Frugalversery 2020: Homemade chocolate raspberry torte

Brian and I didn't exactly have a traditional wedding, so it seems only natural that we've never really gone in for traditional anniversary celebrations. For years, we celebrated by ordering a miniature version of our wedding cake from the bakery that provided it, then going to the park where we got married to eat it. Then the bakery stopped selling small cakes, so we started making a trip into Princeton instead, going to the bakery in person, and getting a slice either to go or to eat in. Unfortunately, their selection of cakes varied from day to day, so sometimes we'd make the trip and find it wasn't available. So by the time our tenth anniversary rolled around, we'd switched to visiting IKEA and having lunch in the cafe (where we knew we could get a good slice of cake, even if it wasn't the cake). But we'd still make a point of swinging by the coffeehouse whenever we happened to be in Princeton and picking up a slice of our very own special cake as soon as it was available.

This year, however, the routine fell apart completely. Our local IKEA has reopened, but it let us down so badly last year that we've given up on going there at all. And the bakery in Princeton, even if we wanted to take our chances on it, appears to have closed down its cafe entirely during the pandemic and is now offering takeout only.

So, if we wanted to enjoy the fabulous Chocolate Raspberry Torte we had for our wedding as part of our anniversary celebration, we had only one option: make it ourselves.

Well, to be more accurate, Brian would make it, since he's the one who does the baking. My job is usually reading aloud to him while he works, so I asked him if he had a request, and he asked for The Tempest. So I read him that in its entirety, doing my best to present distinct voices for each character (Tim Curry as Sebastian, Aidan Turner as Caliban, etc.), while he worked his way through the complicated process of reproducing this cake from scratch.

Fortunately, we'd anticipated that we might have to do this some day, so we'd already made some notes on just how the cake is constructed. From top to bottom, the layers are: white sponge cake, chocolate mousse, cake, raspberry mousse, cake, chocolate mousse, cake, raspberry jam. It's finished with chocolate curls all around the outside and fresh raspberries on top. So, to recreate it, Brian would have to produce four distinct components — the cake, the jam, and two types of mousse — and then assemble them in the proper order.

At first, I tried simply Googling "chocolate raspberry torte" in hopes of finding a cake more or less the same as ours. Unfortunately, all the recipes I found were chocolate cakes layered with raspberry, rather than white cake with both chocolate and raspberry. However, one of them, from Taste of Home, did include a simple recipe for raspberry mousse that we thought we could use — basically just raspberry jam, sugar, and a touch of raspberry liqueur (which we skipped) folded into whipped cream. This would mean breaking our abstention from dairy products, but we figured for such a special occasion, we could make an exception. And since we needed raspberry jam for the cake anyway, using it to make the mousse would simplify the process.

In fact, as luck would have it, we already had some homemade raspberry jam. After our success putting up our first batch of plum jam last summer, Brian tried preserving some of our raspberries the same way, so he had a couple of small jars of the stuff set aside. And he found a recipe for Genoise sponge cake in The Joy of Cooking and an "easy two-ingredient chocolate mousse" recipe at Kitchn. This recipe starts with a chocolate ganache, which gets folded into whipped cream, so he figured he could make a little extra ganache and use that to stick the chocolate shavings to the side of the cake.

Since the weather has been beastly hot lately, Brian opted to do the actual baking part of the process the night before, when it was cooler. Instead of actual cake pans, he used two of his small deep-dish pizza pans to make two sponge cakes that he thought would be small enough for him to hold upright while slicing them, which would be much easier than trying to torte them horizontally. He lined the bottoms of the pans with circles of baking parchment to make it easier to turn the cooled cakes out in the morning.

Since the sides of these pans are not quite vertical, he had to trim around the the edges of both cakes to make them cylindrical, as well as shaving pieces off the top to make them roughly flat. But eventually he got two layers that he was indeed able to slice in half vertically — kind of like slicing a bagel. This gave him four thin layers to work with.

 Next, he whipped up the chocolate ganache, which would serve as both the outer coating and the basis for the chocolate mousse. Scaling the recipe to fit the size of the cake we were baking, he used 1/4 cup of heavy cream to 1/2 cup of bittersweet chocolate chips, following the procedure in Kitchn's chocolate mousse recipe.

