Cooking is one of those life skills that can very easily save you hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime, for a relatively minimal initial investment of time and money.

Let's look at the numbers:

Say you're saving and investing 40% of your income and planning to retire in approximately 20 years.  If the market average return is in the vicinity of 7% (and this is very reasonable), that puts your Future Value Factors (FVFs) at approximately 4x, 40x, 500x, and 15500x for one-time, annual, monthly, and daily purchases, respectively.  Let's say that you're considering changing your lifestyle so that four days a week, you cook dinner instead of eating out ($10 saved) and you have leftovers that you can bring into work the next day ($5 saved).  At $60/week, this is equivalent to saving $8.50 a day.  At the daily-purchase FVF of 15500x, this simple act will put an extra $130,000 in your bank account at your 20-year retirement goal.

Saving less than 40% and retiring in more than 20 years?  Due to the power of compound interest, your savings will be even greater.  Look up your Future Value Factors here.

Have a significant other?  If you can double the total saved on food per week, that's now $260,000 extra saved at retirement time.  If you have friends living nearby and you can coordinate regular potlucks and foodshares, the savings can be even greater for less work on your part.

Maybe it's time to learn how to cook.

I am a fanatical follower of Mr. Money Mustache.  This rather amazing specimen of an INTJ used financial common sense and a very uncommon amount of Life Wisdom to embrace a frugal, environmentally-conservative, socially-engaged lifestyle that freed him and his wife and young son from an empty existence of endless consumer consumption and ultimately, at the age of 30, from the need for full-time employment.  No inheritance, no investment windfalls, no magic - just the intellect to know that just because you make $70,000 doesn't mean you have to spend $70,000 (and the discipline and organizational acumen to follow through!).

Respect the 'Stash

Mr. Money Mustache - MMM for short - preaches a gospel of riding your bike, buying used, cooking your own food, frequenting the library, cooperating with your neighbors, tracking your habits and optimizing away the trivial.  He's not some crazy survivalist living an ultra-spartan existence in the woods somewhere - he's a devoted family man with a huge list of hobbies and pretty much the greatest life I can imagine.  He owns a home and a car and he travels with regularity, supporting it all on $27,000 a year through careful consideration of what's actually important. He's breaking into the mainstream because he addresses something that most personal finance gurus neglect: maximizing money for money's sake is a fruitless endeavor, and personal finance is only really useful when applied as a tool for maximizing happiness.

'Google Keep' is Google's most recent foray into the digital notetaking universe (1).  Available at https://drive.google.com/keep/ or via an Android app (2), Keep allows you to quickly save your thoughts in text, voice, and photo form for future reference.

As described on AndroidCentral (3), a third-party developer created a very convenient Chrome extension that allows you to launch Google Keep in a pop-up, panel, or new window from a launcher in the Chrome extension bar (4):
Unfortunately, Google recently removed this extension from the Chrome App Store, probably because it was named 'Google Keep Extension' and Google is working on its own solution.  If you'd still like to give it a shot, click here to download my archived copy of the extension.  Then, navigate to chrome://extensions and drag and drop the .crx file into the browser window to install it (5).

By default, this extension just opens Keep in a new tab and isn't much different from a bookmark.  To change its behavior, right-click on the extension launcher and select 'Options'; from here, you can configure whether Keep opens in a Panel, a Pop-Up, or a New Tab.  To get the Panel version working, you must navigate to chrome://flags, 'Enable Panels', and restart Chrome.

Some of you might remember Google Sketchpad (6) or the awesomeness that was Google Notebook (7).  Here's hoping that the mobile component was the missing piece of the puzzle, and Google Keep will be more successful than its predecessors!

EDIT
This explains it: Google's official Keep for Chrome app is now available (8).  Curiously, it doesn't have a Panel option or the right-click context menu options that the unofficial app did.  For now, I'm keeping both versions installed.

(1) http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/google-keepsave-whats-on-your-mind.html
(2) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.keep
(3) http://www.androidcentral.com/expand-your-google-keep-use-chrome-extension
(4) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-keep-extension/jccocffecajimkdjgfpjhlpiimcnadhb
(5) http://www.howtogeek.com/120743/how-to-install-extensions-from-outside-the-chrome-web-store/
(6) http://www.omgchrome.com/google-stopping-development-of-scratchpad-web-app/
(7) http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/faq.html\
(8) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-keep/hmjkmjkepdijhoojdojkdfohbdgmmhki/

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This article provides a brief overview of the history and utility of the 529 Education Savings Plan, followed by a discussion of how to choose the best 529 Plan for your state of residency and investment time horizon.  It includes links to resources for further researching your plan options and a simple calculator for making the decision between home-state tax-incentivized and out-of-state low-cost plans.

For discussion of historical investment returns since 1950, see this article instead.

The Internet is full of people arguing about the stock market.  A question I'm interested in: if my parents or grandparents had invested in an index mutual fund that followed the S&P500 inside a tax-advantaged account such as an IRA or a 401(k), how much money would they have today?

Toward answering this question, I created the SimVestment spreadsheet that I shared in a post last month.  It uses historical S&P500 data to simulate what would have happened if a particular investment schedule had been followed over a period of time in the past.  The spreadsheet takes into account the automatic reinvestment of dividends, adjusts for inflation, and can handle investment rates that change with time; the investment rate can be automatically adjusted to a constant value in 2013 dollars, making the dollar value amounts a lot more meaningful.

As I discussed in the previous post with regards to arithmetic and geometric means, it's very important to clearly define what it is you're calculating. Take, for instance, the graph of annualized return from that previous post. Each color is a different starting year, the x-axis is the number of years invested, and the y-axis is the annualized, inflation-adjusted rate of return:

Play with the original graph here

As the graph title states, this visualizes the annualized real return over different time periods.  You could use this information to calculate the net real return of a lump sum invested all at once.

Going into the spreadsheet, I changed the 'initial investment' to zero and set the 'monthly investment' to $1000, selecting the option to invest at a constant 2013 dollar rate.  The spreadsheet then simulates a situation in which you invest a constant value (in 2013 dollars) every month.  The graph then looks like this:

Play with the original graph here