Straw Bale Gardening

This post comes from a blog written by a good friend of mine.  I am going to try this next year.

What is straw bale gardening?  You use straw bales as the soil for your garden plants.  They don't have weeds and you eliminate a lot of bending.

Continue reading: straw-bale-gardening

Save on Prescription Drugs

The cost of prescription drugs can be an enormous drain on the budget. Enjoy this great article which gives some excellent suggestions on how to treat the high cost of prescription drugs.

http://www.walletpop.com/2011/02/15/savings-experiment-treating-the-high-cost-of-prescription-drugs/?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-n%7Cdl9%7Csec1_lnk3%7C201866

5 Home Cooked Meals Cheaper Than McDonald's

I recently had the chance to hear one of my idols, Mark Bittman, speak at a conference that I was attending. I’ve always been a big fan, and I love his recipes. I find them to be completely doable, and they have minimal ingredients – both wins in my book. I am also fond of some of the articles I’ve read in his column for The New York Times. So when I heard that he was one of the speakers, I was giddy, to say the least.

Though I loved his whole talk, a few points stuck with me. One of them was the fact that he had researched it and found that it is actually cheaper for families to cook at home than it is for them to buy dinner at McDonald’s. I missed his article on this one, but hearing him mention it certainly got me thinking. Like many others, I have always been under the assumption that fast food is cheaper than home cooked meals. I’ve figured that was part of the excuse for why so many people buy fast food. Seems logical, right? I decided to put his theory to the test, and I have findings below to support his theory.

Though I’m fortunate to live in an area with a slew of grocery stores around – everything from Bi-Lo to Fresh Market to Food Lion to Whole Foods – I realize that these are not as accessible to everyone. And I wanted to be sensitive to budgets of all levels, so I headed to the one store that most people have access to – Walmart.

Read more home-cooked-meals-cheaper-than-mcdonalds

18 Bizarre (and Legit) Ways to Earn Money in 2016

If you hate making extra money, then I suggest you stop reading right now. However, if you, like most normal people, are up for making a little extra cash in 2016, then read on, my friend! We’ve rounded up 18 of our favorite ways to bring in some dough throughout the year. You can try one or two to make a little money, or try them all to add more wiggle room to your budget.

Read more 18-bizarre-and-legit-ways-to-earn-money-in-2016/

19 Unbeatable Deals You Can Only Find at Costco

Every time I get my Costco membership renewal notice in the mail, it’s these 19 items that keep me writing that $55/year check.  Read more  19-unbeatable-deals-you-can-only-find-at-costco

5 Tricks To Reduce Food Waste (And Save Money!)

When I open the refrigerator at the end of the week, my mood can turn sweet or sour. Either I get a feeling of immense pleasure and satisfaction when I see that I have used up almost all of the food I bought the previous weekend, or I feel disappointed with myself when I toss a head of broccoli that has turned brown into the compost bin or throw out salsa that grew mold before we finished it.

Read more reduce-food-waste-save-money

Cut Your Spending by $400 a Month

Did you know if you cut your spending by $13 a day, you’ll save $400 a month and $4800 a year! Pay attention to the little expenses because they really do add up.

Check out   http://www.thebudgetdiet.com/cut-your-spending-by-400-a-month   for 72 ways to cut your spending.


The tips come from The Budget Diet at   http://www.thebudgetdiet.com/what-is-the-budget-diet

15 Ways to Do Date Night on a Dime

Fun doesn’t have to equal lots of dollars. Check out these Nesties' date-night ideas! 
1. Go to the movies for cheap. There are ways to do movie dates on a budget: "Find second-run theaters. 

