You may learn something, too, at the “Smart planning for summer travel” Tweetchat on Tuesday, May 21.

From 2 to 3 p.m. EDT, representatives from Ally Bank will offer money-saving info and solicit travel tips from savvy consumers like, well, you.

I’ll be there, talking about a few of the frugal hacks I’ll be using for my trip to New York and Philadelphia in July: companion fares on Alaska Airlines, the Megabus, five days of house-sitting, and using discounted gift cards to buy meals, cold drinks and sunblock.

Not going anywhere this summer? Stop in anyway. You’ll likely learn something that you can use for holiday travel or a trip to someone’s graduation next June.

Hoping to win one of the two $100 Amazon gift cards to be awarded? To do so, you must:

• Be at least 18 years old and a resident of the United States or Canada (excluding Quebec)
• Follow @AllyBank during the chat
• RSVP with a comment and your Twitter handle at the above link

Seriously: If you don’t RSVP, you can’t win. So do it, already.

If you’ve never participated in a Tweetchat, let me assure you that the process is pretty simple: You answer questions that pop up or ask questions of your own. Follow hashtag #AllyMoneyChat, or follow along at Ally Bank’s TweetChat room.

The tweets are so fast and furious that it can be a little dizzying. But you get used to it. Trust me.

Yes, that’s “macarons,” not “macaroons.” The macaron is a meringue-like cookie filled with a jam or cream filling. Sounds nice, right? But wait until you hear how they’re done by the Sucré Sweet Boutiques and Confection Studio, a New Orleans specialty shop that’s sponsoring this week’s giveaway.

One of you is going to get the 15-piece Signature Macaron Collection, whose flavors are almost too good to share.

Pecan, obviously — this is the South. But you’ll also get chocolate, almond, pistachio, strawberry, hazelnut, salted caramel and bananas Foster.

If you win, don’t tell anybody. They’ll just want a bite.

I live too far away from Sucré to test the wares myself. But you’ve got to love a bakery that devotes part of its site to “Obsessions” — treats like candied violet chocolate bars, handmade Tahitian marshmallows, candied pecans, and Sicilian pistachio, rose petal and chocolate bars.

This being New Orleans, you can get king cakes. This week, however, Sucré is donating a more petite treat.

To enter:

• Leave a comment below
• Subscribe via e-mail or RSS
• Sign up to follow Surviving and Thriving on Twitter or Facebook

If you do any (or all!) of these things, please leave separate, additional comments to get credit for each entry.

The deadline is 7 p.m. PDT Tuesday, May 21. If I don’t hear back from the winners by 6 p.m. Wednesday, May 22, I’ll pull two more names.

Last week I participated in a Tweetchat with Liz Weston, J.D. Roth, MP Dunleavey and other personal finance geeks. One of the questions was, “I’m in my 40s and just started saving. What advice would you give beginners to make the most and try to catch up?”

An onslaught of 140-character advice poured out, but J.D. Roth summed it up best of all: “The best thing when starting to save late in life is to just DO it. Don’t worry about lost time. Just save.”

Easier said than done, to be sure. But necessary nonetheless.

I can testify, having run through my own savings in my 40s while waiting for a divorce to go through. At my lowest point I had $130 in cash and a boatload of lawyer debt on my credit card.

These days I’m debt-free and have rebuilt my savings almost to the point they were when I left my marriage. It was easier for me than for some because I no longer had kids in the home, and because my needs were relatively few.

But this rebuilding was also due to determination. I refused – and still refuse – to let current wants/needs overshadow future wants/needs.

A few strategies

That means saving. I’m funding an individual retirement account but I’m putting money in the bank, too.

One of the pieces of advice I gave in the Tweetchat was, “Stay focused on goal. Celebrate every deposit. Look for ways to trim budget, earn more money.”

Trimming the budget is rarely easy or fun, but every dollar you can coax away is a dollar you can keep. Whether that’s for an emergency fund, debt repayment or investing for retirement is up to you.

