Money Crashers: 2 new articles

A quick post to let you know about two new articles of mine that have popped up on Money Crashers in the past week:

9 Best Books to Read Before Buying a Home

From the author who brought you "7 Best Personal Finance Books to Read of All Time," a new piece on the best books about home buying. These volumes cover every aspect of your biggest purchase ever, including real estate agents, mortgages, inspections, title insurance, negotiation, and closing costs. It's everything you've ever wanted to know about home buying but were afraid to ask.

How to Get the Best Price on a Rental Car – 10 Simple Steps

The second  article is a companion to my earlier piece on avoiding rental car fees. This one focuses not on the fees, but on the base price you pay for a rental car. It lets you in on the secrets to getting the lowest possible price, from avoiding upselling to taking advantage of discounts.

Recipe of the Month: Butternut Squash Soup with Apple and Leek

Whew! Over this past weekend, I have probably eaten more meat than I did during the rest of the year combined. My folks always get a free-range turkey for Thanksgiving, mostly to accommodate me, and from Thursday through Saturday I consumed parts of it for at least four meals: Thanksgiving dinner itself, then turkey sandwiches for lunch on Friday and Saturday, and Thanksgiving leftovers for Saturday dinner. Of course, I wouldn't have eaten so much turkey if I didn't enjoy it, but still, it was kind of a relief to get back to my more normal plant-based diet tonight with a new vegan recipe. And, of course, it also allowed me to slip in this month's Vegan Recipe of the Month just under the wire.

This recipe, or at least the inspiration for it, came out of the Fix-It and Forget-It Vegetarian Cookbook, which I picked up cheap a few years ago. I forget just where it came from; maybe it was the library book sale, or maybe it was part of our regular December trip to Half Price Books. But whatever its source, it went onto our cookbook shelf and basically just sat there. Whenever I was looking for a recipe, I skipped right over it and went straight to the more familiar cookbooks we've worked with before. As far as I can recall, we've never actually made anything at all from it. 

This month, I got to thinking it was a bit silly to have this cookbook taking up space on our shelf if we weren't going to use it, so I decided to take it out and put it to the test. I paged through it and found that most of the recipes in it wouldn't be all that useful for us, as they have a fairly heavy emphasis on dairy, which we've largely given up. But I happened to hit on one recipe for Acorn Squash Soup with Apples and Leeks that I thought could be converted to vegan without too much difficulty. The only dairy ingredient in it was a half-cup of half-and-half, and I believed a substitution of canned coconut milk would fit in perfectly well with the rest of the ingredients (acorn squash, vegetable broth, apple, leeks, and a touch of ground nutmeg).

We also replaced the acorn squash in the recipe with butternut squash, which tastes much the same and which we always have on hand. As I noted last month, last year's crop lasted us over a year, because we always grow a lot of it and we have a limited number of recipes that call for it. We seldom make our beloved butternut squash lasagna anymore because it requires so much dairy, and so far, we haven't dared to risk making it with our new vegan mozzarella and almond milk for fear of mucking up the texture. So that leaves only a handful butternut dishes we make recipe: butternut squash souffle, black bean and butternut quinoa bowl, butternut squash pizza with sage, and roasted fall veggies with eggs. So I figured this new soup recipe, if we liked it, could provide an opportunity to expand our repertoire.

Making the soup was pretty easy. The recipe calls for baking the squash in the oven for half an hour, but Brian skipped that and used the microwave method we follow when making souffle or lasagna: zap the entire squash in the microwave for about 20 minutes, let it cool, and peel and mash it. He did that ahead of time in the afternoon, and come dinnertime, all he had to do was stir the soft squash into a big pot with a chopped apple (skin and all), a sliced leek, and three cups of veggie broth. Then all it needed was 15 minutes of simmering, a half-cup of coconut milk, a quick blending in the pot with our stick blender, and a sprinkle of nutmeg before serving.

And the result was...interesting. It's quite unlike most of our other soup recipes, because the butternut squash and apple together give it a distinctly sweet flavor, while the leeks and vegetable broth (from our favorite Penzey's vegetable stock) provide a savory background. It's sweet, tart, salty, and savory, all at once. And as I suspected, the coconut milk blends in quite unobtrusively with the other ingredients. Eked out by Brian's half-wholemeal biscuits, it made a perfectly enjoyable meal, but I wouldn't say I prefer it to any of the other butternut recipes we make regularly. So I don't know if it will earn a place in our regular rotation.

