The next time you sip from a can of soda consider this: the average American will consume more than 43,000 cans of soda in his or her lifetime. Opting for something a bit healthier, like an orange? We'll each consume nearly 13,000 of them in our lifetime. Those are among the facts and figures from the National Geographic Channel's (NGC) video report, "Human Footprint." Some of the stats are interesting; others are alarming, like the fact that we'll each throw away 64 tons of waste.
Matt's View
The report made me wonder: What impact will we have on the 1,700 people we'll each know over our lifetime? Is there something we could do to consume less than the average 1.8 million gallons of water? And, with each of us owning an average of 12 cars over our lifetime, wouldn't it make better economic sense to keep our cars longer?
You can see three short portions of the report on NGC's web site
, where you'll also find suggestions
for walking a bit more lightly through life. To see the whole 90-minute report, you could buy the DVD
or see if it's available at your local library.
A recent Businessweek.com story mentioned a coupon site I had never heard of before that turns out to be unusually good: RetailMeNot
. Enter the name of an online store where you're planning to do some shopping and it'll give you a coupon code, if available.
Matt's View
I figured the site would have coupons for all of the common e-tailers--Amazon and such. But while placing an order for custom water bottles for an upcoming event, I decided on a whim to enter the name of the little-known company I was using. I assumed it would be a complete waste of 15 seconds of my life, but was amazed to find a coupon code available. It didn't save me much--about $3--but that's not bad for 15 seconds of work.
The go-to source for information about saving for college has been the aptly named web site Savingforcollege.com
. But Morningstar
is giving that site a run for its money with a new analysis of the best and worst 529 plans, along with a comprehensive set of articles about the pros and cons of such plans and all of the other options for college savings.
Matt's View
To estimate how much to save for college, my favorite online calculator is still the one on Savingforcollege.com. On the site's home page, look for "World's Simplest College Calculator." Don't be alarmed by the initial figures it comes up with. Where it tells you the current cost of the college your child will attend, click on the "Help" link and you'll be able to find out the current costs at specific schools and also the average financial aid received by students at those schools. Then you can adjust the current cost figure and other assumptions to make the estimates more accurate and probably less daunting.
Anyone who has lost someone they love will tell you it's the holidays that bring back their strongest memories of those people. So, with Mother's Day fast approaching, I've been thinking about my mom who passed away in December of 2003. This year brought back a memory of a conversation we had about money just a couple of months before she died. Lying on a couch, weakened from the effects of cancer, she wanted to talk about the money she and my dad planned to leave my brother and me in their will. Even though my parents were both teachers, they had rarely given us any overt lessons about saving or investing or avoiding credit card debt, so the topic caught me off guard. What would she say? Was she worried that I might mismanage it, as I had an inheritance I received from an uncle
15 years earlier? Would she implore me to save most of it? To invest it conservatively? No. She surprised me with the encouragement to use a portion to buy something just for fun.
Matt's View
It's possible that my mom was feeling some regret over not spending more on herself. But she also knew that the financial crash and burn I went through had made me very conservative in my use of money. Maybe she thought I had swung too far to the frugal side and wanted to remind me that it's okay to spend money sometimes just for fun. Of all the final financial advice one could give, making sure we use some money just for fun isn't bad.
By the way, it took me a few years to follow my mom's advice, but I finally did buy something just for fun--a nice digital camera. I get a lot of pleasure from pictures taken during great vacations, and from those that remind me of how much our kids have changed in a short amount of time. As an added bonus, when I use that camera to capture a memory, it very often brings back fond memories of my mom.
What great financial advice--either by word or by example--did you get from your mom? Please send me a note
to let me know.