Not everyone can get a second actual job, but there are other ways to earn money:

• Online surveys. Pick your spots, but these really can pay.
• Swagbucks. You can cash in your points for PayPal or you for gift cards to use instead of cash at stores.
• Microjobs. Short-term or one-time gigs that can pay surprisingly well.
• Selling stuff online. I sold a little plastic baseball statue for $1,200. No, I couldn’t believe it either. If you don’t have any heirloom or special-interest items, maybe you can take clothes to a consignment store or put unneeded electronics on Craigslist.
• Babysitting. No, really. I used to get paid $10 an hour or more, even when the kids were sleeping and I was doing my homework.
• Odd jobs. Instead of going through a microjobs site, find out people around you need – or don’t want to do – and offer your services.

Getting started

Believe me, I know this is not easy. Being in your 40s with basically no savings is terrifying – and at times paralyzing. But nothing will happen unless you cause it to happen.

Put another way: I’ve talked with people about going back to school in midlife. Some have said something along the lines of, “I couldn’t do that. I’d be 55 before I finished!”

My inevitable reply: “Well, how old will you be if you don’t get a degree?”

It’s the same for saving. You might think there’s no point in trying if you can put aside only a few bucks here and there. I once interviewed a woman who, just out of graduate school in her early 30s, did a meticulous budget and found she could save, at the most, $10 per month.

Temporarily discouraged, she decided to go ahead – and to get creative. Among other things, she recycled cans and bottles, held garage sales, banked her coupon/rebate savings, saved spare change and dollar bills, and sometimes rented her condo or her parking space to weekend travelers.

Within a few years she had not just a six-month EF but also separate funds for vacations, retirement and a down payment on a someday home.

Don’t know where to begin? Use some of her tips. Or check a piece I wrote for Get Rich Slowly, “Stealth savings: Sneaky ways to fatten your account.” Maybe there’s something in there to get you started.

And you must start. Start now. Today. Even if all you do is throw your pocket change into a Miracle Whip jar every night, you’re taking charge. You’re making it happen. You’re taking care of the future you – and believe me, the future you will be glad you cared enough to try.

Related reading:

• Cards and consequences
• Goal-oriented groceries
• Zombie consumerism

Today is Mother’s Day, a time when many bloggers will wax sentimental about their moms and how they hope they can give their kids the same kind of magic.

Not me. I’m going to talk about regret.

When I was a kid, my mother and other female relatives would sometimes tell me, “Have fun while you can.” I knew what they meant. I’d already observed that for women, life ended after marriage. With the wedding ring came the assumption that even if you had a job, your home and family were more important.

This was during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when women’s roles in society were being called into question. But the women I knew had always worked. My maternal grandmother and aunts had sweated as field hands, cooked in cafeterias, toiled in tomato canneries; my mother was considered a success because she worked as a secretary in the glass factory instead of standing on its concrete floors eight hours a day to inspect and pack bottles. Other relatives and the mothers of my friends worked in dress factories, provided child care, drove school buses, took in sewing, gave piano lessons.

It was the middle- and upper-class women who had the luxury of arguing for liberation, which for them meant equality and fairness at work and at home. Among my kind of people, “having it all” meant doing it all. I saw the same dynamic over and over: When a man and woman got home from work, the woman headed for the kitchen and the man headed for the couch. After dinner, the men usually did things they wanted to do. The women did everything that needed to be done to keep their households running for another day.

What we girls saw was that women had no power. Their examples, spoken or unspoken, felt like inculcation. We did not want to be like the women we knew, helpless and/or devalued and/or saddled with all the responsibilities. So although they might have had useful advice to offer, we couldn’t listen. We were afraid of becoming our mothers, a running societal joke.

Ever heard a woman in a department store say, “That’s something my mother would wear”? Ever lamented with friends about the first time you opened your mouth and heard your mother’s voice coming out of it? And certainly motherhood is perennial fodder for comedians, who know that barely veiled hostility toward their own moms won’t be seen as disrespectful because, after all, everyone has a mother.

Apparently all mothers are alike. Martyr, fixer of everything, absorber of all of life’s blows, general drudge and ultimate laughingstock – who would willingly assume such a mantle? It’s no wonder we run like hell. But we can’t run far or fast enough.

