Living Frugally in a High Cost-of-Living Area + MORE

Welcome readers to this weekend’s chit-chat. The biggest news to share with you is of OCAAT reaching a million page view milestone. It was a journey of all success for OCAAT in last 28 months. When I started on March 1, 2011 I never set a goal, I never thought about people reading my articles a million times!

For almost 5 years, I have only been reading other blogs…

Dear FS Community,
For those who subscribe to Financial Samurai via Google Reader RSS please sign up for a new RSS service such as Feedly which should automatically import your existing RSS subscriptions. Google Readers is about to go kaput on July 1, 2013. Another popular RSS service is Bloglovin.
For those who receive Financial Samurai content via e-mail, later today I will be transporting the existing e-mail subscriber base from Feedburner’s email service to Aweber, another e-mail subscription service, which will perform the exact same function…

Some big changes are coming about in my life, which I can’t yet announce. Let’s just say that they will alter the course of my life a bit. I’m excited about the possibilities and will share the details as soon as I can.
All this craziness has got me thinking about the paths that you are I are taking in our lives…

According to recent housing market statistics, house flipping (the practice of buying an under-priced home with the purpose of re-selling it for a profit) is on the rise once again. As the market bounces back from the drop in home values and bankruptcy of the nation’s largest mortgage companies, speculators are feeling more confident about investing in homes…

David Bakke is an author and blogger for the personal finance resource Money Crashers, where he discusses tips for saving money for retirement and generating long-term wealth. When it comes to saving for retirement, many Americans are woefully behind. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 56 percent of those surveyed said they had less than $25,000 in retirement savings, and 30 percent doubted they’d have enough money to retire…

I make no bones about the fact that I live in a rather rural area. I live on the very edge of a small town. The nearest grocery store is about ten miles away. This is a low cost-of-living area, in other words. It’s not the lowest in the country by any stretch of the imagination, but when I hear stories about New York and San Francisco, I almost choke…