Month: August 2024

The Wednesday Morning Weekly

Our city water is very bad and we used to buy bottled drinking water from Walmart at $1 per gallon — now more recently $1.35 per gallon. It was a lot of work transporting the water and carrying them from the car each trip, not to mention quite costly over the year. Assuming a conservative 1 gallon per day, this results in $493 per year! Very pricey! We also didn’t care for the flavor as we could taste the plastic odor in it. 1 gallon per day wasn’t ever really enough for the both of us for drinking, coffee/tea & cooking. 3 gallons per day is more reasonable. This means if we consumed 3 gallons of this Walmart bottled water per day, over the year it would cost us $1479. This article shares an alternative at 2.5 cents per gallon or $27 per year for three gallons per day.

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The Wednesday Morning Weekly.

Most of us agree how important it is to have an emergency fund — it’s often one of the first recommendations from financial planners along with tracking all of your spending each month. A three to six month emergency fund recommendation is common. Some of us, including myself prefer a one to two year emergency fund. It depends on a lot of factors: risk level, type of employment, number of dependents, personal preference, etc.

In the recent past, many of us who prefer a larger emergency fund have been concerned because that money was not getting much interest sitting there eroding in the bank accounts. Just a couple years ago it was hardly getting anything as interest rates were near zero. Today, at this time of writing 5%+ APY is fairly common. So things have changed a bit.

Well even better, is that if you are in the bonus hunting game, that emergency fund can also serve as a bankroll for the bonus hunting. It then becomes dual purpose: both a bonus hunting bankroll as well as an emergency fund. I call this the BHEF — the Bonus Hunting / Emergency Fund.

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