This week, I participated in four blog carnivals and was honored with one editor’s choice. Thanks so much to everybody who worked hard to make these carnivals come together!

My Carnival Submissions

Carnival of Careers #3 - Hosted by Cash Money Life and featuring my post Why having a job is not cool, which was honored with an editor’s choice. Yay!

Carnival of Personal Finance #157 - Hosted by Consumerism Commentary and featuring my post Rental car fees at airports stink.

Festival of Frugality #130 - Hosted by Out of Debt Again and featuring my post Cheap travel on Amtrak.

Money Hacks Carnival #17 - Hosted by Mrs. Nespy’s Frugal World and featuring my post Is it worth it to sign up for a Student Advantage card?

My Favorite Posts

…that are from these carnivals but are not by yours truly.

The job interview: To shave or not to shave? (That is the question) - I Am Sheamus knows how to ask the right question. Wait a minute, I think the right question might actually be, “how do I support myself without getting a job?” Well, anyway, this is an amusing post. Via the Carnival of Careers.

My top five personal finance blunders - Ron of The Wisdom Journal spills the beans about his five top (bottom?) personal finance mistakes. The “I lived paycheck to paycheck spending every last dime I made” one sounds familiar to me. Via the Carnival of Personal Finance.

Free isn’t really free: a story of mendacious marketers - A blog called Are You Going To Be This Way the Rest of the Time I Know You? (cool title) tells a story about telemarketers which sounds a lot more frustrating than the one I related a couple weeks ago. Just what is this world coming to? Via the Festival of Frugality.

The ins and outs of reward credit cards - Free Money Finance says cash back credit cards are best, and I agree. Via the Money Hacks Carnival.

Other Links

101 ways I saved money this year - Wow, nice list. From Save, You Fool!

How we organize our coupons and execute our coupon strategy - I’ve said before that I’m not into coupons, but I’m considering changing my position. The Simple Dollar presents a simple and sensible couponing strategy.

Perot Charts - Ross Perot is back with a vengeance! Here are some more of the incredibly detailed charts that imprinted him in the memory of every American who watched TV coverage of the 1992 election. I’m not sure I totally agree with all Ross’s political positions, but the charts are neat.

Retail sales jump in May as stimulus payments go out - Big surprise - people are spending their economic stimulus payments, not saving them! Well, it’s good for us even if it’s not good for them. Know what I mean? From CNN Money.

What’s your neighborhood’s walk score? - Consumerism Commentary introduces a neat web site called Walk Score that’ll tell you how easy it is to live without a car in a particular neighborhood.

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It’s important to complain. Or, I think what I really mean is that it’s important to let others know what you want.

There are many cases in which a company or organization will slight you, whether due to sloppiness or by design. And you’ve got to let them know that you don’t appreciate it. You’ve got to let them know how they screwed up and what they can do to make it right. The best way to do this is by writing a good complaint letter.

Here are five ways to craft an effective, attention-getting complaint.

Send an actual, physical letter. There are a couple reasons to deliver your complaint by snail mail rather than by email or through a phone call. First, snail mail is hard to ignore. A letter is an actual, physical object and it can’t be forced to listen to muzak for 20 minutes on hold and it can’t be deleted with the click of a mouse. Second, when you send out a letter, you’re creating a paper trail. If you need to escalate the dispute (by, say, contacting a CEO, filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau or even perhaps filing a lawsuit), you’ve got written records of what you sent to whom and when.

Make it clear that you’re a loyal customer (if you are). Any business worth its salt values its regular customers. If you’re a regular, make that fact clear. If Steve’s Lawn Service screwed up your lawn, mention that you’ve been using them since 1989 and have been extraordinarily pleased with the service up until now, but that they stand to lose you as a customer if they don’t meet your demands. I actually think it might be better to start your letter out with a compliment - to mention how great everything was up until now so that the recipient sees you as a friend/asset instead of an enemy, and then launch into your complaint.

Be calm. Nobody likes to deal with somebody who’s insulting, sarcastic, or rude. Firmness will help you get what you want, but anger generally won’t, unless you’ve concluded that the people you’re dealing with are total zombies. There’s a fine line between firmness and anger. You want to make sure that other party understands that you mean business and that you refuse to be stepped all over, but you don’t want to be so harsh that the recipient of your complaint concludes that you are a jerk and loses all willingness to help you. Also, keep in mind that the person reading your complaint most likely isn’t the person who wronged you.

