Working parents can find great flexible jobs. Zivica Kerkez / Shutterstock.com
For many parents, the end of summer means the opportunity to head back to work. But with the kids heading back to school, finding a balance between work and family can still be challenging. However, several scheduling options can meet your needs if you’re not interested in a full-time, in-person job. Many parents report that remote jobs with part-time schedules have helped them pursue their…
Do you find yourself overspending or getting overwhelmed by Costco? Here are two affordable places to shop instead. [[{“value”:”
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Between the rotisserie chicken, food court options, and their sample carts, Costco has achieved near-cult status. Where else can you get enough ketchup to make it through the apocalypse or find a comfortable couch for under $1,200?
It’s an easy place to rack up travel points, too. And then, of course, there’s the food court. What’s a trip to Costco without a cheap hot dog or slice of pizza?
For business owners and people with tons of storage space, Costco usually can’t be beat. But is it the best place to save cash? It might not be, depending on how you shop.
I have a list of items I always get at Costco, like my favorite dairy-free buffalo sauce, rice, and ketchup. But it’s also really easy for me to overspend. Costco is about half an hour from my house, so I only go once every few months. As a result, I tend to over-do the stocking up.
Sometimes, I forget that I have three extra jars of Better Than Bouillon in the basement or a massive bag of chicken nuggets in the freezer. Five pounds of peaches sounds like a great idea, but I often don’t eat them before they start going bad. Add in the clothing, books, and toiletries section and I’m lucky to get out of Costco for less than $600.
If you break down prices by ounce, Costco is often the cheaper option — but not always. Plus, if you end up overspending on perishable goods or making impulse purchases, there might be options that are cheaper in the long run.
If you have access to Aldi, it can be a great substitute for Costco. Like Costco, store-branded items are often far cheaper than name brands at the regular grocery store. For example, I can get 100 tablets of ibuprofen at Aldi for $1.99, which works out to $0.019 per tablet. Costco charges $12.99 for 1,000 tablets, which comes out to $0.012 per tablet, which isn’t much of a difference.
Many Aldi stores also have a good section of dairy-free and gluten-free items, which can be pricey at regular stores and hard to find at Costco.
The Aldi Finds section offers seasonal, limited-time items like pool floats, seasonal gnome decorations, rain boots, and snow pants. These items change every week and are often far cheaper than Costco or any other stores. For example, I spent $100 on Columbia hiking boots that ended up pinching my toes, but my $12 hiking boots from Aldi have hiked dozens of miles with no problem at all.
Not every city has an Aldi, or it might not be convenient to you. But there’s a good chance you have an even cheaper option closer to home. Small, local grocery stores are often affordable and stock a wide variety of items.
In my corner of Ohio, we have Marc’s. The stores are smaller than Costco and most grocery stores, but offer a wide selection of items. Its closeout section offers everything from school supplies and t-shirts to pet beds. Most of these items are bought from Target or similar stores when it swaps out stock for the season.
I regularly find Justice and Cat and Jack kids’ clothing for less than $2 per piece. While Marc’s doesn’t sell 2,000 tablets of Ibuprofen, I can get off-brand cold and flu medicine for less than $5 a bottle, while Costco charges $29.99 for a three-pack of DayQuil and NightQuil.
Marc’s is only in Ohio, but most cities have local grocery stores with similar pricing. When I lived in Chicago, for example, our local neighborhood market did.
If you find yourself struggling to stay on budget at Costco, look around your neighborhood for a locally owned grocery store. They don’t always offer the selection (or the cheap rotisserie chickens) you’ll find at Costco, but they are usually very affordable — and you won’t be tempted to buy that $1,000 patio set. For the samples and the food court pizza, however, you’ll have to make the trek to Costco.
If you’re shopping with a debit card, you could be missing out on hundreds or even thousands of dollars each year. These versatile credit cards offer huge rewards everywhere, including Costco, and are rated the best cards of 2024 by our experts because they offer hefty sign-up bonuses and outstanding cash rewards. Plus, you’ll save on credit card interest because all of these recommendations include a competitive 0% interest period.
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We’re firm believers in the Golden Rule, which is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers.
The Ascent does not cover all offers on the market. Editorial content from The Ascent is separate from The Motley Fool editorial content and is created by a different analyst team.The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Costco Wholesale and Target. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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Locking in your CD rates now is a smart move, before they drop across the board. Find out more here. [[{“value”:”
Image source: Getty Images
For the last few weeks, we’ve been hearing more and more chatter that the Federal Reserve is about ready to cut interest rates. That chatter is getting louder, and confidence is growing so strong that rates will soon be cut that it’s already starting to ripple through banking products like certificates of deposit (CDs).
Fortunately, you still have a little time before the Fed actually cuts rates to make a move from a high-yield savings account to a CD to lock in your rate for a little while longer.
The Federal Reserve is in charge of monetary policy for the United States. This means monitoring the economy and making adjustments to the federal funds rate as necessary. This is the interest that banks pay each other when they lend money back and forth, so for banks, it amounts to the cost of doing business.
