Money Crashers: Income Sharing Agreements (ISA): A New Way to Pay for College

My latest article on Money Crashers is part of what you might call my Making College Cheaper series. I've done pieces on tuition-free colleges, the pros and cons of paying for your kids' college education, and free or cheap college classes for senior citizens. And in this piece, I'm tackling a relatively new way to pay for college: income sharing agreements (ISAs).

First pioneered in the U.S. via Purdue's "Back a Boiler" program, ISAs are now available at nine U.S. colleges and universities, as well as some non-degree-granting programs. These schools, in essence, offer to cover your tuition costs for you in exchange for a cut of your earnings after you graduate. But is this really a good deal for students? To be specific, is it a better deal than a traditional student loan?

The answer to this question, it turns out, depends on several factors, such as your college, your major, your chosen career, how much you need to borrow, and what your other options are. This article explores those points, along with the history of ISAs, how they work, and where they're available. It should tell you what you need to know to decide whether you, or the future college student in your life, should consider this financing option.

Income Sharing Agreements (ISA): A New Way to Pay for College

Money Crashers: How to Survive a Job Without Benefits

When I decided to quit my full-time job and become a freelancer, one thing that made it an easy call was that Brian and I had just become engaged. Within a few months, I knew, I'd be able to rely on his job for health insurance, so I wouldn't have to pony up for an individual policy—which, in the days before Obamacare subsidies, could be hugely expensive, particularly in New Jersey.

However, many Americans don't have that luxury—and their numbers are growing. According to a 2018 NPR/Marist poll, over 30% of all Americans who work full-time say their job doesn't provide health insurance. Retirement plans are even less common: 40% of full-time workers say their job doesn't provide one. And of course, all of us in the gig economy are on our own when it comes to vacation days and sick days. On the plus side, we can take time off whenever we want—we just have to go without pay to do it.

If you're in this position, my new Money Crashers article is for you. It provides info for freelancers and anyone else who doesn't get workplace benefits about how to supply your own health insurance, retirement funds, sick leave, and vacation leave. And if you're not in this position, you might want to check out the article anyway; the way the economy is changing right now, you could need this information soon.

How to Survive a Job Without Benefits: DIY Health Insurance, Retirement & Vacation

Money Crashers: 7 Things You Need to Do Now to Prepare for the Next Recession

Earlier this week, as I was looking at the traffic report for my Money Crashers articles to see which topics seemed to be the most popular with readers, I noticed something interesting: For the past several months, my story on getting help in a financial emergency received far and away more hits than any other. And that was interesting, because the article had first come out two years ago, and it certainly wasn't hugely popular at the time. But around mid-2018, it started creeping up the ranks, from 3% of all site traffic to 4%, then 5%, and now over 7%. Clearly, some time in the past year or so, more and more people have felt the need to know about this.

To me, this looked a lot like a sign that, no matter what the official jobs numbers say, there's definitely some weakness in the economy. And right around the same time, I read a New York Times editorial by Paul Krugman—who was, let us not forget, one of the only economists to see the subprime mortgage crisis coming before it hit—indicating that he thinks so too.

And so I dropped a line to my editor and suggested that the article I'd written last year on how to prepare for a recession, which they'd been sitting on for several months, probably should be published now—because if we waited much longer, it could be too late to do anyone any good.

So here it is: my take on how to weatherize your life to ride out the coming economic storm. It talks about how to:

1. Improve your employability, so you'll be less likely to lose your job and/or better equipped to find a new one
2. Develop extra income streams, which will help you get by if your income declines
3. Increase your emergency savings, so you can survive a period of unemployment if necessary
4. Reduce your expenses, so you won't have to tighten your belt in a hurry later on
5. Pay down debts, so you won't have to struggle to pay them later on
6. Increase your insurance coverage, so a disaster won't bankrupt you
7. Adjust your investments, not to make them "recession-proof" (which is neither possible nor desirable), but to make sure you're not risking more money than you can afford to lose

Read all about it here: 7 Things You Need to Do Now to Prepare for the Next Recession

Recipe of the Month: Rosemary Potato Soup

At some point in the past couple of weeks, I was leafing through a magazine whose name I can't remember and spotted a recipe for potato soup with rosemary. I remarked to Brian that this sounded good, but I didn't bookmark the recipe, and I'd forgotten all about it until Monday night, when he called me to the dinner table and I walked in to find the kitchen redolent with rosemary. Apparently, the idea had stuck in his mind, and rather than go hunt up the recipe, he'd simply made up one of his own.