“Girls like you don’t go to college”

I wish I had been able to understand my mother’s life, rather than judging her for what I perceived to be its lacks. During early childhood I was always afraid of doing something to upset her. As a preadolescent I longed for nurturing but had long since been trained to be self-sufficient. As a young teen I was critical of her, especially after she and my dad split up and I was left to run the household.

Throughout the divorce I was furious with her, unable to understand the parallel tracks on which her and my father’s lives had run for years – or the possibility that she might have wanted more out of life than just putting out familial fires. As a dangerously sick mother-to-be I was simultaneously grateful for her help and angry to be in what I perceived as a position of weakness.

I couldn’t really comprehend how hard her life had been from the first breath onward. She was the tenth child in a family of field hands plagued by hunger and poverty and violence. Mom likely remembered (but never spoke of) the two-room Tennessee cabin that had housed 10 people before the family headed “up North” to work in fields and factories. She was not quite six at the time.

My maternal grandmother died when Mom was 13. The oldest sister used the insurance money to buy half of a duplex, a place that had four rooms plus attic, but no bathtub or shower. My early memories of that home are mostly olfactory: cigarette smoke, cooking fat, kerosene, snuff, imperfectly washed bodies. It was poorly lit and old bedspreads covered worn spots in the furniture. In the winter, cold winds rattled the plastic sheeting that covered the windows.

Her siblings left school after fourth grade, sixth grade, ninth grade; somehow Mom finished high school, even though no one in her family showed up for graduation. She wanted to take college prep classes but a guidance counselor told her she couldn’t: “Girls like you don’t go to college.” So she took business English and business math, and worked as many hours as she could get each week in the five-and-dime or the army-navy store.

At one point the school got her a part-time secretarial job, but Mom left it because “my boss couldn’t keep his hands to himself.” She took a lot of grief for quitting the job, but kept silent about the reason. Later another student who took the job was also sexually harassed, but complained about it. My mother was called in and asked, “Did this happen to you too? Why didn’t you tell us?” Mom said, “Would you have believed me?”

As my Aunt Dot once told me, “Your mama never did a thing except go to school and work.” The biggest event of Mom’s life was a short trip to New York City with a school club (the future secretaries of America, or something like that). As far as I can tell, it was the first time she ever had a bath in a real tub.

Seven months later, she would have her first child; a year and a day after that, she’d have her second. During my pregnancy I caught her staring at me with a wistful look in her eye. “I have a hard time believing you’re old enough to have a baby,” she said. “But when I was your age, I had two.”

She could never get things clean enough

For my mother, cleanliness was not just the next thing to godliness – it was a measure of the distance she’d put between herself and her past. As a child she’d vowed to herself that when she grew up she would have a nice house. A clean house. Her kids would never be ashamed to bring friends home.

Our place wasn’t huge. The downstairs consisted of living room, kitchen, my parents’ bedroom and the “radio room,” a small cave off the living room that held my father’s ham radio equipment. The upstairs was one bedroom shared by two sisters and me; above that was the attic that Dad had finished off to make a room for my brother.

Over time it became a museum of the middle class, with my mother as its ferocious curator. The living room carpet was, of course, wall-to-wall. The furniture was from Sears, a style called “early American,” although it’s doubtful that the Founding Fathers sat on couches upholstered in tweedy pea-green fabric or stored their Bibles in end tables whose drawer pulls were just for show.

A bowl of plastic fruit sat on the coffee table. The bowl itself was made of milk glass; so were a couple of vases and a candy dish that rarely held candy. At Christmas my mother put out a green pillar candle with a ring of plastic holly around its base. The candle smelled like bayberry – or would have, if we had ever burned it. But in Mom’s world candles were for show, not for use.

Her kitchen was as immaculate as an operating theater. The waxed floor shone. Dirty dishes were never allowed to accumulate. Both sinks were scrubbed after every meal. One drawer was devoted entirely to Tupperware lids; the Tupperware bowls stacked in a cupboard were proof that my mother was no longer the little white-trash (her words) girl who cut asparagus and picked tomatoes, the girl who had two dresses (“one on, one off”) that she pressed with an iron heated on the stove, the girl whose father drank and hit his wife and children.