But before actually making the mousse, he turned his attention to the raspberry jam. The batch he'd made hadn't been strained to remove the seeds, and he feared they'd interfere with the silky texture of the mousse, so he put the whole contents of the jar through a small sieve, muddling it with a spoon to get it through. The seedy parts went back into the jar, along with all the leftover strained jam that didn't get used in the cake, and he mixed it together to make a slightly more seed-heavy jam for later consumption.

Next, he whipped the cream and folded ganache into one batch to make the chocolate mousse and jam into the other to make the raspberry mousse. He used 1/4 cup of ganache to 1/3 cup of heavy whipping cream for the first batch, and 2 tablespoons of the strained preserves plus 1 teaspoon of powdered sugar to 1/4 cup of whipping cream for the second. Since he'd made the preserves using a low-sugar recipe, the raspberry mousse tasted somewhat tarter than the filling in our actual wedding cake, but we decided that wasn't a problem; since all the other components were so sweet, the brightness would set them off nicely.

And finally, he got out our smallest grater and started shaving off pieces of chocolate from a Trader Joe's chocolate truffle bar to decorate the outside of the cake. He grated off approximately one ounce of it to make a pile of shavings that looked like roughly the right amount. They weren't so much chocolate curls as chocolate fragments, but they'd have the flavor and texture we were going for.

With all the components now ready to go, it was time to begin assembling the cake. He started with one of the sponge layers, then spread on a fairly thick layer of chocolate mousse, followed by another cake layer and an equally thick layer of raspberry...

...and continued with cake, mousse, and cake until he had the entire stack assembled and ready for decorating. Since he just eyeballed the layers, he ended up not using quite all of the mousse he'd made; there was maybe a third of a cup left of each type. But he probably could have used all of it without hurting the flavor balance any.

Next, he applied the remaining chocolate ganache to the outside of the cake with a rubber spatula. He had just enough of it left to coat the entire cake.

He then applied the chocolate shavings by the simplest method he could think of: tilting the entire plate and sprinkling the chocolate bits over the ganache. He just kept going round and round the cake until he'd used the entire pile of shavings.

And finally, he took the remaining strained jam and spread a thin layer over the top of the cake. And there it was — an approximate reproduction of our wedding cake, made at home. The only component missing was the fresh raspberries on the top, but our raspberry canes aren't producing at the moment (we're in between the summer and fall crops), and we didn't want to buy a whole pint of pricey fresh berries just to get six of them for a cake decoration.

He did all this in the morning, and the cake spent the rest of the day chilling out in the fridge. In the evening, after a dinner of our favorite Pasta a la Caprese (the first of the summer, made with homegrown tomatoes, basil, and garlic, and our homemade vegan mozzarella) and an after-dinner walk, we cut into the cake...

...and found that it had just the same neat, layered structure as the original. And the flavor, while not identical, was pretty darn close. The raspberry mousse was indeed a little more tart than the original, and possibly the chocolate mousse was a little more bitter, but with the sweetness of the sponge layers in between, the overall flavor seemed perfectly balanced. The cake was also a little bit drier than the bakery's version, possibly because the layers were thicker, or possibly because they used a different type of sponge. But again, that was no problem; I always felt the original, if it had a fault, was a little too moist, inclined to become slightly soggy when left over. This version, we hope, will hold up fine, since we still have two-thirds of it left to enjoy.

Brian has written out the full recipe for what he did to create this cake and saved a copy, so on future anniversaries, we no longer need to be at the mercy of the bakery. We can celebrate right at home, with our very own homemade anniversary cake. (He might even attempt a dairy-free version next year, using Coco Whip — the stuff we used in our vegan raspberry fool — for the mousse.) And for my part, I still have 36 more Shakespeare plays to get through.

Money Crashers: 4 Garage Sale Setup Tips

Here's the companion piece I promised to my earlier Money Crashers article on garage sale pricing. This one covers all the other aspects of setting up a sale — cleaning, sorting, and displaying your wares — to make buyers stop and take notice. For anyone who has a yard sale in their near future, it's worth a read.

4 Garage Sale Setup Tips to Best Display Your Items & Make More Money

Money Crashers: Carbon Taxes Explained

Back in January, I told you about the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (H.R. 763), a bill that aims to fix one of the biggest problems with greenhouse gas emissions: the people doing the emitting aren't the people paying the price. This bill fixes that not by regulating carbon emissions, but simply by raising their cost, so people have an incentive to cut them on their own — using whatever methods work best for them. And all the money it raises goes directly back into taxpayers' pockets, offsetting the increased cost of energy. For the average taxpayer, the money from the carbon dividend would end up being more than they'd pay in higher energy bills — so it fights climate change and puts money in your pocket at the same time. Who could resist that?

