I love when readers shoot me emails with great tips. Some even write articles on topics that they’re passionate about. Like Henry, who lives in Woodbury and works for Northwest Airlines. “I enjoy cooking and finding creative and inexpensive ways to spice up everyday dishes.  And when that fails, I open a bottle of wine and it makes it all good.”
Here is his tip for saving money on preparing meals. I hope you’ll share your own tricks too.

Every day it seems like the stock market is heading in the wrong direction. I even stopped looking at my 401K because it only mockingly informs me that retirement is getting further and further away. And like most families, I too am cutting back on as many expenses as I can, and one way I found is to look within my kitchen cupboard to lower my food bill. 

The previous night I had made an entire ham. Although it was a great meal as well as an economical lunch the next day, I was not sure that I could take having ham one more time without repackaging it into something a little different. But what could I possibly do with it?

I decided to see what the Internet had to offer, so I Googled “leftover ham” and in .24 seconds I had 283,000 results at my finger tips. I scanned through the results taking into consideration what ingredients I had in my kitchen as well as what would be simple to make.

Since then I have used Google several times to piece together a meal with ingredients that I already had in my kitchen. Sometimes I have to venture to the store to pick up a few things. Sometimes the meals are good and sometimes they are not so good, but in either case it saves a little money and gets my culinary juices flowing. By simply searching for ingredients that I had in my cupboard, I have been able to prepare inexpensive dinner alternatives.

No more do I open the cupboard and stare into the abyss of cans, boxes, and jars wondering what I can make for a meal. Now I let Google help me plan mealtime.

Yale prof, author of “Irrational Exuberance,” and co-creator of the Case-Shiller Home Price Index Robert Shiller had an opinion piece in the New York Times that I just got around to reading. He thinks the government should spend $15 billion on subsidized financial advice for the masses.

Here’s an exerpt:

SUBSIDIZED financial advisers should be licensed by self-regulatory organizations that verify their qualifications. Licensing will be imperfect, and some incompetent advisers will end up with subsidies. Still, the net effect of getting professional advice to the public is surely positive.

To qualify for a subsidy, the advisers would have to sign a statement promising loyalty to their clients and agreeing to accept only the subsidized hourly fee, and never any commissions or kickbacks. The subsidies might come to $75 an hour, at a very rough estimate, and if 50 million Americans averaged four hours of consultations, the eventual cost might be $15 billion a year — a substantial expenditure, but a worthwhile one.

If personal financial advisers had been subsidized years ago with the best incentives, they still might not have stopped their clients’ bubble thinking during the boom. Many advisers probably thought that housing investments were a good bet. But it’s still likely that advisers who built long-term relationships with their clients, and who pledged to look after their welfare, would have been a helpful influence, suggesting caution to those who were getting over their heads in debt, and warning that adjustable-rate mortgages could be reset upward, just as the fine print said. For these reasons, financial advisers probably would have reduced the severity of the housing bubble.

Professional financial advice is now generally accessible only by the relatively wealthy. Changing this would be an important corrective step. Giving the general public access to trained advisers would be a boon for the nation in this time of doubt and distrust.

Given how much we’re spending on other things these days, what’s $15 billion to educate the public on money matters?  Think it would be $15 billion well spent?

My Sunday column was about filtering out the financial noise and focusing on the pocketbook issues you can control at home — spending and saving, being adequately insured, being frugal and instilling that value into your children.

And on today’s Dollar Duo video (head to startribune.com and scroll through the videos…working on getting the darn thing embedded into my blog in future weeks), John and I took that concept one step further by outlining ways to track spending so that you can begin to make changes at home if need be.

John had a nifty budget device that looked like a checkbook register. I told viewers about Mint.com, which aggregates my credit and debt card information into one place and notifying me when I’m going over my budget in problem areas.

We also agreed to have a track your spending challenge, where John and I track every penny we spend for a week. We’ll compare notes in a future Dollar Duo segment.

Does anyone want to join us? I’m thinking we start next week on Monday, Oct. 6th.

Anyone have favorite budgeting tools or track your spending success tips to share?

My family is doing just fine financially compared to many others and I’m grateful for what we have.

But I can’t help but think lately with our rising expenses, my pay freeze and my husband’s slow-growing wages that this might be as good as it gets for us.

We’ve discussed our dreams, (moving to a different neighborhood and taking the whole family to Mexico) and our needs (a new car or two in the next few years, unless we decide to go down to one car and then we’ll need to replace a single vehicle). And if incomes or expenses don’t change, it could be tough to make it all happen.

So lately we’ve been talking about how to figure out if we’re sacrificing too much today to save 15 percent of our income for tomorrow.

Anyone else have those thoughts? If so, what did you do?

Does “free” have a cost? Credit Bureau TransUnion is trying to get college students to think about that riddle as they head back to college campuses. Many schools have banned tables offering freebies in return for filling out a credit card application. But some students will still be greeted by seemingly harmless goodies in return for getting a credit card.

Problem is, if you charge up that card and don’t pay the balance in full, that free t-shirt ends up costing a pretty penny, especially considering most cards geared towards college kids have higher finance charges. Who reads the fine print standing outside of the student union?

As part of the campaign, TransUnion sent me a gray t-shirt emblazoned with a piggy bank that says “Free credit card t-shirts can be scary…if you don’t do your homework.”

So here’s the deal. Share what you think is your best college money tip– whether it’s about student loans, saving money, dealing with credit, you name it.

I’ll pick my favorite on Wednesday and will send the winner the T. And Ka-Blog readers will thank you.