A rainy day fund tops every financial pundit’s list of must haves.

But nearly 25% of Americans have nothing set aside for the unexpected.

I can’t add to the story told by the poster prepared by Mint.com and featured at Daily Infographic.

Take a look, find where you fall in the range of foul weather preparedness, and take action if a rainy day would find you out in the cold.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia.

Can I buy healthy food for under $1 a pound?

The cost of eating is rising all around us.  The news last night projects a 2 to 4% increase in the year ahead.

We’ll have to shop and cook smarter in the months ahead just to keep our food expenditures even, much less reduce what we spend at the supermarket.

So my quest for healthy  food for under a dollar a pound takes on a greater sense of urgency.  And it’s January, not the height of harvest season.  Even apples are $1.50 to $2 a pound.

But not pears!

Last week at Safeway, d’Anjou pears (my favorite, unless Comice are available) were 99 cents a pound.  Yesterday, a bag of Bosc pears were 79 cents a pound at Costco.

So I bought a bunch.  Now what?  Perishable food without a plan is penny wise and pound foolish.

Desert

Can we start with desert?  That’s where pears shine.

• sliced with cheese:  blue cheese, brie, or cheddar
• poached with a wine reduction, caramel, or chocolate sauce
• upside down cake, where the pineapple ring goes
• pear crisp or pie
• baked in cream or in salt
• pears a la mode

Dinner

My favorite salad at our neighborhood pub is mixed greens flanked with pear slices, dried cranberries and a few walnuts.  Adding the pears boosts the menu price from $4.95 for plain greens to $8.99 for the pear salad.  You can try this at home.  For a lot less.

Fruit is traditional with pork dishes.  Try grilled pears as a side dish.  Or this recipe for sausage and pears.  I haven’t tried it, but I still have some Boscs uneaten.

Breakfast

I like to serve a compote of cubed pears and sliced kiwi for Sunday brunch.  But my favorite guilty pleasure (involving pears, at least) is sauted pear slices and sausages with a pan sauce of a bit of cream and cinnamon.

Pears are most plentiful in the fall and winter.  So, while they are available and inexpensive, indulge.  For under a dollar a pound.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia.org

If you’ve got bills you can’t pay, it may seem that debt is forever as well.

Not so.  Every debt owed to a creditor who isn’t a governmental entity has a statute of limitations.  That’s the point beyond which a creditor can’t use the law to take money from you.

Far more people can tell you how long a debt can remain on your credit report than can tell you how long a court will help the creditor collect.

The statute of limitations has nothing to do with whether the debt was real.  It simply says that, at some point, all things must pass.  Debt has a life span.  Once it reaches the end of its legal life, you win any lawsuit brought to enforce the debt.

You’ve got to invoke the Woody Allen Rule to win, however.  Allen asserts that 80% of life is showing up.    To win a collection lawsuit when the debt is beyond the statute of limitations, you have to show up,  file an answer in writing and raise that defense.

Put another way:  snooze, you lose.

Finding the statute of limitations

Statutes of limitations are creatures of state law.  Nolo Press has a chart showing the life span of debts in each state and the place in the law where the statute is found.

Generally, the statute that applies is the one in the state where you live or the state where you signed the contract that created the debt.

Calculating the life of debt

You start counting on the statute of limitations from the last activity on the debt.  That could be the last purchase on a credit card, or the last payment on the account.

If you make a partial payment on a long dormant debt, you run the risk of resetting the statute:  the debt may get new life, because there is now new activity.  That’s one of the reasons that debt collectors are so anxious that you make a payment, any payment.

Limits to limitations

Statutes of limitations don’t keep creditors from using methods other than lawsuits to collect the debt .  In fact, the statute of limitations doesn’t prevent the collector from suing.  It just assures that you win if they try to sue.

So debt collectors can continue legally to call and write in an attempt to get you to pay.  That’s zombie debt at work.

So, before you pull out your checkbook to pay on old, old debt, check out the statute of limitations.  That debt may be legally dead.

The FTC summarizes the law on time-barred debts.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia.org

My next goal is to read the other selections in the Carnival and we can compare notes on what resonates.

My New Year’s resolution to adopt a 36 hour day never made it off the memo pad…and I haven’t quit my day job.

