Coordination Apps When it is more than just you helping to care for someone, a major issue becomes how to keep track of who said they would do what and when. Scheduling people for needs is another aspect of the coordination. Applications have been developed to help with the coordination of all of these tasks. These can be helpful both with long-term caregiving, as well as for short-term when someone perhaps is in recovery/rehabilitation from […]

Inflation. The big “I” word that everyone is hearing about this year. A large portion of our population has not experienced high inflation, since the last time the rate of inflation was this high was back in the 1970s and 1980s. What Does It Mean? Although I’ll have another blog post that goes into more of the economic ideas behind inflation, the important concept is to understand that with a high inflation rate, it takes […]

If your spouse currently handles all of the household finances, have you ever thought about what you would do if your spouse was not there to do those tasks? People become widowed, divorced or for other reasons find that suddenly they are responsible for personal finances. What would you need to know in order to suddenly do this? What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know Donald Rumsfeld, during a department of defense press conference, uttered […]

As you know, I offer services as a Daily Money Manager (DMM) and support my clients by helping them with their household financial tasks. If you should find you or someone you know needing someone like myself, how do you go about finding someone who can do this? That’s the question that I help answer when I present the topic to different social groups. I thought it would be useful to publish this in order […]

During our lifetime, we make financial goals. These might be short-term goals such as having enough money around to spend on car repairs or a summer vacation. Or they might be longer-term goals such as saving for retirement. Of course, a spending plan is the key to having success with both of those. But that’s a different topic. The canal of a spending goal is that one is keeping track of the expenses against those […]

If you’ve said to yourself that you wanted to get a better handle on your household finances, I’m sure you’ve seen the suggestion that you should create a budget. Are you dissuaded because you feel that it is too much work? Because budgeting doesn’t sound like fun at all? Because it sounds constraining? Then let’s get rid of that word. Instead, what we want is a plan to answer two questions about our money: Am […]

Earlier this year, I wrote about a way to save money that involved reviewing and removing subscription apps on your phone as well as other auto-renewing subscriptions that you might not be using. I suggested cancelling those subscriptions that are note being used as a method of getting more money back in your pocket. For those auto-renewing subscriptions, I also recommend setting a future calendar reminder for a year out to generate a reminder to […]

If you received a bill in the mail tomorrow, that you were not expecting, and it said you owed $400, would it be a financial hardship to pay that bill? In 2013 nearly 50% of adults would find paying that bill a hardship, and 20% said they would totally be unable to pay that. The silver lining is that with the boom in the economy since then, the numbers have improved. By 2020, only 36% […]

If you could put all the information needed to communicate your health history into one place, where would be a good place to keep it? Perhaps in a filing cabinet? On a desk? On the nightstand? The basic concept is that the information is stored in the medicine bottle and this bottle is stored on a shelf on the refrigerator door. In other versions, the bottle is placed in a plastic bag and attached to […]

A couple of decades ago, the U S Army had a promotional ad on television that ended with “We do more by 9am than most people do all day.” There is another category of people for whom this is true as well: caregivers. Caregiving is not for the feint of heart and not all people can take this on. Being a caregiver for another person is something we probably don’t think about until it happens. […]