What I didn't tell you at the time was how I came to learn about this bill. I became involved with the  the Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL) in January after having written a piece on carbon taxes for Money Crashers. I've since updated the piece to cover H.R. 763, and it's now gone live on the site.

The article goes into details about:

• How carbon taxes work
• How they compare to other methods of regulating carbon emissions, such as cap and trade
• How they're working out for countries and states that currently have them
• Their advantages and disadvantages, and how to mitigate the disadvantages
• Current climate tax proposals in the House and Senate, and their chances for passage
• What you can do, if you're sold on the idea, to make a carbon tax a reality

In short, it's everything you ever wanted to know about carbon taxes but didn't know whom to ask. Read about it, and join the fight! Go Pigouvians!

Carbon (CO2) Emissions Tax Explained – Pros & Cons, Alternatives

Money Crashers: 7 Tips for Garage Sale Pricing

My latest Money Crashers post is on a subject dear to my heart: yard sales. I've noted before that one of my biggest pet peeves is a yard sale without any marked prices, so I jumped at the chance to update this old article all about how price your garage sale items. (There was also a section on how to arrange and present your items for maximum curb appeal, but that ended up being spun off into a separate article, which should be published soon.)

This piece covers all the ins and outs of figuring out the right price for an item (which can vary significantly depending on where you live), labeling it clearly, and negotiating with buyers. Read all about it here: 7 Tips for Garage Sale Pricing to Maximize the Value of Your Items

Money Crashers: Urban vs Suburban vs Rural Living

In the heat of the COVID pandemic, many city dwellers are considering leaving the dense urban environment for what they see as the relative safety of the country or the suburbs. However, this may not be the smartest decision — not just for their health, but for their wealth and happiness too. For one thing, infection rates aren't necessarily higher in urban areas; in fact, studies from the World Bank and ProPublica Illinois show just the opposite. And for those who do get sick, rural and suburban areas don't necessarily offer the same health care resources as big cities.

But more importantly, this pandemic won't last forever. Changing where you live brings big changes in your lifestyle that will persist long after it's over, such as:

• Income and access to jobs
• Expenses for housing, utilities, food, transportation, and health care
• Choice of schools for your kids
• Access to government resources
• Options for entertainment and shopping
• A wide range of other lifestyle factors, from diversity to gun ownership to time spent outdoors

All in all, this isn't a decision to make hastily. It's a choice that affects your whole life, and it's worth considering it carefully from all the angles first. And luckily, my new article for Money Crashers does just that. I explore all the ways living in the city, suburbs, or country can affect your life, and then sum up which kind of person is most likely to be happy in each setting. (My personal favorite is a small town, but sadly, I couldn't cover this as a separate category in the article.)

Urban vs Suburban vs Rural Living – Differences to Consider Where to Live

Money Crashers: Charities Providing COVID-19 Relief

My latest Money Crashers article is a companion piece to my earlier one on finding the best charities. This one has a more specific focus: the best charities to support during the COVID pandemic. I consulted guides from charity watchdogs like CharityWatch and Charity Navigator, as well as news sources like Wired and The New York Times, to find out which organizations are helping people affected by the pandemic — meeting needs such as medical care, supplies, food, mental health care, cash aid, and education. I selected the ones that showed up on multiple lists and checked them all out on the charity watchdog sites to make sure they all got good marks for transparency, oversight, and effective use of funds. These are the 16 charities that made the cut.

There are also businesses that have been helping out in various ways, such as donating PPE for health workers, cash to charities, or their own products and services. In most cases, you can't donate to these businesses (though some have set up funds for this purpose), but you can support them with your shopping dollars.

Check out the full list here: 16 Charities & Non-Profits Providing COVID-19 Relief (Highest Rated)

Is our carbon footprint growing or shrinking?

For several years now, I've been buying carbon offsets every year from Carbon Footprint. You can use their calculator to roughly estimate carbon emissions from your home, various modes of transportation, diet, and general consumption, and then donate money to various carbon-reducing projects (tree planting, green power, energy efficiency, and so on) to offset those emissions. The site also shows you how your personal carbon footprint compares to the average person in your own country, the average person worldwide, and the global target we'd all need to reach to halt global warming. In previous years, our household footprint has worked out to somewhere between 12.5 and 14.5 tons (or "tonnes," as it's a British site). Although this is quite a bit larger than the target, or even the world average, I always found it reassuring to see that it was less than half the size of the average American's footprint, which meant that we were doing reasonably well on the grading curve.

