RSS Feeds
Facebook
GRS Twitter
As an aside in a recent guest post, my wife mentioned that I had purchased eight loaves of bread for an article I never wrote. Well, I’ve written it now.
Over at Get Fit Slowly, I’ve posted my examination of which whole wheat bread is best. I looked at cost, nutrition, and taste in an effort to find the best value. (Based on reader feedback, I picked up a couple more loaves today. I’ll post follow-up results on Thursday.) It’s fun to be able to combine frugality with fitness!
Here are some other personal finance articles I’ve enjoyed recently:
JLP at All Financial Matters has turned into the spreadsheet whiz of the personal finance set. I love what he does with numbers. Last week he ran some calculations to find out how much that 401(k) loan will cost you. He writes:
I have read in the news lately that more and more people are tapping their 401(k) plans in order to get cash to pay bills. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that in most cases, borrowing from your 401(k) is a bad idea. That said, I thought would be interesting to try to put some numbers to a 401(k) borrowing scenario to see how much a loan really costs.
His conclusion? If you must take a loan from your 401(k), minimize the amount and duration.
Meanwhile, Mike at Master Your Card shared five steps to a do-it-yourself LifeLock. LifeLock bills itself as a service that can help consumers prevent identity theft. Mike points out that everything LifeLock does, you can do for free on your own. This is a great tip.
Finally, in 2006 Venture Voice interviewed John Bogle of The Vanguard Group, one of the largest mutual fund companies in the world. Bogle is the inventor of the index fund. He’s a frugal fellow, and one of my personal finance heroes. Though I don’t usually listen to podcasts, I listened to this one — it’s excellent. This is highly recommended listening. HIGHLY.
This article is about Spare Change Monday, 3rd March 2008 (by J.D. Roth)
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Another FANTASTIC John Bogle interview can be seen in it’s entirety on PBS’ site:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09282007/profile.html
March 3rd, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Suze Orman always says “DON’T BORROW MONEY FROM YOUR 401(K)!!!!!!!”
I would have to agree.
Also about not listening to podcasts, there are some great podcasts out there that are very educational. It is a great way to learn while walking, in the car, etc.
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:16 pm
You should be eating 100% whole wheat bread!!! The rest is just processed garbage.
As for buying it, the cheapest I’ve found is runner up WalMart brand at about $1.80 a loaf, and the winner is Cascade Pride which is about $1.30 a loaf and found at WinCo. There’s a WinCo in Beaverton right off I5 (not sure where you live).
WinCo does comparison shopping where they buy a full cart of items at their store, and comparison shop at other stores for prices. What I’ve seen is the WinCo at $90s, WalMart at $120s, Fred Meyer at $130s and Safeway and Albertsons in the $150s. The bottom line? Safeway is about the worst store you can shop at.
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:26 pm
Shannon, my favorite bread is Milton’s Whole Grain Plus, which goes for $3.79 at Safeway. Much to my surprise, I found that the same bread goes for $3.29 at Trader Joe’s.
Get Fit Slowly readers suggested a couple of other breads from Trader Joe’s, so I picked them up and gave them a try. One of them is a winner, though I can’t recall the cost. I’ll figure that up for Thursday.
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:06 pm
If you’re interested in being frugal with the bread purchases (and sometimes other products as well) see if there’s a bakery outlet nearby. We have one here in Kennewick, and I grew up with buying bread from the bakery in San Luis Obispo, CA (mmm… San Luis Sourdough…).
The trick is that you buy the ‘day old’ bread. The bakery generally can’t sell that to the supermarkets, but its still just fine. And often its marked down to half of what you’d pay in the market. I buy various Oroweat loaves that go for ~$3.50 or so in standard market (guessing a bit, since I don’t buy ‘em there) and at the bakery store as a ‘day old’ bread they’re $1.29.
I’ll buy 3-4 loaves, use one and freeze the others. I’ve found there to be very little difference between my frozen breads and purchased right from the supermarket. Now, admittedly, its a bit out of the way for me, but I just wait til I’m headed that way for something else. And to top it off, they’ve often got little free goodies and they have a ‘rewards’ stamp card, buy 10 items, get one free.
March 4th, 2008 at 4:50 am
Hi J.D., just wanted to say a big thanks on behalf of Mike and myself for the link to our DIY Lifelock article.
I hope your readers find it useful!
Kind Regards,
Jonathan
March 4th, 2008 at 5:43 am
Costco sells a 2-pack of whole-grain bread for under $4. No trans fats, no high fructose corn syrup. It’s pretty tasty and freezes very well. I get 2-3 bags on my monthly shopping trip.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Hi all.
I have enjoyed this blog for quite a while now and decided to try one of my own. If you’d like to stop by, here’s the link… http://tipsfroma20.blogspot.com/
March 4th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
With the way 401ks are performing right now, I am wondering if the interest paid to yourself by borrowing from the 401k wouldn’t be higher than any interest the money could be earning in the account over the next year.
Lisa
March 5th, 2008 at 7:26 am
Thanks for posting this podcast. I really enjoyed it. I have many of Bogle’s books on my to-read list.
March 10th, 2008 at 8:31 am
Sometimes, after you’ve lost your job, gone through your emergency savings & cut back your spending, you might just have to tap into your 401K. This is what we did in 2002 after I’d been out of work for 6 months. We took $4,000 out from which we realized $3,000 to pay off some debts. We were willing to take a 30% hit in order to preserve our excellent credit rating. Why didn’t we just borrow the money at 12% (our credit card rate at the time)? We actually we were using the credit card also to pay bills and only wanted to run it up so high. Six years later we have a healthy 401K balance (as we took only a small portion of it out) and are almost out of debt. Sometimes in the real world, you just have to do things financial wizards tell you not to do. The thing here tho was we only needed a small amt. of our 401K because we had done a lot of other things first.