This Week In Your Wallet: October 16, 2012
My daughter has been invited to the Sweet 16 of a friend from camp. It’s over the Christmas holiday – and it’s in Florida. While we haven’t made the final go-no go decision yet, I started looking at flights only to find that, yes, prices are already on the rise.
I bet I’m hardly the only person in this boat – and that some of you have even more adventurous plans in mind — which is why I wanted to share this great New York Times article with you: In it, the author lists ten websites to make your future travels run more smoothly — and, cheaply. Among the sites they recommend, here are some of my favorites:
- For European flights on the cheap, try Skypicker.com or Vayama.com. Skypicker is great if you’re flexible about where you’re going. So if, for instance, you’re in Amsterdam for work and want to get away for the weekend and for as little money as possible, Skypicker lets you plug in your location and tells you where you could go for as little as 30 or 40 euros. Vayama also specializes in international travel, but according to the Times “seems to know about more airlines and often finds two one-way flights on different airlines that beat out a round-trip flight on a single one.”
- For vacations with a local twist, head to Staydu.com. If you’re willing to do a little work in exchange for free lodging and meals, this is a great resource for you. You can search by location (I tried Nice, France, for fun), and Staydu shows you lodging options that are free if you’re willing to do a little work. In my Nice test, I found a villa with a pool that is available for use in exchange for some gardening work and food preparation. Not bad!
- For the perfect dish, go to Dishtip.com. Do you ever wish you could search for a restaurant based on a specific food you’re craving? Dishtip lets you do just that. Enter the food you want in the city you’re in — say, “pizza” in “New York City” — and it comes up with a list of restaurants that will satisfy that craving. Based on the results for my “pizza in NYC” test, Dishtip will definitely lead you towards some great local cuisine.
For more travel sites that can help make your life easier, check out the full Times article, linked above. And now, here are the other headlines for the week:
Everybody’s working…
… and for much, much more than the weekend. Allow me to explain. According to a post in the Wall Street Journal, more people over the age of 65 are working than ever before. The number of working Americans in that age group is up 21% since 2008, and the size of the retirement-age labor force has increased by 23%.
While I’d love to say that this increase is because people love their jobs and just haven’t wanted to retire, the sad truth is that this increase is likely because people haven’t been saving enough or haven’t quite recovered from the stock market decline. If you’re looking at your nestegg and finding that it’s coming up short, I encourage you to take a close look at your budget and see if there’s any fat you can trim — and then, take those savings and automatically deposit them into your retirement account.
An alternative type of student loan
I was fascinated by this MarketWatch piece, which highlighted a new type of student loan: high school loan funds. Organized by community groups, these loans are turning up as lower-interest alternatives to pricey private loans. However, while high school loan funds’ rates are often closer to federal student loan rates, the terms are a bit more strict: the payment periods range from four to eight years after graduation, and penalties for missing a payment can mean foreclosure. The loans tend to also comprise just a small percentage of the overall cost of college tuition, ranging from just a few hundred dollars to $7,000. Still, I found this to be an interesting idea. If your community offered such a thing, would you take advantage of it?
Playing the waiting game is actually fun?
I’ve seen many crazy consumer studies over the years, but this one might just take the cake: according to consumer analysts and marketing researchers, we wait in line for products (think: iPhone 5) because doing so is fun and makes us feel good about ourselves. … uh, come again?
An article in Time’s Moneyland blog describes like this: “Being surrounded by like-minded consumers, who have also decided that it makes sense to wait in line, is a sign that you’re not alone—and that yourchoices on what to buy and how long it’s worth standing around to buy it are sound.”
Okay, that makes a little more sense… but I still don’t think that logic applies to me. (I was three years behind in getting the iPhone the first time and have absolutely no plans to upgrade until it dies.) What do you think? Does waiting in line for an item validate your decision to buy it?
Have a great week!
Jean
