Donna Freedman

Giveaway: Return of the large flat-rate box of Alaska.

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MedLetThemSpeakA giveaway from last March, “The large flat-rate box of Alaska,” drew 122 entries. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since a lot of people are interested in the Last Frontier and a lot of people like big boxes full of little things.

It’s an odd mix this time around. Then again, Alaska is a pretty odd state.

Among the offerings:

Music: “Icy Grooves,” a CD from local jazz favorite Rick Zelinsky. (He was the guy we were listening to when those people decided to yammer through jazz night.)

Video: “Big Wild Anchorage,” hosted by Mr. Whitekeys (of the late, lamented Fly By Night Club). This particular video is a family-friendly look at Alaska’s largest city, from float planes to glaciers to sled-dog races that begin downtown (where they put snow on the streets).

Bags: A large, reusable shopping bag imprinted with “MTA: Celebrating 60 Years” (that’s the Matanuska Telephone Association, for all you cheechakos), plus another large bag with the logo of “The Vampire Assassins League,” a paranormal romance series (yep, that’s an actual genre) written by Alaska author Jackie Ivie. 

More Jackie Ivie stuff: A Vampire Assassins League coffee mug and two VAL temporary tattoos, plus a copy of “Knight Everlasting,” a novel from her historical romance series about a stalwart clansman in the Scottish highlands. (Och! What does he wear under the kilt, is what I want to know.)

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14 ways to get off the kid-gift treadmill.

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14 ways to get off the kid-gift treadmill.Last week I went to a nearby Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft to buy a book of brain teasers from the dollar section (60 cents with coupon – an inexpensive stocking stuffer for a young relative). An older woman was visibly fretting as she picked things up and put them down.

“What do you buy for someone who already has everything?” she asked me.

Seems that her two granddaughters, ages 4 and 6, drop by fairly regularly.  Some time ago she started buying little gifts for each visit, and now she’s wishing she hadn’t. Although the first thing they want to know when they cross the threshold is what they’re getting, they often don’t even bother to take the items home.

I gently asked if it were stressful always to have to come up with a new and exciting gift. She nodded, then shrugged and said, “But they expect it.”

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Message in a virtual bottle.

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Message in a virtual bottle.I’m tossing this post out there on faith, because I’m not sure how many people will actually be able to read it. That’s because the site continues to flutter and flicker.

My web goddess is ferreting out the gremlins responsible for the past few days’ worth of aggravation. It’s not an easy task, so please hang in there if you get “site down” or, worse, “fatal error” messages over the next couple of days.

Honest: I’m not quitting the business, even though part of the business quit me (and an unknown number of other writers).

Today I put my final MSN Money post into draft form. After almost seven years of contract work it feels odd to be a free agent once more. Not unpleasantly odd, mind you: I’m looking forward for a clear space in which to breathe.

I’ll still have to work, but I’ve lined up just enough to pay my basic expenses. I don’t want to dip into savings, but neither do I want to go back to being just as busy as I was before.

In other news…

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When helping your parents hurts you.

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When helping your parents hurts you.Last month I was contacted by Kira Reginato, an elder-care management specialist and host of a weekly radio program in Santa Rosa, California. She’d come across an article I did for MSN Money called “Are you your parents’ ATM?”

Reginato invited me to be on her program, “Call Kira About Aging,” to talk about this very sensitive issue. If you’d like to hear the result, you can access the podcast here.

No time to listen? Let me give you a few of the highlights, starting with some frightening stats regarding folks currently in their 40s and 50s. According to the Pew Research Center:

  • 27% provide primary support for a grown child.
  • 21% have provided financial support to a parent aged 65 or older in the past year.
  • 38% say both their grown children and their parents rely on them for emotional support.

Anybody but me think that sounds not only emotionally but financially exhausting?

Specifically: If you’re helping out parents whose money isn’t stretching far enough and/or picking up the slack for your under- or unemployed kids, what happens to your own finances?

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Termination dust.

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Termination dust.Today dawned a typical September day: gray and foreboding. The sky was the color of a galvanized trashcan and the air tinged with a chill that whispered of summer’s end.

When the clouds lifted a bit I saw termination dust sprinkled on the Chugach Mountains. That’s the local parlance for the season’s first snow. The tail-end of the tourist trade clucks and points, taking numerous pictures of the shining whiteness while buttoning coats up to their chins.

Residents pretend they don’t care, but it can drive a little shiver into your day. Sure, the snow is still way up there. But we know it’ll make its way down to the flats fairly soon.

Even DF, who’s pretty cheerful about everything and a skier to boot, gets a little glum at the prospect. In fact, he sings about it (to the tune of Chopin’s Funeral March): 

Woke up this morning, looked out the door and cussed:

There on the mountains — behold! the whitish crust.

Termination dust. Summer is a bust.

Hate facing winter again, and yet I must.

That made me laugh. I needed to laugh: Termination dust showed up on the very day that I got terminated.

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College: A great place to have your identity stolen.

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College: A great place to have your identity stolen. I got my university degree in 2009. During my years of higher education students in the library regularly asked me to watch their belongings while they went to the bathroom.

If I’d been at all light-fingered I could have scored some awfully nice phones, laptops and whatever was in their backpacks.

Given how much info is stored on smartphones, I might also have been able to do a little banking or shopping.

So believe me when I say that your college-age kid is at serious risk for identity theft. Believe the experts, too, because they say that Junior or Sister make perfect targets.

He’s excited to be back in school/in school for the first time. She tends to be a little too trusting of her new best friends (and all the other strangers who wander in and out of the dorms).

She may leave a loan application lying on the desk, or  neglect to lock the door when she heads down the hall for a shower. He may apply for a credit card at one of those tables in the quad, without thinking about who might be looking over his shoulder to memorize his Social Security number.

Worst of all, college students have little or no credit history. Not only are they the perfect blank slates for identity thieves, they’re a lot less likely to monitor their credit – after all, they don’t have cards.

That they know of, anyway – someone else might have gotten cards in their names and used them with abandon.

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Need a reason to save? Here’s a $10,000 reason.

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Donna-FreedmanSeptember is National Coupon Month, and Valpak and Savings.com are sponsoring a campaign called “10,000 Reasons to Save.”

The idea is to highlight the “tangible, long-term impact” that coupons can have on our lives.

Coupons have made a major difference in my life, especially when I was a broke single mother and a broke middle-aged college student. Maybe they’ve made a big impact in your life, too – and if so, you can share your story for a chance to win up to $10,000.

That would be a pretty big impact, too. 

The Reasons to Save website invites readers to contribute short essays (250 to 500 words) about their specific reason to save – buy a house? have a baby? put an existing baby through college one day? – and how smart coupon use could support that long-term goal.

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