This year, however, the calculator threw me for a loop. Two loops, in fact, in quick succession.

The first loop came when I reached the section of the calculator that asks about your car. In a typical year, we put about 11,000 miles on ours, so I use that figure to calculate our footprint from driving. However, it occurred to me that in the past few months, we've been doing a lot less driving than usual, so I checked our gas mileage log to see just how many miles we'd driven since last July. As luck would have it, we'd filled up our car exactly a year earlier, on July 18, 2019, and at that time it had 90,031 miles on it. And as of yesterday, it had 96,645. We hadn't just reduced our mileage — we'd cut it by around 40 percent. And that was over only a four-month period. If our current state of semi-isolation continues throughout the rest of the year, and especially if we can't make our annual long trek to Indiana for Christmas, we'll reduce it by even more next year.

Well, between that drastic cut in our driving and the fact that we're now eating virtually no meat or dairy, I expected our overall carbon footprint to be significantly smaller than it had been in the past. And so it was: 9.63 metric tons, as compared to a previous low of 12.5. But here was the kicker: even our new, smaller footprint was still well over half the size of the average footprint for U.S. residents. The average American footprint, according to the calculator, measured 16.49 metric tons; ours was 58 percent of that. And compared to the average for the European Union (6.4 metric tons) and the world (5 metric tons), our performance was absolutely pathetic.

What happened? How could we slash our carbon footprint by nearly 25 percent and still see it increase relative to the size of everyone else's? The only explanation I can think of is that everyone else in the U.S. and Europe has also been cutting emissions during 2020, and since they had more to cut in the first place, their footprints shrank a lot more than ours did. Thus, even though ours is smaller than it was, it's still a larger percentage of the new, smaller average.

Technically, I guess, this is good news. I mean, it's much better for the climate if all Americans (and I guess all Europeans, too) are slashing their carbon footprints, not just a few hardcore environmentalists. But I must admit, I feel a little bit disgruntled to be scoring lower on the grading curve than I'm used to. I feel like, if the average American — who probably isn't working all that hard at it — can get their carbon footprint down to 16.49 metric tons, then surely we ought to be able to get ours down to 8.24 or less. I'm not sure how we'd manage this feat (go full vegan? switch to an electric car? an electric heating system?) but it ought to be possible somehow.

Money Crashers: How to Find the Best Charities

As the COVID pandemic has swept across America, Brian and I have been among the lucky ones who escaped its worst effects. No one close to us has had COVID, we've both kept our jobs, we don't have kids to home-school, and we've had each other and the cats for company so we didn't go completely insane during the long months of isolation. Of course, our investments took a big hit and we've experienced stress like everyone else, but overall, we know we've gotten off easy.

Since millions of people haven't been so lucky, and since we aren't spending as much money as usual on ourselves, it seems only logical for us to respond by giving more money than usual to charity. If nothing else, it allows us to feel like we're doing something to help with a situation that's almost completely out of our control. But, as I observed during my 2017 Thrift Week, we want to give wisely. If our money isn't really helping people who need it — or if a significant portion of it is being squandered on overhead costs for an inefficient charity — then we might as well just keep it in our own pockets.

For me, this is an easy problem to fix: I just check out any charities I want to give to on Charity Navigator. If they don't meet my criteria, I choose a different charity in the same field that does. But others may not know this trick, or may not understand the point of it.

For them, my latest Money Crashers article lays out the value of choosing the right charities for your money, the criteria for deciding which charities are best (they support causes you value, their money goes mainly toward programs, they're efficient at fundraising, they have good oversight in place, and they're transparent about their practices), and how different charity watchdogs can help you identify them.

In times like this, it's normal to want to help others if you can. But you'll help them the most by giving wisely.

How to Find the Best Charities to Donate to – Characteristics to Look For

Vegan Recipe of the Month: Garlic Lemon Broccoli Pasta

Over the past several months, I've printed out a wide assortment of vegan and near-vegan recipes from various sites that I wanted to try. In most cases, however, we didn't get around to trying them right away, and so I was accumulating a thicker and thicker stack of them on the kitchen table. Last week, I finally decided to go through the list, set aside a few that we wanted to try soon, and either file away or discard the rest.