They cost about $2 per person per show. Or go to a matinee of a current movie." --SUE_SUE
2. Make it a lunch date. "Order from the lunch menu -- it's cheaper than dinner and the portions aren't that much smaller." --MATTESMAGIC
3. Go to a cooking class. "Go to Williams-Sonoma and attend one of their cooking demos." You'll have some new recipes to try instead of going to a restaurant, so you'll save even more money. --DARINGMISS
4. Rethink tool time. Cooking stores aren't the only places with free how-tos: "Hardware stores like Lowe's and The Home Depot have DIY seminars. You can both learn to fix things, and it's fun and free!" --QPIX
5. Make a reservation -- for dessert. "We go to our favorite ice-cream shop and get sundaes, then drive around town and get in some quiet time." --OSUWIFEY09
6. Have a Wii night. You've already invested in a Wii, now use it for date night. "We have date-night Wii tourneys and make some interesting bets to spice things up. Anything goes, from doing dishes to sexual favors!" --ENICLAIRD
7. Hit the links. "A really fun date is going to the golf course and playing just nine holes. I did that recently with my husband. Even if you guys aren't good, it's still fun." -- BRIGHTEYES888
8. Volunteer together. For a feel-great date: "Volunteer together somewhere. One of my favorites was volunteering for a local farm to harvest veggies that are then sold at ridiculously low prices to people in need. We had a blast and felt great about helping. Cost: gas money." --SPINCAT9
9. Step up to the plate. "My husband and I take a bat and a ball to a local school and play around." Get into it with knee-high socks, baseball hats or even your favorite team's jersey. --BRIDE2BNVA
10. Get crafty with your home improvements. Decorate and date! "My husband and I do silly, crafty things. For example: We'll go to A.C. Moore or Michaels craft store and buy things that we can make to decorate the outside of our house!" --KLASALA318
11. Go on a field trip. Soak up culture free of charge: "Our neighborhood library has free passes to local museums. You can check out the passes like a library book." --DARINGMISS
12. Read all about it. "If you look in any local paper, you can usually find an entertainment section full of cheap activities in the next few days." Stick to your own neighborhood so you won't have to use extra gas or waste travel time. --DERNIERMOT
13. Pack a picnic in the park. Pack a picnic basket: blanket, bottle of wine, cheese, fruit, etc. -- but be warned: "We did this once to be cheap, and ended up spending about $70. So, make sure it's an inexpensive bottle of wine and cheap cheese." --ANHG80
14. Take a staycation. You don't even have to leave the city limits: "We live in San Francisco, so we visit the Japanese Tea Garden and pack a lunch. You'll get to experience a little bit of another country right inside Golden Gate Park." --BRITTNEY
15. Have a theme night. "Schedule a theme dinner and movie night at home." Create a menu based on the movie you're watching (i.e., spaghetti for a Francis Ford Coppola flick) and make it together before watching. --MELLY_BELLIE


From the nest       http://ideas.thenest.com/love-and-sex-advice/anniversaries-dating-ideas/articles/date-night-on-a-dime.aspx

12 Tips On How To Spend In A Recession

During an economic recession we might feel unsure of what is best to spend our money on. It seems that what has applied in the past has somehow changed. At a time when we need to know with greatest clarity how to manage our money, we feel uncertain.

Read more at http://www.providentliving.org.nz/how-to-spend-in-a-recession/

This article comes from a Ward Welfare Newsletter from New Zealand.

Labels: Budget, Family Finance, Finance, Ways to Save Money

Spend More Money on What You Actually Want

Americans aren’t spending money on what we want, according to a recent Gallup poll.

Instead, we’re paying more and more for things like groceries, utilities and healthcare and less on fun stuff like travel and eating out. Bummer.

While you can’t control the fluctuating costs of health insurance or natural gas, you can figure out some smart alternatives for expensive budget items. Free up more money in these four areas of your life:

Continue reading http://name.everydollar.com/blog/spend-more-money-on-what-you-actually-want

Goals For Setting Priorities

Top 10 things to know when budgeting your money and setting financial priorities.

