Donna Freedman

How to stop getting credit-card applications. (Insurance ones, too.)

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It’s always fun to go through the mail after you return from a long trip. True, a lot of what’s piled up is junk mail and charitable solicitations, but you always hope for some good stuff.

Two months’ worth of envelopes were waiting when I got back from Alaska in mid-July. I did find a $39 check from Mr. Rebates (yay, cash-back shopping!) and a couple of paychecks from my Get Rich Slowly gig. But the haul was mostly, well, junk mail and charitable solicitations.

And credit card applications. Ten of them.

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Back-to-school sales: What, already?

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Kids all over the country are in mourning, having seen “back to school” signs and adverts since early July. Today’s circulars included deals like 1-cent manual pencil sharpeners (Office Depot), 25-cent crayons (Kmart), free-after-rebate yellow highlighters (Staples) and $9 backpacks (Target).

It’s not time to buy yet, though.

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Blog roundup: Cartesian dualism edition.

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You’ve got to love a blogger who can work the phrase “Cartesian dualism” into a post. In this case the blogger is my daughter, Abigail Perry, and the article is about us both. (But mostly her.)

Don’t let the title “Glorifying my mom (who’s glorifying me)” fool you. It’s not an exercise in mutual admiration, although I do admire the hell out of her. The post is about her re-reading “You can’t even tell perfect bodies apart,” a post I wrote about Abby’s near-fatal illness, and then reflecting on who she was then and who she is now.

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Goal-oriented groceries.

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Yesterday I filmed my first “Ask A Money Expert” video for MSN Money. I’d done several videos for MSN in the past, but this is a different format: Readers post questions on Facebook, to be answered by people like Jim Jubak and Liz Pulliam Weston. And now by me too, also (as the cat from Mutts would say).

The challenge was giving good information succinctly, since I had just 3½ minutes to answer a trio of questions. I’ll post the link once the finished product is available. In the meantime, I want to talk about one of the responses I gave.

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