One of those that made the cut was this Garlic Lemon Broccoli Pasta from my favorite vegan blog, It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken. Having recently been to H-Mart, we happened to have on hand all the produce required to make it: broccoli, garlic, and a fresh lemon. We didn't have the gluten-free penne the recipe called for, but we could see no problem with using regular penne, and the slivered almonds for the garnish were easy to replace with crushed whole almonds. And it was a quick and easy recipe — just 20 minutes to make. With nothing else planned for that night's dinner, Brian was happy to put this new dish to the test right away.

When I tried my first forkful of this, my first comment was, "Wow, that's really...bright." The dish contains the juice and zest of one entire lemon, so that tart, citrusy flavor was very much to the fore. Brian didn't respond to this comment, because his mouth was too full; to his taste buds, that mouth-puckering lemon flavor was just enough and not at all too much, and he dug into it with abandon. I proceeded more cautiously, and after a while, it started to grow on me too. Once I'd gotten past that first punch of lemon, I was able to appreciate the deeper notes of umami-rich garlic and nutritional yeast, the faint bitterness of the broccoli, and the even fainter bite of the red pepper flakes. (The recipe calls for half a teaspoon, but since I'm a spice wimp, Brian had dialed this back to a scanty pinch.)

This dish has pretty much everything we want in a weeknight dinner. It's tasty, vegan, quick and easy to prepare, and it calls for no unusual ingredients. It will definitely be showing up on our dinner table again, probably on a regular basis. Which, since the whole point of this exercise when I first started it seven years back was to incorporate more veggies into my diet, is a definite win.

Next up: a quinoa bowl featuring roasted eggplant and Brussels sprouts. It also calls for cherry tomatoes, so we should be able to try this one as soon as our Sun Golds start ripening. Watch this space for details.

Money Crashers: 17 Personal Finance Books to Read

First of all, let me be clear: the rather immodest title of this article, "17 Best Personal Finance Books to Read of All Time," was the editor's idea, not mine. I make no attempt to claim that the books on this list are the absolute best treatises on personal finance ever written, or even the best currently in print. Instead, this list features:

• 15 books selected because they consistently get good marks from reviewers for their ability to present financial topics, from basic budgeting to early retirement, in a way anyone can understand
• One book that I added to the list because it's a personal favorite of mine, and one that I think doesn't get enough recognition for its ability to make financial matters not merely understandable but entertaining
• One book (the last) that I added to the list by request because Money Crashers has "a partnership" with the author. In other words, he's paying us for our recommendation. I originally added a "full disclosure" notice revealing this information at the bottom of the section, but the editor removed it. So please take this as my personal disclaimer: I have not personally read this book, nor have I seen a recommendation for it anywhere. It gets pretty good ratings on Amazon.com, but for all I know, the author paid for those too, so I make no guarantees.

With the exception of this last one, all the books on this list come with solid recommendations. Whatever your financial goals may be — from making your first budget to buying a home to achieving financial independence — there's sure to be a book on this list that can help you achieve them.

The Groundhogs Strike Back

It appears that we have new tenants this year. Another family of groundhogs — one adult and four little furballs — has moved into the space under our shed. At first we were unconcerned, even pleased, about this, because we were trusting our modified groundhog fence to foil all attempts at burrowing under, climbing over, or squeezing through the gaps into the garden. And since none of our previous groundhog tenants had ever messed with the crops outside the fenced area, such as the rhubarb and asparagus, we figured we had nothing to fear from them.

However, we'd forgotten about the newly installed flowerbed in the front yard. Shortly after we first met our new neighbors, Brian spotted one of them in the front yard and realized that all the plants we'd gone to such trouble to acquire were at risk of getting munched. He'd heard before that the smell of cat urine tended to scare groundhogs off, since cats are predators, so he took to scooping the clumps out of the cat box, breaking them up, and scattering them around the border of the flowerbed. This, as far as we could tell, was entirely ineffective. After he'd been at it for about three days, we discovered that roughly half the plants in the bed had been chomped on to some degree or other. The victims included two the yarrow plants (which groundhogs aren't even supposed to like), one sedum, one coreopsis, and basically all the echinaceas and violas. The only ones to remain untouched were the hellebores, which are poisonous and also, apparently, taste disgusting.

Clearly, we'd have to find some other way to protect our plants if we didn't want our latest attempt at creating a three-season flower garden to flop like the others. In particular, we wanted to save the sedum plants if at all possible. The hellebores seemed all right, and all the others could be regrown from seed, but the sedums had to be special ordered from a nursery, and we didn't want to go to the trouble or expense a second time. Plus, they were some of the largest plants in the bed, and we were counting on them to grow quickly and fill in some of the empty space.