Look how far she had come. Look how not-her-family she was. Just to be on the safe side, Mom regularly soaked the Tupperware lids in a sink full of bleach water. Clorox was her favorite fragrance. She could never get things clean enough.

Why did you leave?

Mom always swore that her kids would have more than she’d had. How galling it must have been to have two daughters give birth out of wedlock and then struggle financially, and an artistically talented son barely out of his teens get his girlfriend pregnant and have to become a prison guard to support his new family. Her other daughter might have wound up the same way if not for infertility.

I was working as a typesetter and proofreader in Philadelphia when I got pregnant at age 20. Near-constant morning sickness left me so weak I could hardly walk. When I took the bus down to South Jersey to tell my mother I was pregnant, she took one look at my gaunt-and-ghastly self and begged me to move back home. In time I accepted – and almost immediately regretted the decision, because Mom began to pester me, gently but persistently, to look for a permanent job in the area instead of commuting to Philly by bus with an eye toward moving back there.

Yet she seemed afraid to press too hard, e.g., to attach an ultimatum like “If you don’t look for work here, you’ll have to leave.” Maybe that’s because she thought I would leave. I certainly considered it. In the end, we both danced around what we really wanted to say, pushing it all back behind the other un-discussed hurts in our recent history.

Looking back, I can see what Mom was probably thinking: How are you going to manage without help? What if you can’t pay your bills? What if something terrible happens to you in the city? And, maybe: Why are leaving me? Will you ever forgive me for leaving you?

I can see what I wanted to say, too: Why did you put us through all that? Why couldn’t you and Dad have worked out the divorce decently? Can’t you see that I am where I am because of all of that?

And, surely: Who are you to tell me how to be a good mother? If you cared so much, why did you leave?

The pregnancy was the perfect distraction, both for her and for me. I used the baby not as a weapon but as a shield, something to deflect the sorts of discussions I didn’t want to have – either with her or with myself. In fact, I distinctly remember thinking, “If I wanted, I would have an excuse not to make anything of myself for the next 18 years.”

That wasn’t what I wanted, and I knew it. But I didn’t know what I did want, except maybe for my mother’s attention. I was about to become a mother myself and I still wanted her to brush my hair and put it in ponytails, the way she used to do when I was 10 years old. Yet I just couldn’t let her in. Whenever she tried to talk about anything real – the pain of labor, the changes that children bring to your life, the need to be practical and get a job at the county courthouse – I would find a way to change the subject.

I especially didn’t want to hear her when she talked about her memories of us as babies and how much she loved us when we were little. Sardonic responses like “Sure wish you’d let us know” or “Except when we were selfish enough to run high fevers or spill something” kept leaping into my mind.

I felt a mix of guilt and anger about those feelings. Here she was giving me free room and board and driving me to Lamaze classes – yet somehow it felt like control. I couldn’t let her get too close. I couldn’t give her that power over me again.

Karma is a bitch

Oh, how I regret not having been able to talk with my mother, really talk and understand. But neither of us had the tools to get past our upbringings. She couldn’t explain and I couldn’t understand. We didn’t have the words to name what was wrong, let alone the power to affect change.

Regret is the keenest emotion there is, worlds stronger than love or hate or jealousy. Love either goes or stays. Hate ebbs and flows until, if you’re lucky, you realize what a waste of time it really is. Jealousy can be contained, or sometimes used as a goad for self-improvement.

But regret is like a slow, steady drip of icy tears. Regret forces you to look backward and inward: Toward the past to see what you did wrong, and inside yourself until you understand just how badly you hurt someone else.

Whether or not I could have lived my life differently is beside the point. The fact is, through action or inaction I did things that I now regret. The pain is particularly keen because there is no redress. I cannot tell my mother how sorry I am that we lost so many years, how sorry I am that because of anger or pride or the simple ignorance of youth I neglected to listen.

