Have you read the other two parts of this series? In the first article we looked at a few weekend activities that cost little or no money. In the second article, we looked at ways to make more costly activities more affordable.

In this article, we’re going to look at 15 ways to have fun without leaving the house. Who said that you have to get in the car and go somewhere in order to have a fun weekend? All of the below 15 activities can easily take place at home or get some friends and family together and make it even better.

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Who pays the bills in your house? Our house isn’t much different from most households around the country. I’m the financial person in the family so I handle all financial matters in our home including paying bills, watching all of our accounts, managing our investments, and corresponding with people regarding financial matters. My wife barely knows what comes in and goes out.

The Suze Ormans, Dave Ramseys, and Clark Howards would probably say that each person in a marriage should take an equal part in financial affairs of the household but over the years I’ve talked to a lot of people and I haven’t found many of my friends that operate differently than my house. Maybe you and the people you know are different but managing the complicated maze of household money isn’t easy and two people can make it more confusing.

That isn’t to say that my wife doesn’t have total access when she wants to look at the accounts but a few years ago I started thinking about the fact that none of us are guaranteed a tomorrow and what if something happened to me? Would she know where to start when she was thrown in to being the financial manager of the house? Because of that, I put the information together for her. Here’s what I gave her.

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In William Baldwin’s column in an old issue of Forbes, he writes a “fictitious” investment advice letter to his widow, he suggests two important rules for her. The first rule is to use fee only advisors, it’ll cost more up front but be cheaper in the long term and yield more independent advice. The second is a rule I thought was important, he called it the “Yahoo principle.” The Yahoo principle is simple “Buy things that trade in large volumes at prices you can see.”

The idea is that when you buy a stock or bond or ETF or mutual fund, you’re buying something that is liquid and whose price is well known. If you need to sell it, you can sell it without great difficulty. High volume stocks are easy to sell because there are plenty of buyers in the marketplace at any one time (low volume stocks are trickier). Plus, you can buy and sell stocks for just a few dollars.

With mutual funds, you may not trade as often (once a day) but you are guaranteed to be able to at the end of the day. You don’t have to worry about taking a haircut because you happen to find the very last buyer in the world at that very moment. Finally, you can buy and sell shares of a mutual fund for free (Vanguard funds in a Vanguard account, Fidelity funds in a Fidelity account). I have a Vanguard account because I know I can buy and sell shares of Vanguard funds for zero commission.

More to the point, the Yahoo principle warns against tricky financial products. Baldwin points to products with names like Guaranteed Lifetime Enhanced Income Portfolio IV, where there is no ticket, no way to buy and sell it unless it’s to the person who issues it, and “it would take a finance Ph.D. two weeks to find all the buried costs.” Obfuscation is the friend of the person selling that investment, not the one buying it.

I’m a fan of this rule, you?

If you’re a baby boomer or work for a government agency, you may still know about pensions. As a public school teacher I paid in to the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio and if I would have taught for 30 years, I was guaranteed a certain percentage of my highest paying year.

Not much is guaranteed anymore and that’s why pensions are largely a thing of the past but there’s a product on the market that can give a person pension-like benefits as they head in to retirement. It’s called an annuity. Annuities are insurance products that guarantee you a certain amount of income once you retire. Here’s what you should know.

Quick Facts about Annuities

• Most annuities are sold and marketed by insurance companies.
• They are designed to guarantee a certain income once you retire.
• The money you pay in to the annuity is invested which is what allows for the guaranteed payout.
• They may come with a lot of fees.
• There are a lot of different kinds of annuities.
• Investment income generated by the annuity is tax free until you begin drawing on the annuity.

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Have you ever looked underneath your kitchen sink, or whoever you put your cleaning products, and marvel at all the bottles and containers you have there? I recently took a peek and went on a cleaning kick, trying to use as much of the stuff up as possible, and was amazed at how chemically some things smelled. My lovely wife is allergic to some artificial lemon scents so much of our stuff is absent any scent, which leaves our noses unprotected against the chemical smells.

And almost just as annoying was how many products we had. How is a glass cleaner different than a counter top spray? Do I really need all these products? I started to look online to see if there was a better way to do this and found a variety of recipes for all purpose cleaning products you can use in multiple scenarios. It was amazing how many products you can replace with the ingredients you probably already have in your pantry.

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This image was shared on Reddit this past week and it shows how many brands are owned by a small number of holding companies. If you were like me, you probably intuitively understood that many brands are owned by other companies but the extent that it happens is pretty stark. This covers only consumer goods and doesn’t even include several other large companies, like UK giant Reckitt Benkiser Group – they own French’s, Clearsil, Lysol, Trojan and many other huge names.

What’s fun is how the brands are organized, you can sort of go around in a circle and match up similar items. You start with all the P&G cleaning products, go counter clockwise towards Johnson and Johnson and Unilever for personal hygiene products. Move upwards towards food and candies with Mars, Kellogg’s and General Mills. Continue onward into beverages in Pepsi and Coca-Cola, and then Kraft and Nestle owned solid foods. Nestle helps us bridge the gap by also owning some makeup and personal hygiene products. Fun huh?

Onto this week’s gems:
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Thirty-one hours on a westbound train with three kids, ages thirteen to four, might never have originally entered my mind as a recipe for the perfect family vacation until I did it (and survived!)

My husband and I were on a mission to find a way to take the family to Arizona to see Grandma over spring break. I’m the daughter of a commercial airline pilot, so I’ve never really considered other means of travel, but the price of airfare was too expensive and we have been working hard to pay down debt promised ourselves that we’d find a way to get out there that fit our budget.

We crunched the numbers comparing air travel, train travel, taking our own car, and renting a car. Air travel to Arizona during spring break for us was ridiculously expensive. Accounting for hotels, wear and tear on the car, and gas, or miles and car rental fees driving would have been our next best option, but hands down, taking the Amtrak train was our best-bet budget wise, coming in at $907 round-trip for our family of five.

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I hate waiting in line. Ask my lovely wife what happens when we’re at the grocery store, I start wandering around. I hate waiting in line because you’re not actually doing anything. You’re just waiting. With so much out there to do, waiting for something to happen just seems like such a waste of time. The only time I like waiting in line is if I’m tired and don’t want to do anything… then waiting in line becomes an excuse to not have to do something.

So I wasn’t surprised to discover you could pay someone to wait in line for you. This happens a lot in Washington DC when you need to get into a hearing, such as a Congressional hearing or judicial hearing, but can’t actually stand in line yourself. While I’m sure many places just get an employee to go stand in line for them, you can actually hire someone from one of the many courier services around the city. Here’s a line standing service offered by Washington Express and it’s actually an ingenious service to offer since many of the folks who would use a service like this are probably willing to pay a lot for it. More importantly, since they do this often, chances are they know the optimal time to start waiting in line so you don’t get screwed out of a seat. The last thing you want to do is wait in line for an hour and find out you were the first one excluded from a hearing.

How much does it cost? The page said $40 per hour, $50 if it’s the Supreme Court. Another service, linestanding.com, charges $36 per hour with a 2 hour minimum. Not a bad gig if you can get it!

I don’t know how much the line waiters get paid, I’d guess around $15-$20, but it’s not demanding work, as long as you can stand all the waiting.

(Photo: saitor)