This week you have a chance to win one of three copies of my book, and the opportunity for a free preview.
First, the giveaway: The lovely and talented J. Money, of Budgets Are Sexy and Rockstar Finance fame, is giving away three copies of “Your Playbook For Tough Times: Living Large On Small Change, For The Short Term Or The Long Haul.”
He’s doing this in three different places:
I feel so loved: A chapter from “Your Playbook For Tough Times” is the featured topic on this week’s Wise Bread Tweetchat – which regular readers know always includes prizes.
And this week’s prizes are pretty rich – much richer than I had originally posted. (See below.)
“Doing a financial fire drill” is the subject of the one-hour event, which takes place at noon PDT on Thursday, Sept. 15. (As in “tomorrow.”) We’ll be talking about how to do an extreme budget makeover in advance of anything going wrong.
Think of it this way: Relatively few homes or schools burn down each year. Knowing what to do if that should happen is still a good idea.
And if you need another incentive to participate? Wise Bread has that covered, too.
After several weeks of waiting for review blurbs and dealing with daily tech glitches, “Your Playbook For Tough Times” is finally here.
See? I really wasn’t pretending to write a book.
You can buy it as a PDF*, to be read on laptop or tablet, for $1 less than the Kindle version. Another discount is available if you purchase both a paperback and a Kindle product.
A frugal hack of a frugality book, you might say.
The time to prepare for disasters – or even moderate inconveniences – is before they happen. This week’s giveaway can help.
“The Penny-Pinching Prepper: Save More, Spend Less and Get Prepared for Any Disaster” is the latest book from Bernie Carr, she of the Apartment Prepper blog.
Ignore the stereotypes about wild-eyed prepper nutcases stockpiling bullets and Spam. Preparing for power outages, extreme weather and the like just makes sense. In fact, the government urges us all to have at least several days’ worth of supplies on hand. Just ask anyone who’s ever lived through an ice storm whether it’s a bad idea to be a prepper.
Back on June 10 I published a post updating the progress on “Your Playbook For Tough Times.” In the past eight weeks the work has morphed yet again. In fact, it’s become two books.
Neither of which, unfortunately, are yet available for purchase.
How is it possible that two months have passed without my hitting “publish”? As they say on Facebook, it’s complicated.
On the back cover of “Live Your Life For 1/2 The Price,” prolific personal finance author Mary hunt perfectly sums up my feelings about frugality:
“It’s the money you don’t spend that ultimately gives you the freedom to live the life you love.”
You tell ’em, girl.
Hunt, who’s written a couple of dozen books and created the Debt Proof Living program and the Mary Hunt’s Everyday Cheapskate website, gives readers the tools to do things like reduce costs, get control of spending, avoid fees, retire the mortgage off early and pay a fair sum for the right car. And she does it with her trademark humor, compassion and pragmatism.
In other words, she’s fun to read and she knows what it’s like to be in debt — boy, does she know! — but she won’t let you off the hook for any of it. Instead, she’ll throw you a lifeline.
Our house smells of smoke thanks to a wildfire just south of town. The recent unusually sunny and warm weather has left the area ready to burn.
The linked video above shows an uninhabited, mountainous area. Unfortunately the blaze is spreading toward a part of town with wonderful homes – and no utility infrastructure.
That’s the trouble with living in an isolated area: Even if fire trucks can get up there, they can use only the water they brought with them.
Residents are packing their bug-out bags and creating what the fire folks call “defensible spaces” around their homes (e.g., removing trees and mowing down brush) and everyone’s sort of on tenterhooks. I expect even the atheists are praying for a downpour right about now.
Down here on the flats I’m feeling sad for anyone in the fire’s path and also experiencing a bit of survivor’s guilt. Our house lot is mostly treeless; if fire broke out in tree-heavy areas nearby, we have two hose hookups that would let us squirt out any embers that blew our way.
Thanks to the city water system we’d have a steady supply. One of us could be on the ground watching for hot spots and the other on the roof to protect the shingles. Since this is a one-story house it would be a simple scramble up the ladder; DF does this every year when he sweeps the chimney.
Right now I’m praying (for real) for rain.
Take a look at personal finance articles aimed at women. How many of them focus on topics like using coupons, getting the best prices for school clothes and cutting back on our purse collections?
Those are all good things to do. But why aren’t women getting information about building real wealth?
Women make 85 percent of consumer purchases. (Hint: Not all of them are of Jimmy Choo footwear.) Yet they are too often ignored, patronized or marginalized by the financial planning industry.
Kimberly Palmer, author of “Smart Mom, Rich Mom: How To Build Wealth While Raising A Family,” has a friend in that line of work. He told her about a colleague who talked to the husband and referred to the wife in the third person. The wife was sitting right next to her spouse.
That’s why we need books like this one. We do need to worry our pretty li’l heads about money.
Dreading being seated next to or near a baby on your next flight? You should probably be just as concerned about the adult passengers. Recently I’ve read two accounts of teen-aged girls (one of them an unaccompanied minor) being molested by adult men at 35,000 feet.
As we used to write from the city desk, “Police said alcohol was a factor.” Then again, plenty of people drink on planes and don’t grope strangers. Liquor may break the chain and free the beast, but only if the beast was already there.
The family of one girl (just 13 years old!) is suing American Airlines. The other, aged 16, kept pushing the guy away until another passenger intervened.
The moral of the story: Save the stinkeye for creepy drunken dudes and give parents of small children the benefit of the doubt.
Who knew the amount of work it takes to self-publish a book?!? Answer: Everyone who’s already done it or is working on it now.
I’m firmly in the latter camp. About 10 days ago I finished writing and editing “Your Playbook For Tough Times.” Sort of.
Even as I rejoiced that the work was done (a butt dance may or may not have been involved), I felt a bit uneasy. Within a day or two my subconscious was nagging: “Aren’t a couple of those chapters a little bloated?”
No! Shut up! It’s done and it looks GREAT!
In fact, I was so sure it was done that I sent it off to a few people who’d offered to read/critique the thing. And then last Saturday evening I sat down to take “just a quick look” at the manuscript. You can guess what happened next.