In the early months of her illness she said that she felt she’d failed my brother and me. Stricken by the knowledge that she was dying – the doctors hadn’t said so, but I knew it and I think she knew it, too – I rushed to assure her that it was all right. She’d been under tremendous strain, I said, and of course things went badly. But it was all in the past and forgotten.

Mom smiled with what appeared to be gratitude, but now I wonder if that wasn’t just a sham. She probably had plenty more she wanted to say. When I was in my 30s and 40s she’d tried a few times to talk about our lives, but I was not receptive. She’d stopped trying. Now she would never have the chance. And neither would I. I still wasn’t listening.

On Tuesday I participated in a Tweetchat sponsored by FT Press, an imprint of Pearson and publisher of books by my MSN Money colleague Liz Weston. If you missed the event, at least some of the Tweets can be found in the publisher’s Tweetchat room. A spokeswoman for the company says a .pdf summary of the questions and discussion is in the works.

To promote the chat, FT Press gave out a few copies of “Deal With Your Debt” to random questioners. (Did any of you win? Tell us!) Now it’s my turn to hand out the revised and updated version of this book, which I can happily say is written for people in the real world.

Just check the description: “Award-winning personal finance expert Liz Weston reveals why it’s simply impractical to ‘just pay off every dime’ and ‘live forever debt free’ — and why trying to do so can actually make you poorer. It’s smarter to control and manage your debt, and Weston shows you how.”

Not that Liz is giving you carte blanche to run up bills and ignore them. Instead, she tells you how to assess your debt and tackle it in the smartest possible way. Debt can be terrible, she says, but people can get so fixated on debt that they:

• Try to do too much too fast and then give up
• Fail to build in some financial flexibility in case of emergencies
• Focus so utterly on debt repayment that they neglect to save for a home, college or retirement
• Keep fighting an unwinnable battle

Re that last: One of the questions in the Tweetchat had to do with personal bankruptcy. Liz noted that while the stereotype is that people were too quick to give up, the fact is that some people wait far too long to face facts.

From her book: “Like many others, I used to think that most people could avoid bankruptcy if they really tried. Now, after writing about the issue for more than a decade, I’m not so sure.

“Bankruptcy court is meant to give people a fresh start while protecting their homes and retirement funds, to prevent them from facing a poverty-stricken old age. Bankruptcy should never be the first choice, but sometimes it’s the best of very bad options.”

To be clear: I don’t advocate bankruptcy court as the solution to all your money woes. I once interviewed a young woman who declared BK at age 20 as the result of “getting a credit card at 18 and being bad with money.” Her total debt could quite possibly have been vanquished in a year or two of hard-charging repayment. During the interview she told me that if she’d known then what she knows now, she wouldn’t have done it.

If you or someone you know is in money trouble or simply unclear on how to handle his finances, FT Press is offering 50% off all its personal finance titles through May 16. Use the coupon code FTPF.

To enter:

• Leave a comment below
• Subscribe via e-mail or RSS
• Sign up to follow Surviving and Thriving on Twitter or Facebook

If you do any (or all!) of these things, please leave separate, additional comments to get credit for each entry.

The deadline is 7 p.m. PDT Monday, May 13. If I don’t hear back from the winners by 6 p.m. Tuesday, May 14, I’ll pull two more names.

Checked your cortisol levels lately? On Saturday, May 11, all Sam’s Club stores with pharmacies will offer several basic medical screenings for free, including one for the “stress hormone,” to get a reading on how well your adrenal or pituitary glands are working.

(This Mayo Clinic page explains what can happen if your cortisol goes haywire.)

You don’t have to be a member to take advantage of these screenings, so stop in.

And the gift cards?I’ll get to them in a minute. Don’t stress out.

From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. you can opt for one or more of the following:

• Body mass index
• Height and weight
• Blood pressure
• Vision
• Cortisol test

If you do all of them, you’ll get a free sample of a probiotic supplement. (Me, I’ll stick with my homemade yogurt – the last thing I need is another pill.)

Gift cards, anyone?

All You magazine has narrowed down its search for “America’s Smartest Shopper,” and is asking readers to watch the finalists’ short videos and vote for their favorites.