Suggest a concrete solution. Plant a little suggestion about what you want the other party to do in response to your complaint. If you’ve mastered the firmness/anger thing, your letter has just a slight tinge of unpleasantness and it tells the other party clearly how to get you out of the way so that everybody can go on with their lives. If you make it clear how the other party can please you, you make pleasing you the path of least resistance. Everybody likes to take the path of least resistance.

Say how long you are willing to wait. This is another way to urge action. Tell the other party in concrete terms when you plan to escalate the dispute, particularly if you have the feeling your complaint might be ignored. A concrete date can be the extra little nudge that will get the recipient to actually start to act (again, making acting instead of doing nothing the path of least resistance).

I hope you find these tips useful. Remember: be firm, be clear, be direct, and don’t cave in!

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We should declare war on stuff. In fact, I think maybe I’ll formally do so one of these days. I’ll post about how bad stuff is and how it should be eliminated. You know the kind of stuff I’m talking about: trinkets, doodads, gewgaws, things that seem important in the moment but which add nothing of value to life. Stuff costs money, but it has no worth. That’s what it’s called “stuff.” It doesn’t get a descriptive name. All stuff does is take up space and consume resources. It has some striking similarities with garbage.

There are many peddlers of stuff in the world, and there are many different kinds of stuff. Stuff is a name-brand food product that costs twice as much as the store brand but doesn’t taste any better. Stuff is a Mt. Rushmore keychain some guy at a streetside booth in Keystone, SD tries to hawk to you. Stuff is a brand new Bentley when a used Toyota would do. Stuff is name-brand prescription medicine when the generic brand is readily available.

Stuff is not strictly necessary, but many times, we convince ourselves that we deserve stuff. I already discussed this in my post Should you let yourself take a break from being cheap?:

The “I deserve” mentality can be pretty harmful. I deserve this new car, you think; I deserve to eat out at a fancy restaurant. Maybe, but all those “I deserve”s pile up pretty fast and it’s hard to save money when you live like that.

The fact is that nobody deserves stuff except the most boring, apathetic, unmotivated, sluglike individual imaginable. Stuff is worthless! How can anyone deserve something worthless? This is a contradiction in terms. You either deserve something good or you deserve something bad. You don’t deserve something that will have no lasting impact on your life or the life of any other person.

Nobody deserves stuff ’cause stuff is without value. On the other side of the spectrum, there’s something of unlimited worth that everybody deserves: freedom.

When you have freedom, you are fully human. You are the greatest version of yourself you can possibly be. Stuff falls away and crumbles to bits. All obstacles are obliterated. When you are free, you get what you deserve, because you deserve freedom.

I’m talking about something that’s bigger than money, but this is a blog about personal finance, so let’s stick to the topic at hand. One important step in the achievement of financial freedom is getting rid of stuff. If you set your standard of living high - if you think that you deserve stuff - you’ll spend all your income on it and you won’t have anything left over to buy freedom, which is what you’ll eventually achieve if you contribute consistently to safe, passive investments.

That’s why, as I’ve stated before, I’m all about lowering your standards as a means of achieving financial freedom. Whaddaya mean, you protest - the idea that you have to “lower your standards” is depressing! Well, I don’t think so. Lowering your standards simply means ridding yourself of the mistaken belief that you deserve stuff and realizing that freedom is what you really deserve. In other words, I’m talking about “living below your means.”

If you haven’t done so yet, figure out how much a $1000 IRA contribution you make today will be with in 30 years. Then find a way to eliminate $1000 of yearly spending on stuff, whatever stuff is in your life. I guarantee that living a less wasteful lifestyle will in itself be rewarding, and if that isn’t enough, there’s always the prospect of getting what you really deserve!

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I really dislike fees. Y’know, the kind that companies try to slip in at the very last second, hoping you won’t notice - y’know, the extra nickel or dime you’d already earmarked but which somebody else is determined to cruelly pry from your fingers.

Rental car companies are terrible about this. Local and state taxes, refueling fees, facility fees, and on and on; such charges can increase the cost of a rental by 100% or more. Ouch!