Image courtesy of bayasaa.

When the path at your feet is full of rocks and puddles, it’s hard to raise your eyes to the horizon.

Yet if you watch your feet, you never know where you’re really going.

The financial equivalent of watching the path beneath your feet is measuring your finances month to month.  Things are rocky, it’s work to make money stretch til the next paycheck.

So many of us feel successful if we just get by.

When I sit down with someone scared of taking the bankruptcy plunge, they often tell me that if declaring bankruptcy will damage their credit score, they’ll just keep making minimum payments and live in debt.

They are content, they insist, on just getting by, with no provision for misfortune or aging.

I want to borrow a line from Isaiah:  lift up thine eyes.  Not necessarily to the divine, but to the long term.  Look not at finances month to month but at decade to decade.

Is it really  good enough for you to just get by?  Whether you’re getting by paying credit card minimums or a too-large payment on an underwater house, where does “getting by”  get you, in the long run?  Where does this path lead?

The client with a foreclosure next week hoped to keep the house until his youngest teenager  finished high school.  At that point he’d be in his mid 50′s.

When I calculated what it would cost to cure the arrears that drove the foreclosure and make the monthly mortgage payments and property taxes for four more years, we reached an eye popping number.

The conversation changed to “is that the best use of money in these circumstances”.

We can’t know the future.  But it’s a safe bet that it will not be a steady path to better times for each of us.  There will be ups, downs, pot holes, and for some, the path will get washed out entirely.

Add some long term thinking to your tool kit as you look at spending and saving issues.  How do you imagine your situation in 2032?

Image courtesy of Kris Griffon

My current favorite cookbook is his Best Recipes in the World.  I clip his columns and follow him on Twitter.

His New Years article for the NYTimes Mag, No Meat, No Dairy, No Problem, though, resonated with me for its economic implications.

For health reasons, Bittman has adopted a diet that he describes as “vegan til 6″, eating two meals a day that are purely plant based.  At dinner, he throws off the hard and fast limits.

Brought up with dinners centered around a hunk of meat, we have trouble, he says,  “imagining less traditional vegan dishes that are creative filling, interesting and not especially challenging to  either put together or enjoy”.

His imagination is up to the job.  He sketches 10 vegan entrees and suggests making one dinner a week vegan, because it’s good for you.

Looking over his choices, they are also good for your wallet.  Mushroom barley risotto; pasta beans and tomatoes;  sweet potato stew, all sound great and they are undoubtedly thrifty.  (I confess I’m prepared to make the risotto without the saffron he adds).

I’m continually caught up by the convergence of economy, good health, and environmental concern when looking at choices in the kitchen.  So often, like Bittman’s recipes, the same dish or menu change saves money, produces a healthier dish that is earth friendly.

Pick the motivation that speaks to you, they all point us to less meat and more vegetables in the diet.  The by-product is less money spent at the supermarket.

Personally, I’m content to seek out food that is traditionally vegetarian, or simply uses meat with a lighter hand.  This year at Money Health Central, you’ll find occasional menu planning ideas and recipe resources here.  With 15-20% of our budget earmarked for food, it’s an underappreciated path to sounder financial health.

Image courtesy of ghirson

Make and execute on a resolution a month.

Ration the amount of change that we expect of ourselves.  Take small steps, rather than attempt a huge leap.

Resolution for January

So, for January I propose that you arrange to save the tax cut all employees got from Congress at Christmas.

OK, so it’s small, 2% of your gross check.  That’s money that would otherwise have been withheld from your check to fund Social Security.

If Congress hadn’t extended the payroll tax cut, that 2% would have been gone from your checking account anyway.  So, you shouldn’t miss it.

Good news or bad news, it’s only 2%.   But it will get you  a start on banking some part of today’s wealth for tomorrow.

Enlist help

Get a partner in this savings scheme:  your employer or your bank.  Have the 2% automatically deducted from your account and deposited in a savings account.

I’m of two minds about where your savings account ought to be.  It’s simple to have the account at the same institution that holds your working account.  Transfers are easy and you can see progress.

Those are probably also the weaknesses of putting your savings where they are visible and convenient.  You can get discouraged by the apparent slow rate of accumulation.  If the money is too visible, it’s easy to convince yourself that some “need” today justifies invading your savings.

