H. Douglas Chaffin, president and chief executive officer of Monroe Bank & Trust in Monroe, Mich., wrote a guest column for Saturday’s edition of The Monroe Evening News that was headlined “What happened to personal responsibility?”
Doug said in his piece that bankers are seeing an alarming trend “with a small number of borrowers” who can [...]

My “day job” is that of a reporter at The Monroe Evening News, which is an employee-owned, independent, daily newspaper in Monroe, Mich.
So feel free to consider this tip as coming from a biased source.
But it’s also fact.
If you get only the Sunday edition of your local or regional newspaper, and newspaper circulation numbers across [...]

I don’t post a whole lot about my food and dinner preparations, because I find them quite ordinary.
I really am a decent cook and nobody would starve at my house. I am very good friends with my slow cooker, table top griddle, breadmaker, cookie sheets, cake pans and electric skillet.
But there are many people who [...]

I’m not going to name the store where this situation happened, because, frankly, the story could be told about other stores. But it happened to me today.
I was on a mission to buy a new pair of shoes. And instead, I was getting a credit card pitch.
The shoes I bought a couple of months ago [...]

My “day job” is that of a newspaper reporter, but I have absolutely no pull with the Michigan state legislature.
It’s been years since I covered government issues, and my experience with that at The Monroe Evening News was limited to the communities of Bedford Township, Whiteford Township, Luna Pier and Erie Township.
Only one state lawmaker [...]

One of the reasons I started this blog is that I was tired of reading personal finance and frugal living writers who write for a national audience say do this or do that and — their tips were not going to work for those of us who live in Monroe, Mich.
That is why, when I [...]

Do I really want to click through 63 slides to see CNN Money’s entire presentation on Cut your spending by $500 a month?
Answer: no.
I mean, really. That’s just multimedia for multimedia’s sake.

Last night, I got involved in a back-to-school chat on Twitter, where I met some interesting people and got a glimpse of the mix of panic, pride and preparations that families are dealing with in the final days of summer.
Even though most Michigan K-12 students do not start school until after Labor Day, there are [...]

I needed some sinus medicine this morning and decided to make a stop after church at CVS Pharmacy in Monroe, Mich. Although there are several stores I could have made that shopping trip at, I chose CVS in part to look for the free after rebate items that are in today’s sales flier.
Instead, I found [...]

My husband and I are very “old school” on certain things, and one of them is the “one good suit” rule.
It doesn’t matter what you do for a living or how old you are. There are simply certain occasions when certain attire is expected, and one should be prepared for that. Therefore, the “one good [...]