1. Narrow your objectives.
You probably won't be able to achieve every financial goal you've ever dreamed of. So identify your goals clearly and why they matter to you, and decide which are most important. By concentrating your efforts, you have a better chance of achieving what matters most.
2. Focus first on the goals that matter.
To accomplish primary goals, you will often need to put desirable but less important ones on the back burner.
3. Be prepared for conflicts.
Even worthy goals often conflict with one another. When faced with such a conflict, you should ask yourself questions like: Will one of the conflicting goals benefit more people than the other? Which goal will cause the greater harm if it is deferred?
4. Put time on your side.
The most important ally you have in reaching your goals is time. Money stashed in interest-earning savings accounts or invested in stocks and bonds grows and compounds. The more time you have, the more chance you have of success. Your age is a big factor - younger people (who have more time to build their nest egg) can invest differently than older ones. Generally, younger people can take greater risks than older people, given their longer investment horizon.
5. Choose carefully.

In drawing up your list of goals, you should look for things that will help you feel financially secure, happy or fulfilled. Some of the items that wind up on such lists include building an emergency fund, getting out of debt and paying kids' tuitions. Once you have your list together, you need to rank the items in order of importance (if you have trouble doing so, use the CNNMoney.com Prioritizer for help).

6. Include family members.
If you have a spouse or significant other, make sure that person is part of the goal-setting process. Children, too, should have some say in goals that affect them.
7. Start now.
The longer you wait to identify and begin working toward your goals, the more difficulty you'll have reaching them. And the longer you wait, the longer you postpone the advantage of compounding your money.
8. Sweat the big stuff.
Once you have prioritized your list of goals, keep your spending on course. Whenever you make a large payment for anything, ask yourself: "Is this taking me nearer to my primary goals - or leading me further away from them?" If a big expense doesn't get you closer to your goals, try to defer or reduce it. If taking a grand cruise steals money from your kids' college fund, maybe you should settle for a weekend getaway.
9. Don't sweat the small stuff.
Although this lesson encourages you to focus on big-ticket, long-range plans, most of life is lived in the here-and-now and most of what you spend will continue to be for daily expenses - including many that are simply for fun. That's OK - so long as your long-range needs are taken into consideration.
10. Be prepared for change.
Your needs and desires will change as you age, so you should probably reexamine your priorities at least every five years.

These tips come from Money magazine.

Help With Dinner

This web site allows you to enter what you have on hand and will give you some ideas for meals to fix.  http://www.myfridgefood.com/index.php

10 Steps to Making a Financial Budget

Learn how to budget by following these 10 steps on how to bring your spending under control.

1. Budgets are a necessary evil.
They're the only practical way to get a grip on your spending - and to make sure your money is being used the way you want it to be used.
2. Creating a budget generally requires three steps.
- Identify how you're spending money now.
- Evaluate your current spending and set goals that take into account your long-term financial objectives.
- Track your spending to make sure it stays within those guidelines.
3. Use software to save grief.
If you use a personal-finance program such as Quicken or Microsoft Money, the built-in budget-making tools can create your budget for you.
4. Don't drive yourself nuts.
One drawback of monitoring your spending by computer is that it encourages overzealous attention to detail. Once you determine which categories of spending can and should be cut (or expanded), concentrate on those categories and worry less about other aspects of your spending.
5. Watch out for cash leakage.
If withdrawals from the ATM machine evaporate from your pocket without apparent explanation, it's time to keep better records. In general, if you find yourself returning to the ATM more than once a week or so, you need to examine where that cash is going.
6. Spending beyond your limits is dangerous.
But if you do, you've got plenty of company. Government figures show that many households with total income of $50,000 or less are spending more than they bring in. This doesn't make you an automatic candidate for bankruptcy - but it's definitely a sign you need to make some serious spending cuts.
7. Beware of luxuries dressed up as necessities.
If your income doesn't cover your costs, then some of your spending is probably for luxuries - even if you've been considering them to be filling a real need.
8. Tithe yourself.
Aim to spend no more than 90% of your income. That way, you'll have the other 10% left to save for your big-picture items.
9. Don't count on windfalls.
When projecting the amount of money you can live on, don't include dollars that you can't be sure you'll receive, such as year-end bonuses, tax refunds or investment gains.
10. Beware of spending creep.
As your annual income climbs from raises, promotions and smart investing, don't start spending for luxuries until you're sure that you're staying ahead of inflation. It's better to use those income increases as an excuse to save more.