As for the Fix-It and Forget-It Vegetarian Cookbook, I'm not prepared to keep it solely on the strength of one recipe that we thought was fairly good. But based on the quality of this one dish, I'm prepared to spend a little more time delving into its pages and see if there are any more hidden gems to be unearthed.

DIY almond milk from scratch

Two weeks ago, I blogged here about how I'd discovered a new, simple method for making your own almond milk at home by blending almond butter in water (with a little salt and sugar). We tried this with some commercial almond butter from Costco, and the result wasn't bad, but it didn't work well for cocoa; the toasted-almond flavor was so strong that it completely drowned out the flavor of the cocoa powder. But I wondered if it might be possible to produce a homemade almond milk with a milder flavor, more similar to the commercial stuff, by making our own almond butter from blanched rather than roasted almonds.

I can now say definitively that the answer is yes. But it's still not perfect, and it's a bit of a hassle.

Making this completely-from-scratch almond milk last weekend was a multi-stage process:

1. 
   First, Brian blanched the almonds using the process outlined by Alpha Foodie. The blog claims this process only takes five minutes, but it takes rather longer if you're processing a cup of almonds at once. As the recipe notes, peeling them is quite easy: just pinch them and they shoot right out of their skins (and go skidding across the table if you're not careful). But you can only do that to one almond at a time, so it takes a good while to get through a cupful.
2. Then, he ground the almonds into butter using Alice Waters' recipe. Here's where he encountered his second snag: The almonds wouldn't grind easily. He tried it in both the Magic Bullet and the food processor, and in both cases, the motor started to burn. He ended up having to add roughly a quarter-cup of canola oil to the almonds just to reduce them to a paste, and he would have added more if he hadn't been afraid of mucking up the texture. Maybe our little food processor doesn't qualify as the "sturdy" model that Waters recommends.
3. He took a tablespoon of this blanched-almond butter and blended it up with two cups of filtered water, a teaspoon and a half of sugar, and an eighth-teaspoon of salt. That's roughly equivalent to the pinch of salt and single date recommended in the Nest and Glow recipe.

As you can see here, the resulting almond milk had a much lighter color than the stuff made from commercial almond butter. It had a much lighter flavor, too, very close to the almond milk we buy in cartons at the store. The big difference between this and the commercial product was texture. 

Brian ground the almond butter as finely as he could and then blended it very thoroughly with the water, but it still didn't blend completely. There were tiny solid particles suspended in the liquid, which precipitated out when it sat overnight. Getting them back into suspension wasn't a big problem; I just gave the bottle a good shake, the same way I do with the carton of commercial almond milk. But the little flecks of almond in my breakfast cocoa gave it a rather chewier texture than I'm used to.

Mind you, this was only our first attempt, and it's possible we might be able to get the almond milk a little smoother with a little tweaking. Maybe processing the almonds in our big blender on the "grind" setting would work better than using our little Magic Bullet or our little food chopper. Or maybe we could simply strain the almond milk after blending it. But that would also add a fourth step to the process, making it more work than before.

So we're going to need to fiddle with this recipe a bit more before we decide if it can really take the place of our packaged almond milk from Lidl. It comes down to two questions: (1) can we come up with a method that produces a reasonably smooth homemade almond milk, and (2) if we do, is the process simple enough to make it worth the effort. We've still got most of our initial batch of homemade almond butter to work with, so we'll definitely be making at least a few more batches, and perhaps by the time we're done we'll have come up with a method that's workable.

If we do, we'll have the ultimate ecofrugal plant-based milk: half the price of dairy milk, with practically no packaging. But even if we don't, it's good to know that we always have this DIY almond milk as a backup. Now if we're snowed up for days at a time and can't make it to the store, we can always produce a tolerable version of almond milk from ingredients we always have on hand — just so long as the power stays on, that is.

Money Crashers: secondhand shopping and free e-books

Money Crashers has popped up two new articles of mine, both on topics close to my heart.

The first is about secondhand shopping. Since I always prefer to buy secondhand when I can, I felt particularly well qualified to cover this topic. The article compares the various types of venues that sell secondhand goods, from thrift shops to eBay to yard sales, and offers strategies for getting the most for your money. Much of it will be familiar to regular readers of this blog, but here it's all conveniently organized in one place.

