Readers that know me know that I spent my entire career across working for MegaCorps, running branded food businesses. My job was leading a team to figure out the best way to get consumers to choose our soup, yogurt, or frozen pizza over our competitors – which include the low priced store brand. Despite having…
We live in the suburbs and every year our city has a city-wide garage sale weekend that raises money for the local Lion’s Club. It’s an amazing event with hundreds of garage sales across the city – dozens in every neighborhood you drive into. They say that over 5,000 people come to our city for…
Recently a good ‘friend-in-law’ posted this interesting chart on where Americans spend their money. The chart is not just for this year, but for the past 75 years (all numbers adjusted for inflation) using a single data source. Take a look at how amazing this chart (from howmuch.net – a cost information web site. It really…
We enjoy the whole Christmas season, especially attending events and parties with family and friends. While those activities are the highlight of the holidays for me, we also exchange gifts as a family on Christmas morning. The older your kids get (and the older you get) the bigger challenge it becomes to find meaningful presents…
I wasn’t sure how many ‘parts’ there may be to our health insurance open enrollment this year, but we got it sorted out pretty quickly. While the cost increases are dramatic, the fact that there are actually less options to look at makes the shopping process relatively quick. Not painless, but quick. You’ll remember from…
The shower head in our bathroom is starting to drip. Our house is about seven years old and I’m sure there is some rubber washer that probably needs to be worn out. Now that I early retired, I guess I am going to have to figure out how to fix it. It’s not the only…
With the holidays upon us, I ran across studies from the American Research Group, US News & World Report, and the National Retail Federation that look at planned Christmas gift spending for 2015. I was surprised by many of the numbers from the studies and compared it to our own holiday shopping habits at the Fire…