I hit on the idea of deploying the Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluder — a cage of chicken wire and wood scraps that Brian had originally built to protect our eggplants from squirrel damage. We only had one of these left of the two Brian built, as he'd dismantled the other one earlier this year to turn the chicken wire into smaller cages for our young pepper plants. But since they were no longer needed for that purpose, we were able to put both the smaller cages and the remaining large one to use guarding the sedums and a few of the other plants.

However, since this still left quite a few plants unprotected, we looked into other ways to deter these furry critters without harming them. We'd previously seen an article recommending things that move in the breeze, such as wind chimes, spinners, or pinwheels, for chasing away squirrels, so when my mom offered us some decorative pinwheels she wasn't using, we decided it couldn't hurt to give them a try. Unfortunately, these particular pinwheels turned out to be pretty much useless at creating motion. Instead of large "sails" to catch the breeze, they had only tiny, confetti-like specks of red, white, and blue that barely moved in even the strongest winds. We left them up as decorations for the Fourth of July weekend, but we knew we couldn't count on them to scare off mammals of any kind.

So I did a little further research and came across this article in the Farmers' Almanac, which recommended several natural remedies. While some of them (such as cat litter and human hair) had already proved useless, there were a couple of others that looked promising — especially cayenne pepper spray, which deters groundhogs both with its scent and with its heat. I could easily imagine that if I were a groundhog and I took a healthy bite out of a plant doused in pepper juice, I'd quickly lose all inclination to come back for more.

The Farmers' Almanac simply said to use "a mixture of 2 teaspoons cayenne with one quart of water," but another site I consulted had a more elaborate recipe: 4 to 5 tablespoons of red pepper flakes (or 10 fresh hot peppers, finely chopped), simmered for 15 minutes in a gallon of water, then left to sit for 24 hours, strained, and mixed with a teaspoon of olive oil to help it adhere to the leaves. Brian prepared a quarter-size batch using one quart of water and one tablespoon of pepper flakes, and the simmering liquid gave off an eye-watering miasma that seemed like a strong indication it would be effective. He let it cool, strained it, and mixed in the oil as instructed, leaving a rust-colored mixture that had clearly retained quite a bit of the fiery red oils from the pepper flakes. Then he transferred this to a spray bottle and gave all the plants, particularly the uncaged ones, a good spritzing.

So far, this seems to be working. He first applied the mixture last weekend and has reapplied it after every rainfall, and the flowers have suffered no further groundhog damage in that time. So I guess we'll keep it up until either (a) it stops deterring the groundhogs, or (b) they grow up and move out of our yard, or (c) the plants get big enough to handle the odd bite here and there without suffering any serious damage.

There is a postscript to this story: Last week, Brian saw that one of the little groundhogs had actually managed to get into the garden — that is, inside the fence — and was cheerfully munching on our lettuces. When it spotted him, it freaked out and escaped by climbing over up of our new potato plants and out over the top of the fence. However, this clearly wasn't the route it had used to get in, since the plants are on the inside of the fence and there's no way to climb up them from outside. He conducted a thorough survey of the border fence and found one place where the chicken wire had worked itself loose, leaving a gap that a baby groundhog could conceivably squeeze through. He fixed that, and since then we haven't seen any more groundhogs inside the garden, so we're hoping we've now blocked all their modes of ingress. But we're keeping a sharp eye out, just in case.

Money Crashers: Living With Your Adult Children – How to Make It Work

Last month, Money Crashers published a piece of mine on the perils of moving back in with your parents as an adult. This month, they've published a companion piece that they asked me to split off from the original, which addresses the same situation from the parents' point of view. (This led me to the alarming realization that my target audience for this article is probably about my age, as people in their late forties who married and had children fairly early are now in a position to have college graduates moving back in with them. How can I possibly be the peer of the parents with adult children when I barely feel like an adult myself?)

Anyway, if you've already read the first piece, you have an idea what to expect from the second. But if you're (gulp) my age, you may find the second one a bit more relevant to your viewpoint. It offers advice for parents who are now, or may soon be, taking a college graduate back into their home on how to ensure that they aren't stuck in the parenting role for life — and that they and their adult child can live together as adults in the meantime.

Living With Your Adult Children Moving Back Home – How to Make It Work