Which leads me to suggest, put the savings account out of sight. Put it out of your mind when dealing with life’s little financial stresses.  Put it in another institution;  don’t make transfers from savings easy.  Make inconvenience work for you.

Start off the new year with a resolve to save just 2%.  You may find it painless and want to up the ante to 3%! Or you can see it as a step toward joining the one percent.

Image courtesy of creepyed.

My partner in Money Health Central, Jay Fleischman,  says no one is on-line today.  If he’s right, (and he is, sometimes), I’m writing for myself.

However, if you’re here, and thinking about what awaits you and your money in the new year, join me in looking ahead to 2012.

We’ve had 3 or 4 years of recession, stressing personal budgets and governmental budgets.  The statistical improvements in our situation seem unevenly distributed. For some,  debt and decreased income still shadow the present.

Even when personal finances have improved, there remains room to become smarter and more focused on financial health going forward.  I am convinced that financial self sufficiency ought to be a goal for everyone.

How we got here

Jay and I are both bankruptcy lawyers so we hear stories about families and money every day.  It’s those conversations with real families that stoke our passion for this site.

In contrast to lots of other personal finance sites, this isn’t the story of our personal climb out of debt, though we’ve both had our personal financial challenges.

Our personal stories won’t fill a blog; it’s the stories, the money mistakes, and the financial fixes we see for our clients that are worth sharing.

We hope to distill here what we’ve seen, what we’ve learned, and what is possible for real people to become financially stable.

We resolve

Rather than draw up a daunting  list of proposed money resolutions for you, I propose to ration new year’s resolutions to one a month.  Tackling change is tough;  sometimes, it’s even scary.  Take it in little steps.

Next time, I’ll have January’s healthy money resolution, something concrete and doable for the next 30 days.

Let me know if you have financial resolutions that you’ve made for 2012.  What’s your financial goal for the next 12 months?  Spotted other on line resolutions you’d like to champion or diss?

Image courtesy of Ludie Cochrane.

After all, if you make $20 million a year as a hedge fund manager it’s unlikely that you’re spending your evenings trolling Priceline for the least expensive motel so you can afford that vacation in the Outer Banks; rather, you’re thinking about which airline’s first-class seats are most comfortable for the annual family outing to Europe.

It’s sad, but it’s reality.  The super-rich live differently than you and I.

As a bankruptcy lawyer, I spend a lot of time looking at median income figures.  If a client of mine earns above median income then I need to do some additional calculations to see how I can help, whereas below median income households find a simpler means of ending their bill problems.

From Sherman McCoy on one end of the spectrum to a single parent living on the edges of society, “just getting by” means different things to different people.

But what’s the real cost?

According to Dr. Amy K. Glasmeier and The Pennsylvania State University, the Living Wage Calculator shows numbers a bit different than most would consider.  The site details the true living wage in different cities and counties, and it’s an eye-opener.

I encourage you to check it out and use the numbers as a guidepost in your search for a balanced personal budget in 2012 and beyond.

Image credit:  katerw

I got a glimpse of both ends of the retirement saving continuum this week:

• Yahoo Finance profiles the youngest savers for retirement :  the youngest started saving for retirement at 10
• My client of yesterday was 77, and has credit card debt equaling 1/3 of her retirement savings

My client was vulnerable because, as large as her  accumulations were, they were not held in a retirement plan that is protected from creditors.  So the minute she stops paying on the credit card debt, her savings are exposed to collection action by  creditors.

If the same funds were held in an IRA or a 401(k), the money would be beyond the reach of those she owes money to.  Held in freely tradeable stocks, her savings can be invaded by creditors who get a judgment.

But the larger issue is that heading into retirement with substantial revolving debt eats into the retirement nest egg.  My lady was resolved to pay minimum payments for the balance of  her life,  and just hoped that there would be  enough to care for her decade-younger spouse.  It seemed a flimsy hope.

Paying credit card minimums will not get you out of debt in the foreseeable future.  My charge to those seriously in debt is to consider dramatic steps, including bankruptcy,  so that you can  get out of debt and start today making provision for a time when you can’t work.

However old you are today, you’re a day younger than you will be tomorrow.

Image courtesy of Old Shoe Woman.