Stocking Up On Household Goods For FREE

For the past few weeks I’ve been laid up with two different, but related back muscle injuries. Constantly pushing myself, I had a minor strain during a long run. Instead of resting then, I spent the remainder of the weekend moving furniture and continuing to train. So now, I’ll be skipping the Marine Corps race (10k, not the marathon) this weekend and letting the wife run it alone. Things have gotten a lot better though, and we went indoor rock climbing last night, but I just don’t think I can manage the race *and can’t allow a so-so time :).

During this time, I’ve been using a fair amount of heat pads. In need some of more, I recently stocked up on them along with lots of cold medicine. The best part of all – everything I got was… FOR FREE! These aren’t trial sizes either; we’re talking regularly sold products.

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How You Treat Your Goods Could Reflect How You Manage Money

Preserved Red BarnDisposable. It’s a word used far too often in describing items we view as single-use and easily replaceable, like disposable utensils or razors.

Reduction in material quality, craftsmanship, and of course, labor rates has super-charged almost all durable goods – making them readily available and extremely affordable. As a result, we’ve grown out of the smaller disposable items like diapers and napkins into larger products like toasters and microwaves.

Hard to believe for $10 you can buy a toaster. For that small cost, it’s not “worth” the time to fix a broken one and instead we default to buying new, allowing the product to become disposable. Once that happens it’s near impossible to realize the product’s full potential. We’re constantly replacing the item before we squeeze out all of its usefulness.

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30 Ways to Wreck Your Career

Broken Pencil

Broken PencilOriginally a slide show on BusinessWeek, I’ve had these fatal career mistakes saved on my computer for a while. Already having sent it to a few people there was something about this particular list that caught my attention, and knew they needed to be shared.

It may have been some of the truly entertaining photos,or the fact that I’ve been guilty of close to 50% of these at some point.

Although… I’d be surprised if there’s someone out there who hasn’t committed any of these no-no’s!

I’ve left the original number as they appeared in the slide show, but reorganized them by severity.

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Coping as a Live-In LandLord

Old time Milkshake Advertisement

My name is Mike Choi and I look nothing like this photo, but I do run a little blog over at rentingoutrooms.com, which is my story of renting out my individual rooms to roommates. The idea is if you own your home, you can rent out an individual room in exchange for rent. This whole idea started when I decided to go back to graduate school, but I didn’t want to take on additional student loan debt to what I already accrued from my undergraduate studies. Today, I’m here to share my story of work involved making money from your extra bedroom.


Being a “live-in landlord”

I call myself a live-in landlord because a traditional landlord is someone who owns a piece of property and rent it out to tenants. However, my case is slightly different – I live in my residence and rent out the individual rooms to roommates. So that’s why I call myself a live in landlord, which is like a separate sub species of landlords.

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