Airports, in particular, tend to levy extraordinarily high fees on car rentals. The most recent statistics I can find come from 2005 (see this study by Travelocity) and indicate that at that time, up to 66% of rental fees at airports were composed of fees alone, and that these fees were on the rise.

Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport is cited as the worst offender and is responsible for the inexcusable 66% figure mentioned above. Dallas/Fort Worth is not far behind, with fees of about 61%. Phoenix and Austin Bergstrom hover around 50%. All in all, there were, as of 2005, ten airports in the nation where consumers paid at least 39% in car rental fees. (A lot of them were in Texas. Looks like hats and churches aren’t the only things that are bigger there.)

Now, these fees are not all directly airport-related, but there’s no question that airport rentals come with the highest fees. Airport rental fees are typically not the responsibility of car rental companies themselves, but are levied by local governments to finance various projects taxpayers otherwise couldn’t be convinced to support. Local residents see taxes such as these as having the greatest effect on out-of-towners who, of course, have no say in the decision-making process. How convenient!

If you’re booking online with, say, Yahoo! Travel, it’s fairly easy to research in advance the exact amount of taxes and fees you’ll need to pay. Let’s take a look at the taxes and fees on a hypothetical week-long rental of an economy car at the Phoenix airport. The cost of the rental itself is $84 with Payless. Sounds pretty good, eh? Not when the following fees are factored in:

That’s right, the car rental itself costs $84 and the taxes and fees total $66.29, comprising a whopping 44% of the total rental cost ($150.29).

I wanted to know if it would be cheaper to rent outside of the airport, so I did a bit of research. As it turns out, taxes and fees are much lower outside of the airport, but the cars themselves tend to cost more! The cheapest rental I could find outside of the airport in Phoenix runs $125 a week, plus $23.19 in taxes and fees for a grand total of $148.19 - $2.10 cheaper than renting at the airport. The whole concept would be that you could take a taxi or shuttle into town to save on the airport-related fees, but you’d clearly have to pay more than $2.10 to get into town (alright, unless you could take a bus, but even in this case the savings would be miniscule and probably not worth the trouble).

This isn’t only the case in Phoenix. I tried researching airport vs. in-town rentals in several other cities, including Kansas City and Dallas, all with the same result: the airport had higher fees, but renting there was still cheaper or about the same overall. Looks like you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t! Results may vary in some locations, so I definitely encourage you to do your own research before concluding that it isn’t worth it to take alternate transportation to a rental location in town.

I believe this situation is the way it is because the large amount of competition at airports ultimately makes up for the huge taxes on rentals there. If only politicians would quit levying these “tourist taxes,” it’d actually be a lot cheaper in most cases to rent at airports!

The lesson here is that, although it might upset you that 50% of your rental cost is made up of miscellaneous taxes and fees which you weren’t informed about until the last possible second, you’re generally better off buckling down and shelling out. This is not advice I enjoy giving. I’m sorry that I can’t offer some clever, original solution and am left to report this unsavory conclusion. I feel like I’m advocating Satanism or something, because I really hate those fees. But until those politicians wise up, we’ve got no choice… and let’s not hold our breath for that!

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If you’re a student, you can pay $20 a year for a Student Advantage card and get discounts on goods and services offered by 64 national brands and “thousands of local shops and restaurants nationwide.” Hopefully , if you’re eligible for this thing, you’re not already sold and are getting ready to run some numbers to determine if it’s really worth it to fork over the 20 bucks.

When I was a student, I was aware that this card existed but did not sign up for one. My general policy is not to spend money in order to save money unless I’m absolutely certain the savings will come through. Plans change. Crap happens. If you’re on an obsessive quest to never waste a single buck, you’ll want to make absolutely sure that $20 annual fee will pay itself back. You’ll want to consider if, based on your spending habits, this investment will produce an acceptable return.

Here’s a complete list of all national brands that’ll reduce prices for card holders. You’ll find that most of these discounts are, in fact, minimally useful. A number of the “national brands” are obscure (when’s the last time you made a purchase on Shoebuy.com?). Also, many of these places are not the cheapest source for the items they sell, and who cares if you get a piddly 10% discount on some product when the price is super-inflated to begin with?

Although most of these discounts are not going to be very useful for most people, there are a few that are pretty good: 15% off Greyhound and Amtrak fares, 5% off purchases at BN.com, 10% off domain registration at GoDaddy, 10% off purchases at Target.com.