The problem is that the cost of doing business for a bank also trickles down to depositors, who also contribute money to the bank that it can use to do business — often at rates just at or below the federal funds rate. That’s best for banks, because if they use funds already deposited there, it’s generally a lot cheaper than getting it from elsewhere.
But as the federal funds rate drops, banks will be offering less and less interest to depositors. So that means that after the next meeting of the Federal Reserve, your high-yield savings account, for example, is likely to take a hit to the interest rate it’s been paying. It’s not a direct correlation, in that a 0.25% drop in the federal funds rate won’t necessarily result in a 0.25% loss to your savings account rate, but a drop is still a drop.
CD rates, unlike high-yield savings accounts, have fixed interest rates for the period in which they’re locked. CD terms can range from just a few days to many years, and the interest varies based on what banks expect interest rates to do during that period.
For example, most of the banks we monitor at The Ascent are offering the best interest rates for CDs that are locked from about six months to 18 months, depending on the bank. Longer-term CDs have lower rates, which generally signals that the bank is anticipating interest rates to continue to fall for some amount of time.
If you have money that’s just sitting on the sidelines, July was the best time to buy a long-term CD and lock your interest rate in, but if you didn’t do that, now is the second-best time, before rates drop lower. CME Group’s FedWatch tool predicts what the federal funds rate may do, and it is anticipating at least three 0.25% rate cuts before the end of the year.
What that means in real terms is that for every $10,000 you’ve sidelined in a savings account, you’re going to lose about $75 if you wait until January to lock in your interest rate, assuming it only drops by 0.75%. It might not sound like a lot, but that’s $75 in free money for doing almost nothing that you now won’t have.
This is harder to answer. Choosing a CD term length depends on a lot of factors, including:
How long you can sideline your cashWhat you think interest rates will do during the period your money is tied up in CDsYour overall financial snapshot
CDs can be purchased with term lengths up to 10 years at some banks, though many will only offer 5-year CDs at best. You’ll find those 60-month CDs have a pretty wide range of interest rates, depending on the bank, but the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis says that as of August 2024, they averaged about 3.97%. It’s a far cry from the 12-month CD that averaged 4.73% during that same period, but remember that you’ve got a rate that’s locked for five times as long.
Put another way, due to the way interest compounds on a CD, after five years at 3.97%, if you didn’t touch your interest gains, you’d have made $2,191.75 on your $10,000 CD — guaranteed. You’d have made just $483.39 on a 1-year CD at 4.73%, then you’d be at the whim of the market, which can make it very hard to plan long term. If interest rates drop, as banks seem to be predicting from the rates they’re offering for longer-term CDs, you’d have lost out, perhaps substantially.
Unless you have a specific target in mind for your savings — for example, you’re holding on to money to buy your kid a car when they turn 16 or to pay for college — now is the time to lock your savings into a CD for as long as you can. Those 5-year CD numbers look pretty good right now, if you can part with your money for that long.
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We’re firm believers in the Golden Rule, which is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers.
The Ascent does not cover all offers on the market. Editorial content from The Ascent is separate from The Motley Fool editorial content and is created by a different analyst team.Kristi Waterworth has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends CME Group. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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If you bought a home with a high mortgage rate in recent years, refinancing could make sense. But here are two mistakes to watch out for. [[{“value”:”
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Mortgage rates have recently fallen sharply and are now significantly below their 2023 peak. This is making refinancing a viable option for many people who bought homes in the past couple of years.
While refinancing could certainly make sense for you, there are a few things to keep in mind before you start filling out applications. Here are two common mistakes I often see people making when refinancing their mortgages, and why they are so important for you to avoid.
One of the most common mortgage mistakes I see — whether it’s for a purchase or a refinancing — is applying with one mortgage lender and simply accepting whatever interest rate and loan terms are offered. Under no circumstances should you do this.
It’s an important concept to understand that different lenders have different methods of underwriting and approving loans. It is quite common for a home buyer to apply for a mortgage with three or four lenders and get three or four slightly different interest rates.
While I say “slightly different,” you might be surprised at how much getting the absolute best rate matters.
Consider this example. Let’s say that you have a $400,000 mortgage and are looking to refinance. One lender offers you a rate of 6.375%, while another offers you 6.25% with a similar origination fee. These two interest rates might sound very close, but the lower of the two would save you $11,520 in interest over a 30-year loan term compared with the higher rate.
It might take you a few hours to fill out mortgage applications with several different lenders, but that would be a pretty solid return on your time. It’s also worth noting that applying to several lenders won’t have an adverse impact on your credit score. There’s a special rule in the FICO scoring formula that is specifically designed to encourage rate shopping.
As long as all of your mortgage applications occur during a normal shopping period (defined as two weeks in most versions of the FICO formula), it will be counted as a single credit inquiry for scoring purposes.
As mentioned, most experts believe that interest rates will come down considerably over the next couple of years, but there’s absolutely no way to know the timing, or how much rates could fall. In general, trying to time interest rate moves is a losing battle. After all, at the beginning of 2022, most experts predicted the 30-year mortgage rate would stay below 4% for the foreseeable future.
