South Florida on the Cheap

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to exercise more and lose weight, you may be wondering how best to do that on the cheap. The diet industry is big business, and it’s easy to separate yourself from more money than pounds.

One advantage of living in South Florida is that we have the best [...]

The new year has arrived, and we’re ready to throw our bad habits out the window, exercise daily, lose 30 pounds, clean out our closets and organize our lives once and for all.

At least that’s what we want to do.

To improve your chance of actually accomplishing something, pick just one goal. It could be cleaning off your [...]

I recently read a story about a Hollywood woman who did her Christmas shopping for 20 people for a total cash outlay of $6.32. This gives us all something to which we can aspire.

One of the ways she did that was by using Amazon gift cards she had earned by doing surveys and other online [...]

Every time I go to the movies, it seems as if the price has gone up again. These days, I can get an entire month of Netflix for less than the price of one movie in the theater.

But real movie lovers know that there is nothing like seeing a film on the big screen and [...]

I rarely need medication, so I wasn’t prepared for the price the first time I had a prescription to fill after signing up for my $5,000-deductible health-insurance plan.

Co-payment for a tiny bottle of eye drops: $94. Ouch. And I mean the bill, not the eye drops.

United Way of Miami-Dade has partnered with a service called [...]

I’m surprised that so many of my friends and relatives are still doling out money on demand to their teenagers: $20 for pizza and a movie, $10 for a school field trip, $5 for lunch. If the kids don’t have a budget, how can they learn to live within one?

Maybe it’s time for a New [...]

Back when I was putting myself through college in the 1970s, and lunch was a major investment, nothing was so annoying as spending hundreds of dollars on textbooks that ended up never being used in the class.

After a few semesters, I figured out how to save some money: I quit buying textbooks, or at least [...]

The latest craze in the money-saving world is the group coupon — or Groupon, the name of the biggest group-buying site.

If you enroll at www.groupon.com, you get an e-mail with each day’s deal, usually 50 percent or more off the goods or services of a local business. When you sign up for a deal, you [...]

Ordinarily, I’m not an enthusiastic user of coupons. Lots of them are for packaged foods I don’t use, I’m feeding only myself, and I often can save by buying the store brand.

But, in the name of research, I decided to try clipping coupons. I followed some of the techniques recommended by serious couponers, such as [...]

We have learned to look for coupons when we do online shopping. But we often don’t think of looking for online coupons when we visit local attractions. We should. The weak economy means many of our local attractions are offering frequent discounts, deals and coupons, most on their websites.

Here are some current deals:

• Get a [...]