Second-Hand Shopping: How to Save at Thrift Stores and Consignment Shops

And the second is about another favorite subject, books. Specifically, it's about e-books and about how and where you can get them for cheap or free. The article runs through all the best sites for finding digital reading material at little to no cost, from digital libraries to the collection of free Kindle books on Amazon. (Okay, a lot of them aren't very good, but they'll do to pass the time in a waiting room.)

10 Best E-Book Download Sites to Find Free or Cheap Books Online

Money Crashers: 2 health care articles and one on debt settlement

Money Crashers has published three of my articles in the past week. The first is not so much a new article as a spin-off from an old one: my piece on debt settlement from last year. The editors decided to split this into two articles, one on when debt settlement is a good idea and one on the nuts and bolts of how to do it. So the old URL now directs you to the article on the "how," and the new one on the "why" is here:

When Is Debt Settlement a Good Idea – Disadvantages and How It Works

The other two pieces are on health care, and they approach it from two different angles. The latest one is on how to choose the best health insurance plan out of the array of options that your insurer or your state health exchange offers. I walk you through the various factors to consider — premiums, out-of -pocket costs, provider network — and how to balance them to choose the best plan for your family.

How to Choose the Best Health Insurance Plan for Your Family

And the other attacks the problem from the other side of the coin: what to do if you're one of the nearly 30 million Americans without health insurance. I outline the various places to get care without it — including subsidized health clinics, retail clinics, direct primary care, telehealth, free health screenings, Hill-Burton hospitals, urgent care centers, and hospital ERs — with their costs, pros, and cons. And I examine some other ways to save, from the common (discount medical plans) to the obscure (clinical drug trials).

How to Get Affordable Medical Care Without Health Insurance

 

Top takeaways from the Citizens' Climate Lobby conference

Yesterday, I attended the Citizens' Climate Lobby's fall conference via Zoom. (Matter of fact, the conference is still going on today, with seminars on topics from the climate features of the budget reconciliation bill to a panel discussion between left-leaning and right-leaning CCL members — because yes, there actually are folks concerned about climate on the right, not that you'll ever find any of them in Washington. But I decided one day in front of my screen was enough for me.)

I spent the whole afternoon listening to talks about strategies for making progress on climate change, by the keynote address by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (marine biologist and co-host of the How To Save a Planet podcast) to the closing remarks by CCL president Madeline Para. That's four solid hours of talks. And I can honestly say that by the end of the day, I knew a few useful things that I didn't know before. 

Now, I'm about to teach you those same few useful things in a blog post that I imagine will take you far less than four hours to read. Here are my top takeaways from the conference — the most interesting, useful, inspiring, and "actionable" points of the whole day.

1. Regenerative ocean farming is a big deal.

The top question Dr. Johnson got asked at the end of her keynote was about the potential of regenerative ocean farming. I had heard a bit about this already in an episode of Freakonomics about the potential for raising food in the oceans. The guy he talked to, Bren Smith, is an aquaculture farmer who raises clams, oysters, mussels, and kelp: all "things that don't swim, that you don't have to feed." You can do all this on long lines that hang below the surface of the water, so they don't interfere with the view the way, say, an offshore wind farm does. 

And apparently, their potential is enormous. Smith says you can grow 10 tons of kelp in one acre of ocean. This is not only a huge amount of food, but also a huge carbon sink. He cites a World Bank study saying that if you turned less than 5 percent of all U.S. waters over to seaweed farming, you could sequester "the carbon-output equivalent of 20 million cars." And the portion of that seaweed that isn't suitable for food can be turned into fertilizer for land-based farming, reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers involved in the release of nitrous oxide (a greenhouse gas 300 times as powerful as carbon dioxide).

According to Dr. Johnson, this could be a pretty major piece of the solution to the climate-change puzzle. And the beauty part is, there's really no downside. Oysters and seaweed are delicious, so getting more of our food supply from them is all to the good. 

2. The world isn't divided into climate change "believers" and "deniers."

One of yesterday's speakers was from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. It has come up with a model it calls "Six Americas" to visualize how Americans really feel about climate change. We fall into six groups:

1. 26% of the population is Alarmed. These are the people, like me, who think that climate change is a true crisis and we as a species need to be doing a lot more about it than we are now. This is the group that's grown the most over time as major problems, like the California wildfires, have been in the news more and more.
   
2. 29% are Concerned. These folks think climate change is a problem, all right, and we should definitely do something about it, but it doesn't need to be our top priority.
3. 19% are Cautious. They're not 100% convinced yet of the science on climate change: whether it's happening at all, whether it's caused by human activity, and how big a problem it is. This group has shrunk the most in the face of the growing evidence on climate.
   