Not having any idea what was in the original recipe, he just worked with what we had. Our leeks in the garden are ready for harvest, though smallish, so he used two of those. And we happened to have some leftover silken tofu in the fridge that needed using up, so he pureed that and used it to thicken the soup. He also tossed in some garlic, a carrot, a bay leaf, five potatoes, salt, and a generous portion of fresh rosemary harvested from our herb garden. And for stock, he used our favorite vegetable soup base from Penzeys Spices.

Considering what a simple assortment of ingredients this was, the result was amazingly hearty and flavorful. Thick, creamy, savory, fragrant with garlic and rosemary, and full of mouth-filling chunks of potato and carrot. And it's vegan, too.

Now, technically, it was still September when he prepared this dish. But it was so tasty, I just couldn't resist the urge to share it with you as my Recipe of the Month for October. The only change I've made to it is to cut the salt; the version he made Monday used 1 1/2 teaspoons, which we both agreed was a little too much. But if your soup stock has less salt in it than Penzeys, you might want to use the full amount.

ROSEMARY POTATO SOUP

Heat in pan:

• 1 Tbsp olive oil

Sauté in the pan for about 5 minutes:

• 2 small leeks, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
  

Transfer to stock pot along with:

• 6 c. veggie stock
• About 5 russet potatoes, cut into chunks
• 1 carrot, chopped
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 Tbsp. fresh rosemary, snipped into fragments

Cook 1/2 hour, then add:

• 4 oz. silken tofu, pureed
• 2 Tbsp. cornstarch dissolved in water
• 1 tsp. salt (or to taste)

Heat through and serve.

For us, this recipe was not only tasty and satisfying, but also remarkably cheap. Since the leeks and rosemary came out of our own garden, they were more or less free, and the other ingredients, by my calculations, cost about $2.90. The pot of soup provided five servings in total (two for dinner, three for lunch), so that works out to less than 60 cents per serving.

However, if you aren't lucky enough to have a garden, leeks and fresh rosemary could be a bit pricey to buy at the store. I think you could probably substitute a chopped onion for the leeks without really harming the flavor of the soup, though you might have to sauté it a bit longer before it softens. And technically, I guess, you could use dried rosemary instead of fresh, but I honestly think it wouldn't be the same. Much better to cadge some fresh rosemary off a friend who has a garden, or buy yourself a plant and find a sunny window to grow it in.

Vegan dessert experiments

One of the biggest challenges in our attempts to go dairy-free (or nearly free) is figuring out how to get the dairy out of dessert. Cookies aren't really a problem; not only has Brian invented at least one good vegan cookie recipe, we can make pretty much any cookie vegan by using plant-based butter and aquafaba (or another vegan substitute) in place of the butter and eggs. And we've already discovered that our favorite chocolate pudding is actually better with almond milk than with the skim milk we used to use. But there are still lots of desserts we love that are heavily dairy-dependent, with no obvious way of making them otherwise.

The most obvious example is raspberry fool. This simple dessert pretty much has nothing in it but raspberries, sugar, and cream—and in a spectacular case of bad timing, we discovered it only about a month before I first started thinking about getting off the moo juice. So even as I was giving up milk, I was assuming it would be pretty much impossible to give up cream without also giving up this fabulous dessert. I'd seen vegan whipped creams in the store, but they were all the kind that comes in a spray can, which would be impractical for a dessert that calls for the stuff in bulk. And all our attempts to make vegan whipped cream at home, using either chilled coconut milk, aquafaba, or a combination of the two, had been spectacular failures.

