Eating Out
The Wisdom Journal has a great article on tips for eating out as a family, but only paying for one. He turned me on to a great site: My Kids Eat Free. We like to eat out, so I found some new restaurants and which days to go. We also found that one of our local Chinese restaurants only charges 99 cents for kids.
If you’d rather grow your own food, Frugal Dad gives step-by-step instructions on How to Build a Square Foot Garden. He only spent $42 for setup, so it was a fun and cheap project for the kids.
Small Business
Chance Favors has some great tax tips for the self-employed. Included in reducing taxable income is the use of self-employed retirement options: a SEP plan (simplified employee pension), a SIMPLE IRA (savings incentive match plan for employees), a KEOGH Plan and a Solo 401(k) plan.
If you are having trouble with the cash flow of your business you’ll want to read Small Business Hassle: Late Payments and How I’ve Dealt With It at The Digerati Life.
Budgeting
Jeff at My Super-Charged Life put together a three-part series on budgeting: Things I Learned Living on a Budget Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Often, it’s easy to make a budget if you have a regular paycheck, but it’s possible to do one with varied paychecks too. Lynnae explains How to Budget with Irregular Income at Being Frugal.
Life Skills Network
Another great site is joining us at the Life Skills Network! Welcome to David at The Good Human.
Personal Finance
Moolanomy shares 10 Ideas To Retire On Less. We probably wouldn’t consider retiring abroad, but some of the other tips are great. My favorites are to adjust your lifestyle now and investigate passive income (which is on my 2008 goals list).
Here are more articles I enjoyed this week:
Thanks for mentioning The Finwikian. 🙂 Happy weekend!
Great set of articles. Thanks.
I appreciate the link to my series on budgeting. Thanks for your support!
Thanks for the mention Madison, and top of the fold to boot! I’m honored!
We like to eat out as well but rather than buy the kids’ meals which are generally the same fried foods, we prefer family style meals. Order one or two plates per table and that is enough for everyone. Eating in the International District (Chinatown) is even cheaper. We go out for Chinese every Christmas and three adults and one child can eat for about $12.
Oddly enough, I read somewhere the Cheesecake Factory was supposed to be family style (split entrees) originally but they found each person would order an entree. More money for them. We always split dinners when going there. Or we split the appetizer platter (amongst 4 adults) for dinner.
The cheap kids dining is a great one for us, especially with three kids! Pretty expensive even fo fast food!