4. 6% are Disengaged. They don't know much of anything about global warming, and they don't care.
   
5. 12% are Doubtful. They incline to the view that global warming is either not happening or not a real problem.
6. Only 8% are Dismissive. These are the folks you see screaming on the Internet about climate change being a hoax. They're a small minority of the population, but they get all the attention.

There's not much point in trying to talk to Dismissive folks about this issue. Their minds are made up, and they refuse to let you confuse them with facts. But it's possible to influence others if you go about it the right way.

3. The right way to talk about it is not to hammer people with facts.

This comes from speaker Katherine Hayhoe, a leading climate scientist who has addressed our group before. One of the fascinating things about her is that she's also an evangelical Christian, and she sees no contradiction whatsoever between these two things. And because she's talked to so many of her fellow evangelicals and others in the "doubtful" group about climate, she's learned that it does no good to throw a lot of facts at them to prove their views are wrong. Doing this just makes them dig in their heels and hold tighter to what they already believe.

Her approach? Start not with what you disagree on, but with what you have in common. Start with, "Look, you and I are both (Christians, moms, gardeners, whatever," and go on from there to, "And so we both believe (that God made us stewards of the earth, that we want to leave a better world for our children, that soil health is important...)." And once you've established that common ground, then lead into how that ties into climate. People are more willing to listen when you can frame the issue with something that's already important to them.

4. You can build your own solution to climate change, right now.

The single most fascinating thing I discovered at the conference was En-ROADS, an interactive climate simulator from Climate Interactive and the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative. It has all kinds of sliders you can adjust to see how different policies will affect the climate. The best thing about this is that it can show you, right on your computer screen, that climate action is not hopeless. You can sit there and play with the various levers and see for yourself that is is indeed possible, with the right policies, to keep global warming down to 1.5°C. 

I attended a breakout session on how to use this tool, and our group came very close to hitting this target with just a handful of policies:

1. A carbon price that starts at $15 per ton and rises to $850 per ton over 58 years
2. Building and energy efficiency improvements of 3.5% per year
3. 100% electrification of road and rail travel (coupled with a greener energy grid powered by renewables, which can be achieved through the carbon fee)
4. Eliminating emissions of methane and other potent greenhouse gases
5. "Medium growth" of technological carbon drawdown solutions — essentially, machines removing carbon from the atmosphere

With just these five changes, our group got global warming down to 1.6°C, as compared to the 3.6°C of warming (!) we can expect if we continue on our current course. Mind you, knowing what to do isn't the same as being able to do it, and getting leaders to take meaningful action is by far the hardest part (as we saw this week in Glasgow). But by proving that a solution — indeed, multiple solutions — are possible, this tool offers an antidote to climate despair. So rather than throwing up our hands and declaring the whole thing hopeless, we can roll up our sleeves and start pushing for the actions we know will work. And better still, we can see which actions work the best, so we know where to push.

5. Fun (?) fact: Fossil fuel subsides are bigger than the Pentagon's entire budget.

Yes, you heard that right. In 2017, our government spent more subsiding coal, oil, and gas production ($649 billion, counting both direct and indirect subsidies) than it budgeted for defense ($639 billion). And since climate change is probably the biggest threat to our national safety, we are effectively paying more to promote threats against our country than to protect ourselves from them.

6. To get letters to the editor published, you have to hunt for opportunities.

Most papers will only publish a letter to the editor if it's a direct response to a recently published story. So if you want to get your letters into the paper, you have to read the paper every day, looking for stories you could respond to with, "This just proves how much we need action on climate." Unfortunately, the only paper I currently read regularly is the New York Times, which has a very large circulation and thus is notoriously hard to get a letter published in. (I've only achieved it once, and that was on the topic of grammar.) So I guess if I want to make any progress in this area, I'll need to subscribe to more papers, and make the time to read them regularly.

7. I have the right to vote today thanks to Harry Burn's mom.

This final fact comes from the closing remarks by Madeline Para. To illustrate how one person can really make a difference on a big issue, she told the story of how the passage of the 19th Amendment, extending the franchise to women, came down to a single vote in the Tennessee House of Representatives. The deciding vote was cast by Harry Burn, who had voted against ratification twice before under pressure from anti-suffragists. But on the eve of the third vote, he received a long letter from his mother urging him to "be a good boy" and vote for suffrage. And the next day, he stood up in the House with that letter in his hand and voted yes, making Tennessee the last state needed to pass the 19th Amendment into law.

