What you’ve all been waiting for, my financial graphs updated with 2012 data… Our income went down a little bit, but we expected that. It was the first year we had no unemployment. However, our spending went down even more than our income and our savings definitely went up. For the first time ever, we spent literally $0 on what I called credit cards. Instead, every month the cards were paid off completely and the chargesread more…
In You Are Not Alone, I wrote about the circumstances that led to me joining the Women In Red message boards in 2009. This was a community started based on a series of articles written by MP Dunleavey for MSN Money. While MP is no longer with MSN or the community, and the community isn’t hosted on MSN anymore, it is still going strong. Sunday will mark my 3 year anniversary of having been a memberread more…
Do you use GroupOn or Living Social? I know a lot of people don’t like getting their inbox cluttered up by mostly junk mail, but I’ve found the two services to be very helpful for buying things I’d buy anyway, and saving money. For the most part, I auto delete most emails from either service that show up in my inbox, but sometimes, I don’t. For example, the Renaissance Faire we go to usually offers aread more…
Today is Election Day in the United States, where I, and most of my readers, live. Because this will post around the time that most East Coast polls are closing, I have to imagine that if you are actually reading this today, you are looking for a break from election coverage, and that if you are reading this on Wednesday, you are happy to be done with election coverage. With that in mind, I thought itread more…
Ever since we bought this house, 6.5 years ago, C and I have wanted to replace our refrigerator. It is small and not fabulous. But every time we looked at replacing it, we would realize that we could only replace it with another refrigerator exactly like it because of the height issue. The over the fridge cabinets come down far enough that there is only one model of refrigerator that will fit in that space. Ifread more…
At the end of every quarter, I take a look at our actual spending as compared to what I budgeted at the end of last year. I don’t panic as long as there has been money to pay for everything and we aren’t raiding savings on a continual basis to pay for things, but, especially as the year winds down, I like to have an idea of what changes I need to make to the budgetread more…
Leaving a Long Term Relationship When we bought our first house, we got absolutely no reception at our new home on our AT&T cell phones. So, we switched to Sprint, which did have coverage in our house. We have been with Sprint ever since- so, 8 or 9 years with the same cell phone company, and the majority of that time on the exact same plan. In fact, we didn’t change our plan until we addedread more…
This post is part of a blog swap. It is written by Rich over at Money Wise Pastor. You should head over there and read the post I wrote on this topic and then stick around to check out the rest of his site. How do you save money without giving up your social life? That’s the topic of a blog swap I’m participating in today with other bloggers in the Yakezie.com challenge. I’m glad forread more…
Day Amount Place Category Monday $38.00 FinCon Allowance $2,233.00 Car Service Car $45.50 CostCo Groceries $4.75 Safeway Groceries Tuesday $100.00 Charity Misc Wednesday $25.00 FinCon Allowance Thursday $33.45 Outback Eating Out $6.50 Half Price Books Allowance Saturday $71.00 CostCo Groceries Well, if you ignore the ridiculous amount we spent on the 80k miles service on our car, spending this week wasn’t bad at all. And we do plan for the car costs. We knew what thisread more…
Lots of the younger bloggers I read are getting engaged, talking about marriage with their partners, etc. Since today is my 9th wedding anniversary, I want to give them the best marriage advice I know. It’s really the simplest thing in the world. Get married on a holiday weekend. I know this may seem anti-intuitive to many people- who wants to share their big day with something else? But the truth is, your day is alwaysread more…