What I want to get across here is that the important thing is not the size of the discount. The important thing is how much money that discount is going to save you. I think most people intuitively grasp this concept, but it’s worth reemphasizing. It’s super important to ask yourself, “when’s the last time I actually bought something at Target.com?” If the answer is “never,” then the 10% discount is of no use to you. The fact that most other people don’t have access to such a discount has no relevance to your situation.

There are a couple of times in college when I could have saved money on a Greyhound or Amtrak fare, but not enough to make up for the $20 annual fee. I tended to book such trips about once a year and the trips always cost less than $100, so I wouldn’t have derived any benefit from a Student Advantage card.

A few additional notes: Student Advantage doesn’t appear to make any effort to check whether or not you’re actually a student. I don’t advocate dishonesty, but I do believe everybody needs to weigh the moral and financial implications for themselves. Also, Student Advantage will offer you a 30-day free trial, and it’s almost always worth it to take them up on this offer as long as you remember to cancel before the fee comes due. They’ll even give you a $10 rebate after your first purchase with a national partner, including Greyhound and Amtrak. (Unfortunately, this wasn’t offered when I was in school, but if it had been, you can bet I would’ve been on it!)

My advice is that, if you’re eligible for the card, you should seriously consider signing up for a free trial, but understand that canceling your membership may be the best decision after that, and be ready to actually pick up the phone and do it. In the end, it all comes down to cold, hard numbers. Is $20 more or less than you’ll save by using the card, without altering your spending patterns? This is just one more reason why it’s important to understand your own spending and to always be a super-analytical personal finance nerd!

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This week, I participated in no less than four blog carnivals. Thanks so much to everybody who worked hard to put these things together!

My Carnival Submissions

Carnival of Debt Reduction #143 - Hosted by Moolanomy and featuring my post Should you let yourself take a break from being cheap?

Carnival of Money Hacks #16 - Hosted by Daily Money Hack and featuring my post Cheap, easy urban gardening.

Carnival of Personal Finance #156 - Hosted by Prime Time Money and featuring my post A penny saved is a penny earned… sometimes.

Festival of Frugality #129 - Hosted by Bored Finance and featuring my post Calculating the real cost of driving.

My Favorite Posts

…that are from these carnivals but are not by yours truly.

Tweaking the debt snowball to fit your life - I’ve mentioned before that I believe Dave Ramsey’s “debt snowball” isn’t the best way to eliminate debt. Think Your Way to Wealth offers a contrasting view. Via the Carnival of Debt Reduction.

The perfect home is a financial nightmare - So says the Personal Financier. I don’t own a home yet, but I’m certainly gonna take this into account when I do eventually purchase one. This is a very wise post. Via the Carnival of Money Hacks.

The ABC’s of keeping cool - Frugal Fu presents a very nice list of money-saving tips for hot weather. Via the Carnival of Personal Finance.

Where to buy cheap spices - FeedTheFam offers a few options I hadn’t thought of before. It seriously burns me to pay $3 for two ounces of cumin or paprika! Via the Festival of Frugality.

Other Links

The ‘best before’ challenge - The Daily Mail presents the story of one man in the UK who eats an awful lot of out-of-date food for the sake of science - that is, testing the limits of expiration dates. This is an informative and funny article but is not recommended for those with weak stomachs.

Does having kids earlier save money? - The Baglady concludes that it probably does. What an interesting, freakonomical line of thinking.

An illustration of why saving money is harder than spending money - This is really amazing. Check it out. From Broke Grad Student.

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Planning a road trip for this summer? You might want to reconsider after you take a look at how affordable it can be to travel with Amtrak - particularly if you take advantage one or more of the many discounts floating around online.

First, here’s how cheap an ordinary, non-discounted, advance purchase Amtrak fare can be: if you wanna go from LA to San Francisco on 7/1 and stay for a week, as of today (6/10), you’ll pay just $104 round-trip. Think you can fly or drive for that? No way!

And in fact, there are a whole ton of discounts you can apply to your Amtrak fare to make it even cheaper. For instance:

Amtrak offers discounts every day to certain types of people and to members of certain organizations. Seniors 62 years of age and older receive a 15% discount; members of the military, as well as their spouses and dependents, can take 10% off; AAA members also receive a 10% savings; kids 2-15 get a whopping 50% off the adult fare.

