Is Welfare Unconstitutional AND Bad for Society?

In the book Does Your Bag Have Holes?, Cameron C. Taylor, in addition to financial and spiritual topics, highlights a number of points regarding the foundations of society, the intent of the Constitution and the role of government in the welfare of its people. I’d like to talk about the last point because Taylor opened my eyes to “the other side of the argument” about social welfare and who should take care of the poor and unfortunate.

The Intent of the Constitution

In the book, Taylor discusses about 2 dozen “myths” about personal finance and how God, government and our own free will play a big role in each. One of the myths reads:

Government has a responsibility to provide for the poor and needy

Well, that was always my assumption because why else would the government have instituted welfare programs, social security, or giving money to other countries to help in crisis situations? Who else would do it?

Caveat Emptor: Buyer Beware

By Shawn

Shawn is a personal friend of the Clever Dude and Dudette. At the time of writing this article, Shawn didn’t know he was going to be driving to the hospital that night to deliver his first child!

Latin for “Buyer Beware”, Caveat Emptor would have come in handy for me about a month ago.

Since we’re about to have a baby, I’ve been trying to find ways to cut costs associated with the new arrival (without compromising her safety, however). There are some things that you are warned against buying used, such as car seats and cribs, because safety requirements are constantly changing.

In an effort to save some money, we made a list of things that we could purchase used. One of the things on the list was baby gates.

Finding a Used Baby Gate

We have 2 rather large openings to 2 rooms that we want to block off when our little one starts roaming the house. The gates to fit these openings are pretty expensive. I did some searching on Craigslist, and I found a person selling a gate that would fit one of the openings at half the cost of a new one.

A New Approach to “Staying the Course”

By Rob Bennett

Rob Bennett is the author of “Passion Saving: The Path to Plentiful Free Time and Soul-Satisfying Work,” and writes the Financial Freedom Blog. He writes extensively on Valuation-Informed Indexing at his www.PassionSaving.com web site, which features The Stock-Return Predictor calculator, a calculator that reveals the value proposition associated with purchases of the S&P500 Index made at various valuation levels (based on a regression analysis of the historical stock-return data).

Stay the Course!

How many times have you heard that bit of advice? Probably hundreds. It is John Bogle’s favorite admonition to investors.

Have you ever stopped to think what it means?

The idea of Staying the Course sounds great. No investing strategy is going to pay off unless you possess the courage to stick with it through challenges. Investors who Stay the Course are stable, consistent, unshakable.

Right?

Not necessarily.

Expanding Your Family and Reducing Your Income

By Shawn

Shawn, a subscriber and frequent commenter here at Clever Dude, as well as a personal friend of the Clever Dude and Dudette will be posting occasional guest articles. You can read his introduction here.

My wife and I are less than 10 days away from the birth of our first child. As a result, we’ve had first hand experiences with a lot of the concepts that the Clever Dude has discussed on this site.

Stay-at-Home Parent

The first arises because my wife and I thought it would be best if she stayed home for a year or so. This means we’ll be heading down to one salary.

One of the most important things we needed to do as a couple to make this adjustment was to sit down and discuss our new financial goals. We’ve had a debt-free plan that was contingent on a 2 person family with 2 incomes. Adding a third and losing an income obviously has an affect on our goals.

Inviting All of YOU to Submit Guest Post(s)

Although I’ve always been open to posting article written by my fellow bloggers AND readers who may not have their own site, I’d like to present an open invitation to submit guest articles on any subject that falls under:

Family Marriage Finances or Life

Is that broad enough? Depending on how many I get, I’ll be posting submissions over the next 2 weeks, give or take. The sooner you submit, the sooner I’ll post it!

Obviously I have a couple rules/standards:

• It has to be relevant to readers. I probably won’t post a rant about your cat unless it’s actually useful to others. For example, if you hate your cat’s shedding, then research ways to shave the cat without losing an eye.
• No swearing, racism or anything else that would bar you from a normally respectable site, assuming this site is respectable
• Don’t worry about formatting as I’ll make sure it fits into the style of this site. Try as hard as you can to write with proper grammar, but don’t worry about getting it perfect.

Retaining Wall (almost) Complete!

_{Our retaining wall}

I mentioned that the second thing I did all weekend was “finish” our retaining wall, so I’ll explain a little more. I started digging the 55ft section of wall along our pool on May 2nd, and it took about 5-6 hours of digging over 2 days to square out the area for the retaining wall bricks and level it out. That was by far the hardest and most tiring work of the whole project.

Pulling in a close second to the digging would be hauling 3 half-ton loads of gravel in my truck, shoveling it out, wheeling it to the backyard, then hosing out the truck bed. It doesn’t help when I fall back first onto the wheelbarrow though. I gotta say that shoveling gravel is not the easiest job.

And bringing up third in the tough jobs would be hauling about three-hundred 22 lbs bricks (counting the first wall I completed) for a total of 3.5 tons. Luckily on the last 2 loads, and one of the other ones, I had my neighbors help. I thanked them with a restaurant dinner, but we each used an Entertainment Book coupon so I really paid for 1 meal (plus my own).

Reminder: Postage Increase In Effect

If you didn’t stock up on Forever Stamps on Saturday in order to save money when the cost of postage increases today, then you’re one of the smart ones. The price of a stamp “shot up” from 41 cents to a whole 42 cents, but that doesn’t mean you should go hoarding forever stamps unless you’re in the mass-mailing market.

Since the postage rate increases are pegged at no more than the inflation rate, you won’t “make” any money by stocking up on more stamps than you think you’ll use in the next year or so. Just buy a book of forever stamps when you need it and no more than what you need. We go through about 20 stamps every 6 months unless it’s Christmas time. And a majority of our mailings are greeting cards for birthdays, anniversaries, etc. anyway.

So don’t fret about this 1 cent increase unless you ship out huge amounts of mail because you probably won’t even feel the effects.

Freecycle Rocks! Guess what I got for free…

So this weekend, I’m browsing through my Freecycle emails when I spot something interesting. Someone is giving away a Garmin Quest portable navigation unit (MSRP $450-600, on sale for ~$250). They didn’t say it was broken or anything, just that all it had was the unit and the car charger. It was hours after it originally posted, so I assumed I wouldn’t get it, but I responded anyway with a request to get it.

A few hours later (around 9:30pm on Saturday), I checked my email and saw a reply from the owner. Apparently the first person to respond didn’t come to pick up the unit, so it was all mine. Woohoo!

So at around 10pm, I woke Stacie from her nap (ok, she had passed out while watching the live-action Nodame anime) and headed out the door to pick up the Garmin. The offerer’s house was only 4 miles away and she had left it on the front porch. We got there, I ran up to the door and sure enough it was in a plastic Ziploc bag as she had claimed. I grabbed it, went back to the truck then drove away.