As a reasonably environmentally conscious person, I have always hated having to waste gas and water while simultaneously emitting fossil fuels all for the sake of having a reasonably well-kept lawn. Summertime in Florida means mowing at least three times a week if not more during rainy periods. Aside from being wasteful and a pain in the neck, this process is also expensive, given the rising cost of gas and oil needed to keep your mower running.

However, I recently came across an ad for the "No Mow Lawn," which is basically a breed of grass that doesn't grow past a certain height. More Here...

Lifestyle inflation is one of those tricky financial hazards that sneak up on you and become a problem before you even realize it exists. Lifestyle inflation is when your spending increases along with your income and the Personal Finance Ninja has a great post about it. In the post, lifestyle inflation vs. quality of life is explored, and there's a graphic to help with the explanation.

The gist of lifestyle inflation is that as you make more money, you can afford nicer things. So you buy those things you once had to resist. Where you might have once been happy with the bare bones necessities, now you find yourself buying the shinier, flashier things.

It's this inflation that puts people with huge salaries in equally huge debt. While they can afford to buy a mid-range car flat out, they might take out a loan so they can have that luxury car. Or they'll take on an expensive mortgage to afford that mini-mansion instead of being content with outright owning a more modest home. So instead of being as financially stable as you would expect, these people may still live paycheck-to-paycheck. The paychecks may be larger, but there's still little in the way of savings or a financial cushion.

Orlando@xanga submitted a very interesting post the other day about how corporate the Academy Awards have become. He refuses to watch the Oscars anymore because it has become driven by financing and hype. He's especially angry because he feels the system is biased towards the expensive movies and against the little guy because the increased number of nominees in categories just stacks the decks.  In fact, his anger is directed at the entire movie-making industry. As a result, he finds ways to avoid supporting current incarnation of Hollywood by watching downloaded movies, buying used DVDs, watching classic movies and checking out movies from the library.

This is interesting because while the budgets for the big budget movies are absolutely exploding, there also seems to be a surge of support in the opposite direction- in favor of indie movies. With the expenses involved in producing big budget movies, a lot of fim makers are turning to smaller indies. More indies are being carried at mainstream movie theaters and these movies are much less obscure than they once were. Actors build their careers from indies or go to them to gain acting "street cred' so to speak.   More Here...

Google announced last week that its top three executives will once again make a base salary of $1 this year, no bonus, no options.  Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and Co-Presidents Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been on $1-a-year salaries since 2005. 

Page, Brin and Schmidt are not the only big-wig execs to do this.  $1-a-year salaries are all the rage these days, with Apple's Steve Jobs, Yahoo's Terry Semel and Kinder Morgan's Richard Kinder all on dollar duty. 

This doesn't mean that these dudes aren't getting paid.  Most CEOs and Presidents are owners or chief shareholders of their companies.  They make money (lots and lots of it) by selling stock and owning shares.  Because of this, people think that $1-a-year salaries aren't noble; they're just fancy PR.  I think that we should still give these billionaires some credit.  They don't have to make $1-a-year.  They're choosing to.  They could easily take 6-figures and run. 

Discount retailers like TJ Maxx and Marshall's are often recommended as places to score good deals. But some people have concerns about how fashionable the clothes might be or the organization of the store.

Saxomaphone asks about this over on our Advice page. She asks:

A couple of friends have suggested I check out TJ Maxx for good deals on clothes. Are the clothes there worth checking out, or are they mostly out of season?