an entire shelf of spaghetti for nothing what I found was that the effort that went into super couponing was akin to a part-time job for a less-than-minimum-wage rate, produce was difficult to find ANY discounts on, and Big Data was putting an end to the consumer’s ability to pool information in an advantageous way to get their groceries for next to nothing. Recently I field tested a new method for gaining some of your grocery money back, an app that is a lot more convenient than the work that went into super couponing, gets literally every shopper some amount of money back from their groceries, and even offers discounts on produce. I’m talking about iBotta.