Let’s say that you bought a home last year and have a 7.5% rate on a 30-year mortgage. You can get a rate of 6.5% today, and even including the origination fee, the mathematics make sense. But the Mortgage Bankers Association projects that the 30-year rate will fall further to 6% by the end of 2025.
Should you wait to refinance? Not necessarily. Not only is there absolutely no guarantee that you’ll be able to get a 6% interest rate next year, but in the meantime, you’ll continue making your payments at your current (high) rate.
There is no rule that says you can only refinance once. Mortgages are an ongoing one-way renegotiation. I have friends who refinanced two (or even three) times as rates plunged in 2020 and 2021.
Thanks to expectations of interest rate cuts starting later this year, mortgage rates have recently fallen to their lowest level in 15 months. The average 30-year mortgage rate is 6.49% as of the latest data, well below the 2023 peak of nearly 8%.
The short explanation is that if you’re planning to be in the home long enough that the monthly cost savings of refinancing will more than justify the costs of refinancing, it can be a good time to take a closer look at refinancing.
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We’re firm believers in the Golden Rule, which is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers.
The Ascent does not cover all offers on the market. Editorial content from The Ascent is separate from The Motley Fool editorial content and is created by a different analyst team.The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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You can unlock new income streams with easy side hustles. Read on to learn how to boost your earnings today. [[{“value”:”
Image source: Getty Images
Are you sitting comfortably? Good, because we’re about to turn that cozy corner of your home (or that spot where your car sits 90% of the time) into a cash machine. Before you brush this off as another get-rich-quick scheme, hear me out. Let’s explore five not-so-boring side gigs that could easily boost your checking account balance by $500 or more every month.
Got an extra room where the only guests are dust bunnies? It’s time to evict them and list the space on Airbnb. Depending on where you live and how charming your digs are, you could rake in $50 to $150 per night. Just 10 nights at the lower end can push your monthly earnings to $500. And that’s underestimating, considering that the average nightly price is $219.
Remember, you’ll need to manage bookings and keep the place clean, but it’s a small price to pay for a sweet addition to your bank account.
Is your car spending more time stationary than a lazy cat in a sunbeam? Let it earn its keep through car-sharing platforms like Turo or Getaround. These services estimate you can earn between $30 to $45 a day — do that for about 15 days, and hello, $500! It’s like telling your car to get a job; surprisingly, it listens.
Ever think of turning your mad skills into mad bills? Platforms like TaskRabbit and Fiverr are the freelancers’ playground. Whether you’re a whiz with graphics or can fix a sink in a blink, you can find gigs paying an average of $68 each.
Snag about eight of these a month, and you’ve nailed that extra $500. Best part? You pick what you do and when you do it, so say goodbye to boredom and hello to more cash in the bank.
As the world turns more digital, the cry for virtual assistants grows louder. If you can manage an inbox, keep a calendar in check, and handle social media without breaking a sweat, you’re golden.
Start-up costs are a minimal hit to the wallet (think $100 to $300 to create a website and marketing materials — you may have to spend more if you don’t already have a laptop you can work on). With a going rate of $15 to $50 per hour, working just a handful of hours each week can easily stack up to $500 a month. It’s almost like printing money, but you know, legally.
Got a passion for pedagogy? Or maybe you just really like showing off how much you know. Either way, teaching or tutoring online can turn that brainpower into buying power. Platforms across the web connect you with eager learners from all corners of the globe.
With rates typically ranging from $20 to $40 an hour, a few sessions a week can make that meter hit $500 before you know it. Plus, you get to change lives, one lesson at a time — how’s that for a win-win?
So, now that we’ve walked through five playful yet practical side hustles, what’s next? It’s time to transform your curiosity into action. Pick one — or hey, why not a mix? — and start setting up your side gig today.
Whether it’s turning your home into a mini-hotel, teaching from your laptop, or letting your car clock in for you, each step you take builds toward that extra $500. Think about how that additional income could change your monthly budgeting game or fund those dreams on your wish list. Ready to shift gears from potential to actual earnings?
This credit card is not just good – it’s so exceptional that our experts use it personally. It features a 0% intro APR for 15 months, a cash back rate of up to 5%, and all somehow for no annual fee!
Click here to read our full review for free and apply in just 2 minutes.
We’re firm believers in the Golden Rule, which is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers.
The Ascent does not cover all offers on the market. Editorial content from The Ascent is separate from The Motley Fool editorial content and is created by a different analyst team.The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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These organizational aids from the popular discount chain are both affordable and functional. Deb Hipp / Money Talks News
There’s no need to wait for spring to get organized when you can find cheap organizational products at Dollar Tree to whip your closets, kitchen and other rooms into shape for good. From drawer organizers and caddies to storage baskets and tubs ,you’ll find an abundance of affordable organizing items starting at $1.25. I went shopping at Dollar Tree to find the best organizational products…
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