If I may ask, since I haven't bought a new trimmer in years and I'm a much more discerning consumer now, do you think these trimmers that double as edgers handle the edging job adequately?

As it happens I'm in the market for a trimmer right now. We moved into a house with a much larger yard and more landscaping/edging. I hate the gas/oil mix thing with the fire of 10,000 suns and don't want to hassle with dragging extension cords around. I'll look into this.

I'm going from memory, but those numbers are rough approximations of our most recent auto loan, but there was a down payment involved too. Sorry, I should have stated before that it was meant as a rough example for discussion and not 100% accurate for mathematical purposes.

Great points.

And, I would offer, very ignorant of their own behaviors and trigger points. That might be the real issue...even if most people don't do the math, they know that buying items such as the $500 bag you mention on credit is a bad thing. But they can't, or don't know how to, help themselves.

I think we're basically on the same page. My point is, I don't know that I'll ever be in a position - at least until my kids are out of college - where I can plunk down $25-30K cash for a car. But if I can get the same car with a $500/month loan payment for 3-4 years, and that $500/month is within my budget and still…

If you're paying extra on principal, I don't think that counts toward debt-income. They're talking minimum/required payments.

I'm in a similar situation: we have a rewards card, so we put everything on it. We budget for this (obviously) and pay it off each month. So in my own mind, that is not a part of my debt-income ratio, although like you if you count the credit card it would surely put us over 36%.

I'm seeing a lot of "debt makes you a slave" talk here and on the Facebook post. Is this from Dave Ramsey? I've never read his books or listened to him. (I have nothing against him, I've just never felt my debt was a problem.)

I don't recall exactly as that was around 7 years ago, but I do know that our debt to income ratio was well within the 36% figure cited above. Our debt wasn't a problem for us, we just didn't like the idea of being in any more debt than necessary so we started aggressively paying it down. We just aren't big spenders…

One of the moments I'm most proud of in my adult life was when my wife and I paid down something like $35K of debt in about three and a half years. None of this was "bad" debt - it was student loans, what remained of two car loans, and a home equity loan piggybacked on to our mortgage so we could avoid PMI. Our debt…

In a post about Do Not Track yesterday, I openly questioned what the big deal was. But as I think about all this data out there, and people's/companies' increasing sophistication in how they are able to use it, I'm coming around to the idea that this is worth taking more seriously.

I read that NYT story last week and it's fascinating. But while the premise of that story has ramifications online or offline, am I incorrect in thinking that being tracked online does not identify you personally in any way, other than to those (like Google, for instance) you choose to identify yourself to? Isn't…

I don't mean this in a dismissive kind of way, I'm asking a genuine question for discussion: what is so bad about being tracked online?

This is in conflict with other pieces I've read that says you're probably halfway through a long vacation before you ever begin relaxing enough to actually enjoy it. Plus, added trips = more planning = more travel expense = more disruption to your work/life/routine/etc.

Yeah, I wish I'd thought of this before I bought that mini-fridge for our wet bar, before realizing that you have to buy a special fridge for an enclosed space like that. I did all that research, then had to sell the stupid thing on craigslist before launching another massive round of research. Grrr.

This doesn't just apply to bad news...I can think of a few times where someone was delivering good news but they start by meandering through the backstory, meanwhile my mind begins churning and assuming a bomb is about to be dropped, only to be greatly relieved when I hear the good news.

I switched my Droid X to Google Voice (without porting my number) about a year ago, and while it appears to me to have the same number of rings before going to voice mail, people who call me say it's something like 8-10 rings. That seems like a Google Voice feature though.

Years ago I received noticed of a class-action suit against DeBeers for price-fixing or something similar. If you bought diamond jewelry within a certain period of time you were eligible for settlements that could potentially be hundreds of dollars depending on how many people responded. I signed up, bookmarked the…

I like ESPN ScoreCenter, but I'm a college football fan so I scroll through a lot of scores frequently. This app has the annoying habit of starting with LAST week's games rather than this week's. And to my knowledge there's no setting to fix this. A great app otherwise...