However, I still had hopes that I could at least find a decent vegan substitute for the canned whipped cream of which I've long been such a heavy consumer. And one day, while searching for "best vegan whipped cream," I hit upon a recommendation for a product called Coco Whip from So Delicious. This stuff comes in a plastic tub, like Cool Whip, but unlike that product, it truly is vegan (and doesn't have as many weird, unpronounceable ingredients). And after a little digging around on the So Delicious store locator, I was able to find that it's available at a nearby Shop-Rite.

The reviews of this stuff on the web mostly said that the product itself is great, but the packaging is a pain in the butt. Many reviewers said the tub was really hard to open, and some had actually cut themselves trying. So we were a little wary when we first tried it, but we found it wasn't all that bad. It requires a little force, but it wasn't actually hazardous. And to our delight, the Coco Whip blended almost as well with our mashed, sweetened raspberries as real whipped cream. It had the same light, fluffy texture, and if the flavor had a faint hint of coconut to it, there was nothing about it that was incompatible with the raspberries. The only thing we didn't like about the product is that it comes in a nonrecyclable plastic tub, but that's probably less damaging to the environment than cream from a methane-belching cow. (And to be fair, the cardboard cartons that we buy cream in aren't recyclable either, since they're lined with plastic.)

After the success of that vegan dessert experiment, I was emboldened to suggest another one this week. We happened to have some silken tofu left over after making another batch of our recently discovered vegan mozzarella, and I was musing about whether it would make a good substitute for evaporated milk in a pumpkin pie. Brian had heard about this kind of "tofumpkin" pie before (a friend of his made one during his post-doc years, which he dubbed the "resplendent tofumpkin" pie), so he knew it was theoretically possible, but he'd never actually tasted it. So we decided to give it a try this weekend, and if it worked, we might consider making this year's Thanksgiving pumpkin pie the same way.

Brian did some research on tofu pumpkin pie recipes and came up with one that was sort of a composite from several different websites. The filling was:

• 5 to 6 oz. silken tofu
• 8 oz. canned pumpkin
• 3/8 c. sugar
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. ground ginger
• 1/4 tsp. ground cloves
• 1/8 tsp. ground nutmeg

To make it a true vegan experiment, Brian also decided to make the crust with our favorite vegan butter, rather than the real butter he's been using in his pie crusts ever since he discovered what shortening does to your arteries. So the crust contained:

• 1/4 c. fake butter
• 3/4 c. flour
• a little less than 1/4 tsp. salt

He said he had to add much less water to this crust than he usually does, presumably because there's more moisture in the vegan butter than there is in real butter. He started out with 2 tablespoons of water, and even that turned out to be too much, so he had to add a little more flour. He eventually managed to get a workable dough, rolled it out, laid it in the pan, filled it with the custard, and baked for about 10 minutes at 450 and another half-hour at 350.

Sadly, this experiment was not nearly as successful as the first one. Part of the reason the pie looks a little odd here is that it's a half-sized pie baked in a slightly-larger-than-half-sized pan, since Brian forgot when he started the recipe that our smallest pie pan is currently in use as a cat dish. But the other reason is that tofu, even silken tofu, simply doesn't have the same texture as evaporated milk and beaten eggs. The pumpkin filling never firmed up to the point that you could put a knife in and have it come out clean; it remained soft and dense, with a custardy texture that isn't what you expect in a pie. And the crust, while acceptable, was crisp and hard, not light and flaky like a true butter crust.

So it looks like when Thanksgiving comes around, we'll have to take a break from our dairy-free eating and buy ourselves a can of evaporated milk and a pound of real cow-based butter for the pies. But since Thanksgiving comes but once a year, I'm not going to worry about it too much. It's probably more important to focus on trying to find a vegan whipped cream substitute for our everyday use. (Coco Whip is great in a fool, but keeping it on hand for other desserts isn't really practical, since it doesn't keep nearly as long as well as whipped cream in a pressurized can).

