Holiday traditions don’t have to be expensive. Some of the best traditions don’t cost anything at all.
When I was a boy, Christmas meant The Cinnamon Bear. During the weeks before Christmas, a Portland radio station (KEX) would broadcast a fifteen minute episode of this story every night. The Cinnamon Bear chronicles the adventures of Judy and Jimmy, and their fantastic trip through Maybeland as they search for the missing Silver Star that belongs atop their Christmas tree.
I loved the cast of characters and the exotic locales: the Root Beer Ocean and the Inkaboos, the Wintergreen Witch, the Looking Glass Valley, the Crazy Quilt Dragon. And, of course, I loved Santa Claus and the North Pole. I believe that The Cinnamon Bear sparked within me a lifelong love of fantasy and science fiction.
Because of the vagaries of copyright law, most old-time radio broadcasts are now in the Public Domain. The Cinnamon Bear is freely distributable. Some [...]

Jeff V. writes:
I just came across this budget-minded DIY site and I thought you and your readers would be interested in it.
Curbly bills itself as a “web community for people who love where they live”. It’s a site designed to help users create do-it-yourself projects to improve their home and environment. In a way, it’s a social community designed to help people with home-improvement.
The site includes the following sections:

How-To — Articles describe how to make an easy photo wall on a shoe-string budget, how to make a chalkboard wall, refurbishing a $3 garage sale table, or even how to flip a house in 90 days.
Inspiration — Here you can find ideas for future projects. Do you like the idea of living in a comic strip? Want advice on building a look around one great piece? Can you draw inspiration from wood?
News — DIY and crafts current events such as the No-Coast Craft-o-Rama. This section also [...]

Over the past week, I’ve received a barrage of messages from people seeking specific personal finance advice. While I’m willing to offer help where I can, many times the questions lay outside my area of expertise. I’m just a regular guy who is learning about personal finance and sharing the information with the world. I’m not a trained financial advisor. I can offer generalities, but the specifics are sometimes beyond me.
Lifehacker has a feature called “Ask the Readers”. The editors put out certain questions for group discussion. I’m going to try that here at Get Rich Slowly. My hope is that your collective wisdom will be able to help people find direction. I’m constantly amazed at the stories and advice you people have to share — let’s see if we can put it to good use.
Some of the questions will prompt criticism, but my hope is that we’ll mostly be able to be constructive [...]

Initially, T. Harv Eker’s Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth seems cast from the same mold as Loral Langemeier’s The Millionaire Maker (my review): full of vague promises, unsupported claims, and thinly-veiled sales pitches for products and seminars. It’s true that Eker is guilty of some of these faults. But ultimately I could not help but like the book once I stopped thinking of it as a personal finance guide and began to consider it as a motivational tool.
I’m sure that many people would dismiss Secrets of the Millionaire Mind as useless. There’s not a lot of concrete information here about how to improve the details of your financial life. (Though the scant advice presented is sound). Instead, this book encourages readers to adopt mental attitudes that facilitate wealth. It’s about changing your psychological approach to money, success, and happiness.
Eker believes that we each possess a “financial blueprint”, an internal [...]

MAKE: Blog: The Open source gift guide - Open source hardware, software and more for the holidays
(tags: christmas DIY)

New York Times: In class warfare, guess which class is winning
A fascinating editorial in which rich conservative Republican Ben Stein argues, with support from Warren Buffett, that the rich should be taxed more than they currently are.
(tags: taxes economics class wealth)

Stackbacks: Cash Allowance File
“I’ve created a cash allowance file to eliminate … trips to the ATM.”
(tags: money lifehack tips)

I originally shared this piece on June 12th. I’m reposting it because many PBS stations are rebroadcasting this show tonight.
How did the United States become a nation of debtors? When did credit cards become popular? Did you know that many modern credit card policies are the creation of one man?
The Secret History of the Credit Card was a 2004 “Frontline” presentation from the Public Broadcasting System. The program examines the nation’s use of credit and, more specifically, the methods used by credit card companies to obtain enormous profits. The Secret History of the Credit Card won the 2004-2005 Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism.
PBS has made the entire program freely available online in RealMedia and Windows Media formats. The broadcast is divided into five segments of roughly twelve-minutes each for easier download.
When this program was produced, 145 million Americans carried credit cards. Of these:

55 million paid in full every month
90 million carried balances
35 million paid [...]