You’ll learn all sorts of savvy tricks, such as how one finalist turned a $10,000 trip around the world into a $1,000 excursion, and how one super-bargainista bought high-end fashions for less than $1.

Vote daily, if you’re so inclined. What’s in it for you? This week, one of two $125 gift cards to JC Penney; next week, a pair of $150 Target gift cards; the final week, two $200 Wal-Mart gift cards.

Finally: The Swagbucks sign-up bonus code was extended through May 31, in part because a Swagbucks rep was delighted by a couple of the comments from happy users. Use it to get 100 points when you join instead of 70. This referral program lets you trade in points for cash (via PayPal), merchandise or – my favorite – gift cards. I’m an Amazon GC groupie, myself, since they let me send birthday, Christmas and “just-because” gifts to family and friends.

However, last weekend I used accumulated scrip to order $130.50 worth of the eyedrops that DF has used since having cataract surgery a couple years ago. Thus I can attest that Swagbucks is a way to save money on the essentials as well as the latest best-seller.

Details on joining can be found in my “Swagbucks redux” post. Again, the code expires on May 10 so don’t delay if you want the extra points.

P.S. Hope you can attend Liz Weston’s Tweetchat at 2 p.m. EDT Thursday, May 9. Send any money questions you’ve got to @FTPress or to lisa.loftus@pearson.com — copies of her revised and updated “Deal With Your Debt” will be given away to several questioners, drawn at random.

Got money questions? One of them might win you a copy of Liz Weston’s updated and revised Deal with Your Debt.

She’s hosting one heck of a Tweetchat on Thursday, May 9, and will be giving away several copies of the book to folks who submit questions ahead of time (more on that in a minute).

Even if you don’t need the book, surely you know someone who does.

Weston, aka “the Internet’s No. 1 personal finance expert,” has lassoed quite the stable of PF experts for the chat. I’m honored to be joining the lineup of:

• J.D. Roth, formerly of Get Rich Slowly and now of More Than Money.
• Mary Hunt of Debt Proof Living
• MP Dunleavey formerly of MSN Money and Daily Worth
• Steve Rhode, the Get Out of Debt Guy
• Gary Foreman of The Dollar Stretcher

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Weston, she’s also the author of titles like Your Credit Score, There are No Dumb Questions About Money, and Easy Money.

She writes twice a week for MSN Money and her “Money Talk Q&A” column is syndicated nationwide, from the Los Angeles Times to Stars and Stripes. Weston has appeared on The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, CNBC Power Lunch, and Dr. Phil, and contributes regularly to NPR’s “Marketplace Money.”

But for me, Liz will always be my former podmate at the Anchorage Daily News and the person who convinced me to get my first professional massage. Bless her heart.

Did someone say “free book”?

You can ask questions during the chat. However, if you ask them ahead of time you’ll be in the running for one of those free books. The publisher, FT Press (an imprint of Pearson) will pick a few questioners at random to get the freebie.

Send your questions in advance to @FTPress or email lisa.loftus@pearson.com. And if you don’t win? Use the coupon code FTPF to get 50% off all personal finance titles from May 9 to May 16.

What kind of money questions? All kinds of money questions: debt repayment, credit scores, college funds, how to save for retirement and just about anything else you want to know.

We’ll be answering questions starting at 2 p.m. Use the hashtag #FTPersonalFinance. The publisher has its own Twitter Chat Room to help you keep track of the goings-on.

See you there, I hope.

There’s just something fun about being there at 12:01 a.m. the day it opens, especially for a popcorner like this one.

I hope to see a lot of other movies this year, with Linda or with my niece and her boys. Maybe you want to go to the movies, too, but are horripilated by the price of the tickets.

I can help: This week I’m giving away two $15 gift cards to Regal Cinemas.

Use it for whatever movie tickles your fancy: kid flicks, shoot-’em-ups, romances, monster-of-the-week films. It’s your call. Note that these things are also good at the snack stands.

(Anyone else old enough to remember seeing this at the drive-in? Heck, anybody old enough to remember going to the drive-in?)