I don't have a son in state government, so maybe I can't have as momentous an effect as this. But I'll keep using what I do have — this blog, social media, conversations with friends, calls to Congress, and any letter I can manage to get into any paper — to exert as much leverage as I can toward pushing our climate, and the future of our species, back from the brink.

Money Crashers: 12 Things You Should Never Buy Used

As I've noted, I'm generally a big fan of secondhand shopping. It's a smart move both for the environment and for your wallet — in most cases. But even I will admit that there are exceptions.

Some products, such as bike helmets, can pose a health or safety risk if you buy them used. Others, like vacuum cleaners, tend to be so worn out that they're not a good value, even if the price is low.

These items are the focus of my latest Money Crashers article. The title (which I didn't choose) is a bit misleading, since I'm not actually saying you should never buy these things secondhand. For almost every item on the list, there are special cases in which it can still be a good buy. But you do have to take extra precautions to protect yourself and your money.

12 Things You Should Never Buy Used (Worst Secondhand Purchases)

Money Crashers: 10 Things You Should Always Buy Used (Secondhand)

My latest Money Crashers article is on a topic I have a fair amount of experience with: secondhand shopping.

Shopping secondhand is nearly always the most ecofrugal choice. Nearly, not always, because some items — appliances, for instance — are likely to be more fuel-efficient if you buy them new. But in general, buying used is a way to save money and natural resources at the same time: an ecofrugal win-win.

However, I admit that some secondhand deals are better than others. So in this article, I discuss which types of products make the best secondhand buys of all — from wedding dresses to musical instruments. Nearly everything on this list is something that Brian or I or both of us have bought used at least once, and we've generally been satisfied with our bargains.

10 Things You Should Always Buy Used (Secondhand)

Plant-based milk experiments follow-up

Three years back, when I was first toying with the question of whether to switch from dairy milk to a plant-based milk of some kind, I did a little experimenting with homemade milk alternatives. I hoped one of these would provide the ultimate ecofrugal alternative to dairy milk: a lower carbon footprint, minimal packaging waste, and low cost, all in one.

Unfortunately, none of the "schmilks" we tried at the time was able to clear this bar. Homemade oat milk, made from rolled oats blended with water, was cheap and easy to make, but it turned into glue when heated, making it useless for hot cocoa. Diluting canned coconut milk with water was just a big mess; the coconut milk didn't dissolve, leaving big lumps of oil floating on a watery base. And most recipes for homemade nut milks were both expensive and complicated to make. 

So I ended up deciding that store-bought almond milk wasn't too bad a deal — especially once we discovered Lidl, which sells it for just $1.89 per half-gallon carton. That's only $3.58 per gallon, only about 20% more than the $3 per gallon we used to pay for dairy milk.

But recently, I found myself growing frustrated with the amount of waste our new, otherwise green habit was producing. Almond milk cartons now make up the bulk of our household trash, and they require us to empty the kitchen bin much more often than we used to. 

So one day, I started casually searching online to see if I could find a brand that came in some kind of recyclable container. And in the process, I came across this page on Nest and Glow arguing that all packaged plant-based milks are unsustainable and the best alternative is to make your own. And moreover, it claimed to offer a way of doing this that "costs pennies and takes 30 seconds."

The key? Ready-made nut or seed butter. By simply blending this with water and an appropriate sweetener, it claimed, you can get a perfectly acceptable schmilk that's both cheaper and more sustainable than any store-bought alternative. True, it only lasts three days in the fridge, but it's so easy to make, that's no big deal. You can always whip up more in under a minute.

So, on our next visit to Costco, we grabbed a jar of almond butter to try this experiment with. (Even if it didn't work, we figured, we could always use it up in sandwiches.) The recipe said to sweeten it by blending a date into the mixture, but we didn't want to spring for dates as well, and anyhow, we suspected it would make the milk lumpy. So we just threw a teaspoon of sugar into the Magic Bullet along with a tablespoon of almond butter, a pint of water, and a pinch of plain salt (not the sea salt the recipe rather snobbishly calls for), and blended it up.