If you’re a student of any description, you’re in luck. Student Advantage cardholders receive 15% off most fares, and if you don’t feel like paying $20 a year for membership, you can get a free 30-day membership when you sign up online. (Note that you also get a discount at Greyhound and a $10 rebate on your first purchase of any type using the card.)

If you live anywhere close to Chicago or St. Louis, you have access to all kinds of discounted fares. I’m not sure why the Midwest in particular gets so many el cheapo tickets, but it does. These fares are released via Amtrak’s online Weekly Specials Fare Finder. Theoretically, the weekly specials are not limited only to the Midwest, but in practice, I’ve never seen tickets for any other region on this page.

In addition to these everyday discounts, you should definitely check up on the current discount codes before booking your ticket to see if one or more applies to your situation. This site maintains what seems to be a fairly comprehensive list. You can save up to 25% off travel on some trains, and others offer great companion discounts. You also may want to check through the FatWallet forums for recent posts regarding Amtrak discounts, since such info frequently turns up there.

Also, before you book with Amtrak, do be sure to check Greyhound’s prices. I personally prefer to travel with Amtrak when I can, but Greyhound also offers pretty awesome fares sometimes, particularly if you purchase your ticket well in advance.

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So I just happened across a CNN Money article entitled Nine cool jobs that pay well. “When you’re surrounded by beige walls reading inane e-mails all day, you can’t help but wonder if there’s a cooler job out there that will still put food on the table,” says the article.

This so describes my feelings when I used to work a desk job. I spent literally nine hours a day reading inane e-mails, and each evening, I came home too mentally drained to work on any of my own projects. It wasn’t the pleasantest time, but to tell the truth, I learned a lot at that job. The number one thing I learned is that the “security” provided by a job comes at a heavy price: the freedom to use your time as you see fit. I was not satisfied with this situation, so about a year ago, I set out on my own. I now work as a writer, teacher, and translator, and am almost completely in control of my own schedule. I view even this arrangement as a temporary step in the journey towards financial freedom.

But back to the article. The nine cool jobs that pay well are brewmaster, toy creator, food scientist, doll fashion designer, sommelier, athletic trainer, event planner, wardrobe stylist, and concert promoter. There’s a theme here: creating something. When you work for eight or nine hours and your labor hasn’t produced any tangible result, it’s a bit depressing. I mean, somebody has to read through emails, but when you’re the one who has to do it you get the feeling that you’re not really doing anything, that you’re flushing away minutes and hours and days that you’ll never be able to reclaim. I’d rather clean the sidewalk and at the end of the day have a clean sidewalk; I’d rather write magazine articles and see those articles appear in magazines and get feedback from people and express stuff; I’d rather design computer graphics and see my creations appear in movies or commercials or games. There’s something about having a tangible result that you can see and/or hold that really convinces you that all the blood, sweat and tears were expended for a worthy goal.

My point is that I do agree that being a brewmaster, toy creator, etc. would be much better than reading inane emails all day. But there’s a limit to what you can accomplish when you work for somebody else.

If you find your job incredibly fulfilling - if you are convinced that it is what you were put on earth to do - then I certainly have no argument with that, regardless of who you’re working for. However, there are a number of ways in which working a job can be very limiting. Steve Pavlina has already covered them in his post 10 reasons you should never get a job, and I don’t have the energy to repeat his thoughts, with which I totally agree. Essentially, Steve argues that passive income is much safer and more fulfilling than working a job. While some might debate the idea that there’s such a thing as truly “passive” income, the fact remains that jobs suck up your time and that the security they provide is not really very secure when your employer can get rid of you at will.

No matter how cool your job is, you lose control of your time when you have to conform to regular working hours. You have to beg for money when you want a raise. You have to play politics or you could find yourself at the bottom of the food chain when the time comes to downsize. In short, when you work a job, someone else is in control of your livelihood.

This explains why I do not think that having a job is cool, regardless of what kind of job it is. I’m certain that the jobs listed in the article are more enjoyable than the truly nasty and boring ones, but any job can really crimp your style. When you realize that you don’t have to beg somebody else to provide for you - when you realize you’re the one in charge - then you can set out to fulfill the tasks that you were put on earth to accomplish.

