I went to the doc for a physical for the first time since I was a teenager. I was asked to exercise more and cut back on consumed fat and cholesterol. I was just one category out of normal on everything on my lipid panel. I’ve made some pretty significant life changes to try and improve over the past three months. If…

On the 529, we have one for both my sons but we want to open one for our daughter. Our bank is insisting we open our daughter’s through the 529 website without coming in. Our state’s 529 program is insisting that we need to go back through the original financial institution to add an additional account. Anyone have…

My grandfather out and out paid for all the grandkids’ undergrad degrees.  Education lifted him out of the lowest levels of poverty in the US at the time.  His advice was that if you want something beyond that, find someone willing to pay for it.  That way you know at least one place finds it valuable.

This: “Something that was verbally agreed to in a house purchase (for example) wasn’t included in your closing documents.“
Our first mortgage , a couple days before closing I got a call from our bank saying, you don’t qualify for this awesome program that we talked about when we sat down. Your interest rate is going up…

Curious thing for me is that many of my progressive friends HATE hobby lobby. I get how much the health care stance stirs them up, but it is a right leaning business that is a great example of how businesses can pay their employees far better than the minimum yet still have decent locations, well organized stores,…

If it is a significant money problem for the restaurant, then management will push the servers to take a stricter stance on enforcement or fix the kids prices. I haven’t worked food service in a long time, but is what this person is trying to save the restaurant really worth what it will cost the restaurant to have a…

Absolutely, everything that goes in the budget is under scrutiny. If I pull out cash and carry it around, well I don’t know where it is going when I scrutinize the transaction. After that I’m carrying around a little budget gray area that I can blow on any frivolous impulse. Then when I finally give in, I’m out of…

My grandparents grew up in the blue and worked to the teal. They had nice housing, necessary transportation, health care, retirement, and educated not just their children but their grandchildren. I’m just barely cracking the red and all those basic necessities just don’t seem achievable. I agree in principle that the…

We strive to make sure none of our kids are slighted. I will say that it is definitely harder to find gifts for my daughter. Between the cultural forces on her desires outside our control and the offerings for her age, it is a real struggle to make things even seem equal.  We try to make up any financial difference in…

As far as I can tell, whether I do them or a profession does them, I bear all the legal responsibility for what gets turned in. Either I have to become an expert to do them or I have to become an expert to double check my professional. I’ll just do them myself.

The thing that is “messing with my body’s natural wake mechanisms” is tapping into a self-protection mechanism every morning to wake up hours before it would be possible for a primitive human to do anything useful. After thousands of times being awakened by a starting noise that hasn’t killed me, my body has learned…

Going from standard insurance to HDHP has made most of the people around me double down on the practices that were already drowning our health care systems. Everybody is passing up cheap preventative care because they are afraid that all the long term stuff that comes up is going to drain their HSA so much they won’t…

Mom’s mom read the obituaries every day.  Mom would ask her why she did it because it seemed kind of morbid.  Grandma would say, “What if I died last night and nobody told me?”

And a fail is inevitable every once and a while even if you are acclimated.  Every 6 months or so I’ll sleep through a multitude of alarms and end up waking up an hour late.

As the father of a dyslexic, I agree. Nobody (at least no one near me) will even screen a child that young. Dyslexia is underdiagnosed even after being around professional educators and the diagnosis rate is about 1 in 20 kids. Estimates of how many are actually affected by dyslexia or related conditions are as high…

All the things in the article were the things we learned in kindergarten when my wife and I were in school. They are “expected” to be taught at home now, but the kids zoned for my kids school are mostly so poor that the teachers can’t really count on them getting at home instruction.  The weird thing is that the…

If a company is large enough you need a policy. Seems to me, most people who I’ve talked to with split leave have vacation banking, but sick leave expires. That seems exactly backwards to how things aught to be in many ways.

We also have combined leave. I get enough to take vacations and have normal leave, just shy of 5 weeks every year. Every conversation I have had with someone with split leave involves how they’ve had to use creative explanations to use their entire sick balance before it expires. You know the same sort of creativity…

I’ve never been very big on cursing, but for me I care more for why my children are choosing the words they are than what words they are using. It is not ok for them to be bullies. It is not ok for them to lash out at minor external inconveniences. It is not ok for them (at their maturity level) to use social…

I make about 6 times median of my school district, a sick visit for one child to the only local pediatrician costs me about a day’s take home pay. I don’t see a dime of help from my insurance until I pay about half a month’s take home pay into medical providers. Since a parent in my district will get to visit court…