I once thought it was foolish to buy popcorn at the movies due to the expense. Part of me still thinks it’s foolish. However, I’m told that concessions are the theater’s main source of revenue for the first month or more of the run. Thus I now consider it my contribution toward keeping the movies going.

And if that rationalization doesn’t work, I just tell myself that technically kettle corn is a vegetable. Five a day for good health, right?

No Regal theaters near you? Sell it on the secondary market and use the money to go to the cinema in your own neighborhood.

Incidentally, “Iron Man 3″ was just…okay. It was workmanlike, hitting all its marks and keeping the screen bright with explosions, but it didn’t have a sense of fun about it. Definitely too violent for the younger set, and talky-talky enough in between the pyrotechnics to bore preadolescents. I’d give it two and a half “mehs.”

To enter:

• Leave a comment below
• Subscribe via e-mail or RSS
• Sign up to follow Surviving and Thriving on Twitter or Facebook

If you do any (or all!) of these things, please leave separate, additional comments to get credit for each entry.

The deadline is 7 p.m. PDT Tuesday, May 7. If I don’t hear back from the winners by 6 p.m. Wednesday, May 8, I’ll pull two more names.

Late yesterday afternoon the UPS left leaving an envelope whose contents — “Superman: Last Son of Krypton” and “Beware the Batman” — sent me rocketing back to my childhood.

They’re two of the books to be given away tomorrow for Free Comic Book Day 2013. Every first Saturday in May the comics industry gives away millions of titles for free at comic shops across the country.

Some 4.6 million comics will be handed across counters this year, which is a 30% increase over 2012.

Comics have moved beyond the POW! ZAP! these days. SpongeBob Squarepants has his own comic series. So does “Sesame Street.” The wildly popular series “The Walking Dead” began as a comic book, although purists would probably call it a graphic novel.

The free-comic lineup is quite the mixed bag: books based on the usual superheroes like Superman, Batman and The Hulk, plus titles whose heroes range from Judge Dredd to MegaMan to the children’s book character Pippi Longstocking. (Go here for a full list of offerings.)

What you’ll get depends on when you get there. Anything that’s free is bound to leave the stores quickly, so plan to show up early. The Free Comic Book Day home page has a store locator tool to help you find shops in your area.

You may also find other activities, such as free food or entertainment. For example, Legend Comics & Coffee in Omaha is raising money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation by selling door prize tickets for $5. The grand prize this year is a copy of Amazing Spider-Man #1 CGC, valued at $4,000 – and yes, you can enter to win by donating through the above link.

Old-school entertainment

Comics have changed since I was a kid, especially as regards the slickness of the paper. The pages we read were more like newsprint. But the sight of those two iconic superheroes reminded me of hot summer days when we walked or rode our bikes to one of the two stores in our small rural township – the one that sold comic books.

When we had any money at all we’d buy one and hurry home to read it. We’d discuss the plots and wonder what would happen the next month. Like the old movie serials, they invariably had cliffhanger endings; if a story line was resolved, a new peril would be suggested in the final frame.

We read them year-round, mind you. But somehow comic books feel like summer to me.

My brother was a huge fan and drew comics on every scrap of paper he could find. He had a semester or so of formal training at a comic book art school before life intervened, but during years of working at a glass factory, a diner and the New Jersey state prison system he never stopped drawing.

After retiring just before he turned 50, Glenn turned the avocation into a full-time retirement gig. He’s inked some independent comics and travels to comic shows all over the country to sell original work. If you’d like to see some examples, check out these Google images.

This afternoon I’ll read the Batman and Superman two titles with my nephew, Malachi. Maybe when he grows up he’ll feel as tenderly about the genre as I do. Maybe not, though, since so many types of media are so readily available to him.

My brother and I grew up in an era of three TV channels, no Internet and children’s entertainment mostly segregated to Saturday mornings. Malachi and his own brother aren’t likely to feel the same sense of excitement and anticipation as they head to the store: Will the new X-Men comic be out yet? Oh, I hope, I hope, I hope.

