You may think you have a perfectly reasonable home insurance rate. It is within your budget, it is affordable, it has good coverage, and it seems to be cheaper than what other people are paying.

That shouldn’t stop you from shopping around, though. Complacency is what drives us backwards. You may have a great deal… but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t have an even greater deal!

Yesterday I discussed different ways to enjoy a frugal Thanksgiving. Now that you’ve got your bases covered for Thursday, what to do about Black Friday?

Black Friday marks a few things:

• The beginning of the Christmas shopping season.
• A day of sales and door busters to promote shopping.
• The name “Black Friday” came to be commonly referred to as the day after Thanksgiving from the Philadelphia cops describing the massive traffic incurred in Center City.
• Most stores do make profits all year round. But there are stores that do rely so heavily on the Christmas shopping season that it is truly when they get “in the black.”

Pretty exciting, eh? Over the past few years,  I have developed a Black Friday ritual as follows.

With Thanksgiving comes a short work week for me. I only work Monday and Tuesday and I get the rest of the week off! I love work, but am super-duper excited to have an easy week!

With all of those extra days off and a holiday revolving around eating, it becomes even easier to overspend on my food budget.

Tips to Enjoy a Frugal Thanksgiving

There are plenty of ways to make the most of the holiday while still maintaining a budget, here are a few!

This post is the first “staff” post from Roger of The Amateur Financier. He is going to start contributing some posts on a more regular basis to the tune of a few a month or more. I hope you enjoy this post as it is very timely, and give Roger a nice welcome!

It can happen to the best of us. One day, you’re going along like normal, working steadily at a job you tolerate, if not love; the next, you’re out of a job.

You are not alone; even as most economists are calling this latest recession over and are starting to talk about the recovery, unemployment is still over ten percent in the United States.

Pretty much since the beginning of the automobile industry, lead had been blended with gasoline in order to boost octane levels. Lead content before regulation was 2-3 grams per gallon. Due to EPA regulations in 1973, lead content was phased down to 0.1 grams per gallon by 1986.

State governments are now starting to set manufacturing requirements regarding the minimum efficiency of light bulbs produced. One of those states is California. Due to the sheer size of the market, this will most likely cause the suppliers to roll out the more efficient bulbs in other states as well. This could lead to significant energy savings.

So, why do government bans like these work? Wouldn’t the free market move in that direction anyways?