Two more Money Crashers articles

It never rains until it pours! Money Crashers has published two more of my backlogged articles in the past 24 hours. The first one is on financial literacy — or, where Americans are concerned, the lack thereof. It turns out that Americans get failing grades on many tests of basic financial knowledge. In one very basic test presented in the British newspaper The Guardian, only 64% of Americans could answer the five simple questions correctly. On a similar quiz administered by FINRA, the average respondent got only three questions out of six correct.

This lack of financial literacy shows in the average American's financial situation. Most Americans have outstanding debt, and significant numbers have high-interest consumer debt. Only about half of us have an emergency fund, and less than half are saving enough for retirement. In all these areas, our lack of financial literacy is holding us back.

For those who don't want to be part of these sorry statistics, this article offers a rundown of what financial literacy means, why it matters, and how to improve yours.

How to Increase Your Financial Literacy & IQ – Why It Matters

The second article is a companion to my earlier piece on the gender wage gap. That one talked about how much less women earn compared to men, and why. This one is about how much women spend compared to men — in many cases, for basically the same products.

This phenomenon, known as the "pink tax," has been in the news lately. CBS ran a story in June about how New York is considering a law to abolish the pink tax, and NPR's "The Indicator" podcast did an episode on it in August as part of a series on the gender gap. So my article on the topic arrives just in time to help you identify the products women pay more for than men — and, where possible, figure out how to pay less.

Pink Tax: 9 Things Women Pay More for Than Men (and How to Save)

Three more Money Crashers articles

Money Crashers is continuing to crank out all those articles of mine it's been sitting on for the past few months. Three more have come out in the past couple of days, all on very different topics.

The first piece deals with a subject you've seen me cover here many times before: repairing your old stuff so you don't have to buy new stuff. One of the main tenets of the ecofrugal lifestyle, which is pretty much meant to be exactly the opposite of the dystopia in Brave New World, is "mending is better than ending," so we try to keep our stuff working as long as possible. We've successfully repaired all kinds of small items, including books with detached covers, ripped jeans, and Roman shades, but we're most vigilant of all with big items that cost us big money to begin with. We're rigorous about maintaining our home, car, bike, computers, and appliances so that we can squeeze as many years of useful life out of them as possible.

In this Money Crashers article, I explore this topic in detail. I explain which items it's most important to maintain if you want to save money in the long run, and how to do it.

6 Things You Should Maintain & Take Care of to Save Money Long-Term

The second article is about a newer topic that's been making news recently: universal basic income, or UBI. This radical new government benefit would simply give a flat payment to every single American adult each month, with no strings attached. Tech billionaires say this will be necessary in the face of the widespread unemployment they say is certain to occur as machines replace humans; politicians  argue that it's better than our current system of government benefits because there are no bureaucratic hoops to jump through, and no social stigma attached to accepting a benefit that everyone else is getting to. But opponents point out that UBI would be enormously expensive and wasteful, giving benefits equally to beggars and billionaires.

In this piece, I delve into the history of UBI, previous experiments with it around the world, the arguments for and against it (and the extent to which they're supported by the data), and the chances it will ever become a reality in the United States. And I examine a couple of alternative forms of aid that could offer many of the benefits of UBI with fewer drawbacks.

What Is Universal Basic Income & Could It Work in the U.S.?

And finally, I'm back on familiar ground with the subject of flooring choices for your home. This article is about the pros and cons of the most popular flooring choices, so it doesn't cover the paper floor technique we used in the downstairs room, but it explores the relative merits of hardwood, engineered wood, bamboo, ceramic tile, laminate, vinyl, linoleum, cork, and carpet. For each one, I cover such considerations as how it looks, how it feels underfoot, ease of installation, durability, cost, and, where appropriate, environmental considerations. (This last item apparently really annoyed one reader, who called the information useless and said, "I would floor my house with skins from baby seals if it looked good and added value to my house." I'm assuming, perhaps optimistically, that the majority of readers will not share this viewpoint.)

9 Best Flooring Options for Your Home & How to Choose on a Budget