Posts by Katy Willis

A storm rolls through, knocks a few shingles loose, and by the next afternoon a truck with a magnetic sign on the door is parked in your driveway. The guy says he was already in the neighborhood, he can match your insurance deductible, and he just needs a deposit today to lock in materials before […]

It’s not too late to make the most of Costco bargains. The trick is only getting what you’ll actually need. Stocking up on essentials and some nice-to-haves is smart ahead of the summer heat kicking in, and will save you unnecessary trips to the grocery store. Costco is useful here because the right bulk buy […]

Nobody grows up dreaming of becoming a medical dosimetrist or a corrosion engineer. But these are the kinds of jobs quietly paying six figures while everyone else chases the obvious titles. The pattern is consistent: the highest-paying work isn’t always the most visible. Some of it happens inside operating rooms, cleanrooms, courtrooms, and power plants, […]

The best Dollar Tree summer buys are not the cute ones. They are the things you do not want to pay $6 for somewhere else: sunscreen for the car, a grill brush, freezer pops, matches, paper plates, and a cheap towel that can disappear at camp without ruining your week. Dollar Tree is best for […]

You finally log into your father’s bank account after weeks of asking, and the first thing you notice is two uncashed checks from Social Security sitting in a drawer next to a stack of unopened Medicare envelopes. This is usually the moment the job becomes real. The financial side of caregiving rarely matches what people […]

Every Goodwill has one: a long shelf of figurines, all priced somewhere between $2 and $5, and almost all of them worth exactly that. But sitting among the generic ceramic cats and the plaster angels, there is occasionally something else. A rare Herend figurine made to commemorate the 1936 Olympics sold on eBay for $1,990 […]

You switch jobs in March, keep contributing to your new HSA at the pace you always have, and don’t think about it again until tax season. That’s when you find out: both employers funded the same account, and you put $1,600 more into it than the IRS allowed for the year. An HSA is one […]

You finally cleaned out the hall closet. The remote controls with no TV to match, the LEGO instructions from a set your kid outgrew years ago, the cardboard insert from an old phone box. All of it went straight into a trash bag, because none of it is the actual thing. It’s just the stuff […]

You’re digging through a bin of bakeware at the thrift store and there it is, a turquoise mixing bowl with a farmer and his wife circling the rim, corn stalks and a rooster filling the spaces between them. The price tag says $4. Most people put it in their cart, happy with a decent vintage […]

Summer has a way of making household supplies disappear faster. Paper plates go to cookouts, trash bags fill up with yard cleanup, and laundry somehow gets worse once everyone is sweating through clothes twice as fast. Sam’s Club still has several practical household buys worth checking before June is over, including cleaning supplies, paper goods, […]

You don’t need a four-year degree (or the debt that comes with it) to land a healthcare job that pays well. A solid chunk of allied health careers run on an associate degree, a certificate, or a license you can earn in a year or two, and plenty of them clear $30 an hour without […]

Your paycheck hits the account on Friday. By the following Wednesday it’s mostly gone, and nothing about your week felt particularly expensive. That gap between what you earn and what’s left over is rarely about one big purchase. It’s usually a dozen small leaks you stopped noticing months ago. None of what follows requires a […]

Your kitchen still works. Your bathroom still functions. Nothing in the house is technically broken. But everything looks about ten years older than it actually is, and a full renovation is nowhere near the budget right now. That gap, between needing nothing structural and wanting the place to stop looking tired, is exactly where these […]

Eleven months sit between your last paycheck and today, and that number is right there on the page for anyone to see. You’ve rewritten the dates twice trying to make the gap look smaller. It doesn’t get smaller. You’re also not the outlier you think you are. Nearly half of U.S. workers have taken a […]