shopping

The Target problem: Managing (over)spending at the Everything Store

Target and other big retailers that sell a wide range of products present a challenge to those who wish to track their spending. Target has been around for decades, but it only hit my radar in college, when the first … Read MoreRead More

Why holiday shopping is more complex this year

Black Friday deals have a greater urgency this year because of the pandemic, but it doesn’t mean that you should do your holiday shopping indiscriminately. I can’t lie; I’ve always had challenges with this time of year. It’s not the … Read MoreRead More

Gas prices sign

Adventures in pointless frugality: Shopping for a gas station

I’ve been fascinated in one way or another by gas prices ever since I worked at a gas station in college. At first it was just the geographic variation in prices, like how I could drive across the river from … Read MoreRead More

Bank Vault

Here are some better ways to spend $600 than on hard drive recovery

I spent roughly $600 to recover personal files from a dead hard drive. Now, $600 is a lot of money. It was half of the price of my first car when I bought it. It was more than what my … Read MoreRead More

À la recherche du hard drives perdu: my data recovery experience

So as I reported earlier, a hard drive containing valuable personal files died on me recently. I thought I hadn’t backed up in a few months, which would have been hard enough, but it turns out that I hadn’t backed … Read MoreRead More

How to keep your miles from expiring without spending extra money

  Far too many sites about travel hacking seem to talk endlessly about how to get zillions of frequent flyer miles by signing up for credit card bonuses (that require spending thousands of dollars in a certain period of time). … Read MoreRead More