The result, as you can see, didn't look much like milk. And it didn't taste much like milk, either. In fact, what it mostly tasted like, not surprisingly, was almonds. It had a much stronger almond flavor than the commercial almond milk we've been buying, probably because it has a lot more actual almond in it. But the almond flavor wasn't unpleasant, and when I tried the DIY almond milk on cereal and in a glass with a cookie, the flavors seemed compatible enough. So far, so good.

Cost-wise, it wasn't too bad either. The 27-ounce jar cost us about $8 and contained 48 tablespoons for $8, so each cup of the milk contains about 17 cents' worth of almond butter. The sugar, even organic sugar, adds less than a penny per cup, and the cost of the water and salt is negligible. So all told, it's $0.18 per cup, or $2.88 per gallon — actually cheaper than dairy milk. The packaging waste is minimal: just the plastic jar from the almond butter, which is recyclable. The effort involved in making it is fairly trivial. And it's even lower in added sugars that the commercial almond milk we buy now (4 grams per cup as opposed to 7 grams).

However, I wasn't ready to commit to the DIY almond milk yet. It still had to pass the Cocoa Test. So the next morning, I mixed some of the homemade schmilk with sugar and cocoa and heated it in the microwave. The resulting brew looked like cocoa, smelled like cocoa, and unlike the gluey oat-milk version, stirred like cocoa. But what it tasted like...was almond. The stronger almond flavor of the DIY schmilk completely overpowered the taste of the cocoa.

This almond non-cocoa didn't actually taste bad. It made a perfectly acceptable accompaniment to my morning slice of toast. But it wasn't cocoa, and cocoa is what I want with my breakfast. If I wanted to switch to this DIY almond milk permanently, I'd have to give up my morning cup of cocoa in favor of a morning cup of hot almond beverage. And that's a sacrifice I'm just not prepared to make yet.

Still, I haven't altogether given up on the nut butter milk as a concept. Doing a little more research, I discovered that you can buy a commercial "nutbase" for almond milk that's made from blanched almonds, rather than roasted almonds like the almond butter we bought at Costco. (At $20 for 27 servings, it's definitely not ecofrugal, but it's a proof of concept.) I suspected this might give it a milder almond flavor, and sure enough, this MasterClass article by chef Alice Waters notes that "Raw almonds will yield a milder taste" in a homemade almond butter.

So maybe the ultimate ecofrugal approach to plant-based milk would be to make it a three-step process. Step one, make homemade almond butter from raw or blanched almonds, roughly three cups' worth at a time, and store it in the fridge. Step two, blend a quarter-cup of this almond butter up with water and sugar every evening or two to make a quart of homemade almond milk. And step three, heat the homemade almond milk with cocoa and sugar every morning to make my breakfast cocoa.

Better still, we could use the method proposed by Alpha Foodie: make the DIY almond butter from blanched almonds, then freeze it in an ice cube tray. Then, any time we wanted almond milk, we could skip step two and simply dissolve one of the frozen cubes in warm or cold water. This might not work so well for cold almond milk (I imagine they'd take quite a lot of stirring to melt), but it would probably work fine in hot water for my morning cocoa. If it worked, it would be barely any more effort than pouring commercial almond milk out of a carton. The only part that would be time-consuming would be making and freezing the almond butter, and we would only have to do that every couple of months.

Plus, since almonds at Costco are even cheaper than almond butter — about $4 per pound, or $1 per cup — DIY almond milk made from scratch would be the cheapest plant-based schmilk of all. It would only cost around 8 cents a cup, or $1.28 per gallon. That's less than half the price of dairy milk, and virtually no packaging waste, to boot. It's hard to get more ecofrugal than that.

Money Crashers: Two car-related articles

Money Crashers has posted two of my articles this week, and as coincidence would have it, they're both about cars.

The first deals with car rentals. If you've rented a car recently, you most likely found that the price you actually paid was nowhere near the price advertised. And if you asked about it, the clerk no doubt pointed out that the list price did not include (insurance, toll fees, satellite radio, a second driver fee, a late fee, or what have you). My article identifies these various fees that car rental companies tack on to pump up their bottom line and offers a few tricks to counter them.

How to Avoid Rental Car Fees – 12 Steps to Stop Extra Hidden Charges

The second article is about the car you own — or, to be more exact, your family's second car, and whether you could save money by getting rid of it. I go into the nuts and bolts of what it costs to own a second car, the various ways of getting around without one (walking, cycling, transit, ridesharing, etc.), and what they cost. YMMV (your math may vary), but I can at least help you figure out what to add and subtract.

Should You Become a One Car Family?