My Two Dollars

How to Make Your Own Homemade All-Purpose Household Cleaner – For Pennies!

Do you buy special cleaning products for every surface in your home? Does the kitchen get a different cleaner than the bathroom? How about your appliances? Every major company selling these products tries to market a different bottle of their cleaner for different purposes, but I use the exact same one for everything in my house. And the best part? I make a completely non-toxic one with very simple ingredients all by myself for only pennies instead of $2.99 and up per bottle. Let’s take a look at what I use to make this cleaner…

Here are the ingredients:

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saving

By David

How Federal (IRS) Income/Salary Tax Brackets Really Work

Just because your income puts you in the X or Y % tax bracket, that doesn’t mean that is really what percentage of your income you pay in taxes. We actually have a progressive tax system in place in the US, where you are taxed at different levels as your income increases. I wrote about the 2010 tax rates before on the site, and will discuss them a little later, but people often have the misconception that if their income falls in the 25% tax bracket it means that they pay a full 25% in taxes. This is simply not the case, and I wanted to put together a little post to explain how the tax brackets actually work. Throughout this post, I will use the figures from the “Filing as a single” tax brackets, as that is how I file:

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taxes

By David

5 Free Finance iPhone Apps That Can Save You Money

There used to be a time that you walked into a store, picked up what you wanted, and paid the person at the checkout stand. No instantaneous comparison shopping, no e-tailers to check first, and depending on where you lived, not even too many places to choose from. But with the internet and so many people carrying around miniature connected computers in the form of smartphones, shoppers can now check on a price of a product everywhere else before plunking down their hard earned cash. There are hundreds of apps to choose from, and while I can only recommend iPhone apps for comparison shopping (as that’s the phone I own), I am sure there are comparable apps for other phones as well. Let’s take a look at 6 free ones that can help you save money, along with the links to each (which open in iTunes).

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saving

By David

Need Help Paying Medical Bills? – Negotiate and Ask For a Discount!

I just received yet another medical bill from a pathology office that my Dermatologist used a few months ago. After a small biopsy on one visit, and then surgery and stitches on another, I thought I had wrapped up paying off this latest round of skin cancer medical bills – but boy was I wrong. See, I had finished paying off the $700 in doctor’s bills, but not the bills for the lab that did the pathology testing and diagnoses. I had forgotten that my doctor said that those services would be billed separately! Thus, a new bill showed up the other day for $382 from these guys, and just as I was preparing to call them up and pay off the bill with my rewards credit card, I remembered something pretty important: my doctor gave me a discount on his services because I don’t have health insurance and I was paying in cash. Would the pathology organization be willing to give me a discount as well? What could it hurt to ask?

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insurance

By David

Buy Local – How Spending Money Locally Benefits You & Your Community

Sure, the convenience of those big-box stores is nice because you can get almost everything you need (and a bunch of stuff you don’t, if you are anything like the average person – myself included) in one place, but do you know where your money goes after you give it to the clerk? It heads right back to the big-box headquarters, paying out giant bonuses and perks to the bigwigs while leaving the workers to fight for minimum wage and meager benefits. I fight the urge to buy everything at the big-box stores as much as the next person, because of convenience and price, but when I think about where my money is going it does make it a little easier to try to search out smaller shops. When I lived in New Mexico, I lived in a very small town where most of the stores and restaurants were locally-owned, and I tried to make it a point of buying from them instead of driving the 63 miles to the nearest Target Superstore. (There was a Walmart in my town, but I never shop there for reasons I won’t get into here and that you guys have heard before) Sometimes it took going to 2 different stores to find what I needed, or spending an extra $.50 over the price it would have been “down the hill”, but it was worth it because there was a local human behind the storefront.

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Lifestyle • shopping