Category: Frugality

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Is It Worth Buying a Home Warranty?

For today’s guest post on buying a home warranty, please welcome Dividend Power.

The last two houses that we bought were older ones. The first house we bought was built in the 1980s and the second one in the 1990s. Both were good houses and well built. Older houses are also in more mature neighborhoods making them more attractive. However, there are often concerns about aging appliances, roofs, plumbing, electrical, and other systems when buying an older house. In addition, the cost of repairs or replacement can run into hundreds or thousands of dollars. As a buyer, you can often get the seller to include a home warranty for the first year as part of the deal. However, what about the second year, or suppose you have been in a house for a decade? Is it worth buying a home warranty in that case?

A house you might want to protect with a home warranty

What is a Home Warranty?

A home warranty is typically bought at the time of a home purchase. It provides a warranty on major appliances along with plumbing, heating, and electrical systems, and roofing. Major appliances include furnace, air conditioner, water heater, dishwasher, oven, stove, garbage disposal, and garage door opener. Other appliances can be included on an optional basis. A home warranty is valuable if the home purchased is old and has old appliances or systems. In general, a home warranty will cover the service and repair of major appliances and systems. A home warranty may also cover replacements of major appliances.

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Cars

What’s Driving the High Cost of Driving? Plus 12 Ways You Can Fight It

You not only see it, you “feel” it. The price of gasoline you’re paying today is skyrocketing. In fact, it’s more than a dollar per gallon more than it was just a year ago. This week nationally a gallon of regular costs $3.27 and last year the average price was $2.18. You’re feeling it in your wallet every time you fill your tank. But why is that? What’s driving up the cost of driving?

Woman driving car despite the high cost of driving

What Does the U.S. Government Say?

President Biden has called for an investigation into the current persistently high gasoline prices. He has suggested that the pandemic has fostered “gasoline profiteering” just as it has in other areas and that might be the reason you are paying the highest price for gasoline in over seven years.

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Entertainment, More, Personal Finance

Professional Sports Betting Is Sending Us to Hell

If you’re one who gets together with your buddies for a friendly game of pinochle or with family friends and play bridge, you are not unusual or alone. Those games are basically for fun and are harmless. But if you are thinking about making the jump from a casual game of cards to something even more serious, or even becoming a professional full-time bettor, you may be heading straight to hell. In case you missed it, betting—in particular professional sports betting—is becoming rampant here in the U.S.

NFL football game like the ones being bet on for professional sports betting

The New Roman Empire

It’s not new…I think gambling was pretty popular in the Roman Empire, too! They went to hell and we are heading there as well.

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Health

Medicare Open Enrollment: How to Stop Medicare Choice Confusion

It’s choice time for Medicare again, also known as Medicare open enrollment. If you are just getting involved for the first time or even have had coverage from it, it can be a very confusing time in your life.

Doctor in exam room representing Medicare open enrollment

Medicare, our national health insurance program here in the United States, began in 1965 under the Social Security Administration and is now administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It primarily provides health insurance for Americans aged 65 and older. But it also covers some younger people with disability status as determined by the SSA, including people with end stage renal disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

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Frugality, More

How More New Delays and Price Hikes for Mail Will Affect You

You remember mail, don’t you? It was the way that people communicated with each other for centuries when people actually sat down and wrote cards and letters to each other. Well, while those days are gone now, the postal service will soon cost you even more than ever to use it, for everything.

Mailboxes outside the post office where mail prices and delivery times are going up

With inflation rearing its ugly head again as an excuse and mail delivery problems, starting October 1, 2021, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) will implement new service standards for first-class mail and packages as well as raise prices while lengthening delivery time for about 30% of its volume.

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Food

Pandemic Profiteering Raising Meat Prices? You Better Believe It!

Have you been confused about the rising inflation rate and wondering when this cycle is going to end and “normalcy” will return to your world? Have you just been wondering about it? Or did you figure that inflation comes and goes? And given the way things have been affected with COVID-19 it’s just no wonder that inflation came along now due to high demand and the difficulties in both getting workers and the supply chain issues? Did you just figure that is the way it is and resign yourself to it? Well there is also that other thing that is affecting you and your wallet too. It’s pandemic profiteering and it’s raising your meat prices!

Man looking at high meat prices in butcher case as a result of pandemic profiteering

Don’t Be Naïve About the Profit Motive

Profiteering is a tough subject for me personally to deal with. That’s because I spent so many years in the retail world and I’d like to think that what I always did and the companies I worked for did was to do the right thing for themselves and the consumer. I’d like to think that, but I know it’s not the truth.

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Food

13 Ways We Save Money on Grocery Shopping Without Really Trying

Please note this post contains affiliate links which help to fund this blog at no cost to you. Thanks for your support!

Because I give advice each week here at Super Saving Tips and because I spent almost a decade working with supermarket chains learning all the secrets that they know and use, people constantly ask me about ways to save money on grocery shopping.

Couple in supermarket trying to save money on grocery shopping

On the surface, it seems pretty challenging. You have to buy food and you have to spend money, big money on it every week and there’s really not a healthy way to avoid it. The biggest challenge, however, may be the constant bombardment of advertising that you are exposed to. That influences you and your family about those “must haves” that are really not and that clogs up your budget.

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Food

Grocery Store Problems: What You Want Is Becoming Harder to Find and More Expensive

Are you getting increasingly more frustrated when you’re shopping for groceries these days? Now that you are doing it more, are you enjoying it less? That is probably because you are having some trouble finding many of your favorite items when you are out doing this weekly chore. And if you do find them, you are paying more for them, too. As you may have heard, there are grocery store problems: supply chain and labor shortages.

Empty grocery shelves a sign of grocery store problems

Grocery store chains are grappling with major supply challenges, with some supermarket executives saying they are as bad now as when they saw them occur back in the spring of 2020 when the pandemic first struck the U.S. and some of the staples we use every day left holes on the supermarket shelves!

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