If your job stinks, perhaps you shouldn’t spend your time looking for a cooler one. Perhaps you should spend your time figuring out a way to never work again. There are plenty of resources (such as this blog!) that will help you on this path.

Next time you’re getting fed up with your job, realize that the problem lies in the very concept of having a job. No one was put on earth to worry about being fired or to worry about how to make the car payment or how to feed the kids. Stop worrying and start taking control. Start now.

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Does it make sense, every once in a while, to allow yourself a little “break” from being cheap? Is it good to splurge on unnecessary things every now and then?

I’ve been thinking about this for a few days now and I’m still not quite sure what the answer is.

A couple days ago I posted about how, when you manage to save a little money on something in some way or another, you’ve gotta keep the ball rolling my not splurging on something else. A penny saved is not a penny earned if you go right out and blow that penny on some silly doodad.

The “I deserve” mentality can be pretty harmful. I deserve this new car, you think; I deserve to eat out at a fancy restaurant. Maybe, but all those “I deserve”s pile up pretty fast and it’s hard to save money when you live like that.

You’ll know if you’ve been reading this blog for a little while now that I believe that wants and needs are relative and that to live cheap, you’ve gotta lower your standards, only it’s not really lowering your standards unless that’s the way you decide to look at it. It’s all about making do with less. It’s about sticking with the necessities.

So you might think that I’d be completely opposed to the slightest deviation from total tightwaddery. Yet really, I’m not.

Everybody has stuff they just want, and sometimes, I think it’s probably okay to give yourself a break from being cheap. For instance, you could make every single meal at home, but why not take a break sometimes and go out to eat? You deserve it!

But now I’m contradicting myself. Oh no!

Everybody out there has heard about the “latte factor,” right? Personal finance writers like to bandy about this term. The “latte factor” refers to the leak that forms in your pocketbook when you’re addicted to Starbucks. Over time, all those $3 decaf lattes can really sap your finances.

I’ve seen this at work in the lives of people around me and I believe that it can be a really ugly and harmful thing. But maybe every little expenditure doesn’t need to be thought of in that way. What do you think?

I do take breaks every now and then. Sometimes I’m feeling lazy, so I stop in and get fast food even though I could cook at home. Sometimes I buy $2.00 iced coffee at McDonald’s even though I could make coffee at home for a fraction of the cost. I’ve got a couple bucks in my pocket and I just want to spend it so I do. And I think that that is, in the end, what financially ruins a lot of people!

Like I said, I do think it’s okay to take breaks sometimes, but I can’t really put my finger on what it is that makes it okay or not okay in a specific situation.

What do you think?

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For some time now, I’ve been wishing I could plant my own garden. It sounds like a great way to dig in and use your hands and have some fun and save some money. Unfortunately, my apartment in Los Angeles isn’t exactly the ideal location for this. Space is limited. I don’t have my own patch of dirt to stomp around on or garden in (which, come to think of it, is kind of sad).

This is why I was quite pleased to stumble across this site dedicated to urban “container gardening.” If you’ve got enough space to set out a used tire, a feed sack, or an old bucket, you’ve got enough space to garden. The site suggests using a location such as a vacant city lot, a rooftop, an abandoned industrial site, or a parking lot. Most city folk can probably find a space like this somewhere close to home.

What I really like about this whole concept is that it’s cheap. The largest type of container suggested on the site - a child’s wading pool - can be purchased for around $10. The topsoil, peat moss, and manure used to fill the pool can be had for less than $20. Setup sounds pretty simple. For instance, with a wading pool, you drill a few holes in it, find a level location, toss the soil in and you’re ready to go.

Once you’ve got your garden set up, you can plant a range of different plants in one container. Actually, having some diversity in your garden helps ensure the health of the plants. The site says that people have successfully grown okra, corn, cucumbers, mustard greens, peas, beans, grapes, and more using container gardens. Since the garden is contained, there’s no runoff and thus no waste of soil or water.

I’d suggest that planting herbs/spices is a great way to save some money. Doesn’t it burn you to shell out $1-$2 for a tiny little bundle of mint? I find myself doing this every so often, and I’d love to not have to do it anymore. Now I’ve just gotta find a vacant lot with a fence I can crawl through… hehe.

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