Related reading:

• The day I saved Heckboy
• Order up at Café Awesome
• Some things are worth the cost

Just over four years ago I started writing this site, even as I wondered (a) if anyone would care and (b) whether I could keep it up.

The answer was “yes” on both counts. Sort of.

I haven’t got the huge fan base and influence of a “name” blogger, and there have been times when I was too overwhelmed by my paying jobs to devote enough time to my avocation.

If I had more readers I could turn the site into what the kids call a serious alternate income source. It does make some money, but nowhere close to a living wage. More to the point, I’d like more followers because, well, what writer wouldn’t?

It’s not enough to think you have something to say. You need readers to hear it – and, with luck, to comment on/debate your points.

Of course that requires having something to say consistently. Long stretches of inactivity turn people off. I squirm to think of the weeks when the only things I put up were giveaways and maybe one small green-vegetable post. But I was simply too busy and too tired to do much more during those times.

At least I didn’t quit altogether. And since I passed the one-million mark in March, some readers didn’t give up, either. (See “Couldn’t have done it without you,” above.)

Personal finance, personal examples

Fortunately, things change. My personal life veered off into a new and entirely delightful direction. My professional life is morphing, too: I quit one part-time writing job (Get Rich Slowly) and both changed and cut back on my main gig at MSN Money, and have begun to do more writing for women’s magazines.

Still detoxing, so to speak, from the dead-run of the past eight years. That is, I’m using some my newfound free time to take deep breaths and long walks, hang out with friends, operate Café Awesome, see some plays and the occasional midnight movie, and generally try to figure out that work-life balance thing.

Haven’t got it knocked yet, but I’m sure enjoying the process.

Looking back, I can see how the mix of personal finance and lifeitsownself has shifted. Initially I thought it had to be mostly PF because that’s where I felt I could do the most good. Lately I’m seeing that personal examples are as important as personal finance. Judging from the comments, my attempts at living life well and fully are at least as instructive as my recipe for garbage soup.

I know that my blog traffic would go much higher much faster if I maximized search engine optimization potential, guest-posted nonstop at other blogs and spent hours every day on social media. All of that takes time and focus, which I haven’t had.

It also takes inclination, which I may never get. How much time do I really want to spend on self-promotion? Not enough to make myself even moderately famous or influential, apparently.

A culture of relentlessness

Oh, I think about it, especially when I see people with mediocre writing skills put forth as expert bloggers. Which I suppose they are: They’ve figured out how to sell the sizzle rather than the steak. I confess that this does rankle from time to time. But if it bothered me enough, I’d do something about it.

Then again, most of those bloggers are in their 20s and 30s. I’m in my mid-50s and ready to back a few steps away from a culture of relentlessness. Now that I’ve had a glimpse of how lovely life can be I’d like to slow down and savor it. Specifically, I want that life to be about more than simply lurching from deadline to deadline.

That doesn’t mean I’ll be rocking on a front porch any time soon. Retirement isn’t an option this point, or maybe ever. Right now I still have all the work I want and family issues to attend.

Balance, dammit, balance. I’m going to set the Cruise Control of Life on “amble” and seeing what happens. Hope you’ll stay with me for the ride.

A few thanks are in order:

First and foremost, to Eli Natan of Promoting Group, a “boutique” Internet marketing company based in Los Angeles. He’s the one who got me started and who also hosted the site for the first two years. Bless you, Eli, for giving me the pants-kick that I needed. May you live to be 1,000 and people the Earth with your offspring, if that’s the sort of thing that interests you.

To the readers, naturally: I appreciate your attention more than I can say.

To my daughter, Abigail Perry, who’s been blogging for nearly five years despite life challenges that would have made me want to lie down and scream. She’s offered advice and provided an example sticktoitiveness that I greatly admire. Abby is among the world’s top five brainstormers, and the number-one daughter in the universe.

To Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff: She helps me get ads on my site. Bless her heart. If you’ve got a blog and want to make money from it, see the “Crystal for Hire Advertising Services” section of the above link.

And, of course, to DF – friend, lover, court musician, fellow frugalist, staff poet, personal chef, pun buddy. Thank you, dearest companion, for the gift of delight.