By Gene Ayres

This week's report that consumer confidence has reached the lowest levels in decades shouldn't be surprising, given that we've been hammered with a quadruple whammy of lower real income, falling property values (hence loss of equity), and sharp increases in the two most needed commodities these days: food and energy.

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By Colleen Rothe

Air travel used to be the height of convenience and efficiency as I recall even less than a decade ago. I used to really love to fly. But today, I rather loathe air travel for many reasons.

The most notable, as well as annoying reason to eschew air travel is that airlines rarely seem to keep their word, whether it’s scheduling, courteous service or even something as simple as having soap in the suffocatingly small plane bathrooms.

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By Linsey B. Knerl

I often buy products with the lure of getting it cheaper (or free) with a rebate. Many of my best purchases cost me nothing more than a little time and a single postage stamp. Rebates have been getting a bad rap the past few years, as many consumers report not getting anything back from their rebate requests. Here are some tips to be sure you aren’t getting taken.

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By Gene Ayres

Now that a dollar can only get you about five miles down the road in your car, and not even that far on a bus, it might be a good time to see what, in fact, you can still get for that increasingly paltry sum of once dominant provender.

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By Colleen Rothe

For a couple of years now, my tweens (8 to 12-year-olds) have been asking me for a cell phone to call their own. The number one tool my husband and I use to juggle our busy lives full of three kids’ worth of activities is the cell phone. We’ve both gotten quite the puzzled looks from teens and 20-somethings when they’ve witnessed us speed-thumbing our way through text messages to one another:

HUBBY: Did u get Pnut?

WIFEY: Brt. Eta 10.

HUBBY: Kthxbai!

Needless to say, we know the value that a cell phone adds to keeping a family in touch. But, to make the plunge into a cell phone for the kids is a whole other matter.

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By Linsey Knerl

I used to love very few activities more than browsing my local Hollywood Video for a cult classic or a new foreign movie. The entire process of scanning the shelves for “just the right movie” was almost more therapeutic than the viewing itself. Waiting in line to pay for my rental and having the disinterested clerk take way too long to punch in a few numbers and scan my rental card, however, was a giant waste of time. And fighting traffic to get my rental back by 4:00 p.m. the next day was near impossible.

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By Colleen Rothe

For many of us – at least 70 percent of the American population – who live paycheck to paycheck, the only wiggle room we have is in our monies allotted to food.

But there’s one key factor to saving money at the grocery store: planning.

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By Linsey Knerl

Perhaps you’ve received an offer to join an auto club called AutoVantage. The premise usually involves billing you a small amount (perhaps $1) for a month or two under a trial membership. You are then promised a gift card or other reward for trying them out and are guaranteed the ability to cancel if not satisfied. But some people have been signed up without even knowing it – and billed accordingly.

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By Gene Ayres

When I moved to Seattle a year ago from North Carolina, one of the important attractions to me was the seemingly plentiful supply of fresh water, with so many surprisingly clean and accessible lakes and rivers, even close to downtown, such as Lake Washington. Few metropolitan areas in the world can offer such resources, and even fewer have taken such pains (however futile, at times) to protect and preserve these increasingly vital resources.

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By Colleen Rothe

The Memorial Day weekend just passed and the figures are in. Many people did not kick off their summer season with weekend getaways. They just stayed put. They had a “Staycation,” a term that seems to have popped up on the internet back in 2006, but is beginning to become more popular in the general public’s vernacular over the course of this spring.

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By Linsey B. Knerl

The coolant of choice by car manufacturers and the mechanics, Dex-Cool has been recently accused of ruining car parts faster than if it hadn’t been used at all. With many models of Buick, Chevy, Olds, GMC, and Pontiac vehicles “requiring” its use for optimum performance, this accusation is a kick in the teeth for car owners who followed the suggested maintenance plans to a tee.

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By Gene Ayres

Having been a homeowner, and pool owner, in California, Florida, New Jersey, and North Carolina, and even built my own swimming pool on one foolish impulse a while back in Florida, let me once again attempt to dissuade those of you contemplating such an acquisition in a word: don’t! You may know the old saying about boat ownership. How the owner of a boat (another topic for another day) has two happy days: the day he buys, and the day he sells. The same goes for swimming pools. And by the way, at least in those sunshine states of California and Florida, swimming pools add almost nothing to the value of the property! But they sure as heck add a pile to the cost of maintenance.

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