Another lesson from Money Magazine

The Envelope System Explained

The envelope system is certainly nothing new—it has been around for decades.

And yet many people still don’t know exactly how it works. Do you need to save up money to get started? Does every bill get paid with the envelope system? Can you work an envelope system online? And on and on.

How It Works

You don’t have to save up any money to start using the envelope system. It goes like this: Let’s say you have budgeted $500 a month for groceries.  Continue reading at www.daveramsey.com/blog/envelope-system-explained

365 Day Penny Challenge

Tracking Spending and Expenses

To build a realistic financial budget, start by figuring out where your money goes now.  There are three steps to creating a budget:
1) Identify how your money is currently being spent.
2) Evaluate that spending to see if it meets the financial priorities you specified in Lesson 1.
3) Track your ongoing spending to make sure it stays within those guidelines (or to understand how your budget needs to be revised).
If you happen to use Quicken, Microsoft Money or other such software, you're in luck. These programs generally make it easy to draw up a budget.
In Quicken, for example, every time you make a deposit, write a check, pay a credit card bill or dispatch an electronic payment you are asked to assign it to a particular category, such as "salary," "clothing," "groceries," "child care" or "health insurance."
You can also create subcategories, dividing "auto" expenses into "fuel," "insurance" and "service." The program comes with a set of categories that handle most of the basics. You can edit the list to create categories that make better sense for your particular household.
The drawback, of course, is that entering and categorizing all of your income and outflow is a tedious chore.
You can reduce the tedium by judiciously selecting categories. Let's say you are only worried about tracking your spending for recreation and leisure pursuits. You could create categories that cover those types of expenses, and let everything else accumulate under "miscellaneous revenue" or "miscellaneous expense."
The problem with that approach is that you forgo the opportunity to spot problems in other spending areas that you may not even be aware of.
A better solution is to track expenses using electronic banking. That way, you can download your payments and deposits directly from the bank, rather than having to enter them by hand.
The downloaded banking transactions generally show up without any categorization - meaning you'll have to add the categories by hand. But if you use a credit card that is issued by a bank that permits electronic access, then the downloaded charges from your card sometimes do come with categories attached (they aren't always right, so check them).
Either way, once you've got your spending tracked by category, drawing up a report requires only a few clicks of the mouse. Even better, such programs often have an automatic budget-creation feature that scans your spending in the past in order to estimate how much you'll spend going forward.
If your finances aren't wired, you can still get a good handle on your spending the old-fashioned way. Start by getting all your records together from the past 12 months, including pay stubs, loan proceeds, withdrawal slips, canceled checks and itemized credit-card statements. Then go through them and compile totals for your income and expenses in a set of categories that makes sense for you.
At the end of this exercise, you may still have a sizable lump of spending that's undocumented - typically, the money you withdraw in cash and then spend on day-to-day needs. If this portion of your budget seems to be getting out of hand, keep a journal for the next four weeks in which you record every nickel you spend. You can use those results to extrapolate how your cash is being spent throughout the year.
Now that you've got a good picture of where your money is going, you can proceed to evaluate which parts of that spending should be raised or lowered. 

Another installment form Money Magazine.

The $5 Savings Plan

A new tip that I had read on several blogs, of removing and saving $5 bills whenever one lands in my wallet. You may not accumulate a large amount, but a small amount may grow into a significant amount with persistence.  You may even find yourself paying closer attention to the money in your wallet.

4 Things I Do to Keep Our Grocery Budget at $200/mo. for a Family of Four

This idea comes from Lydia Beiler blog http://www.parents.com/blogs/thrifty-frugal-mom/2012/05/03/must-read/4-things-i-do-to-keep-our-grocery-budget-at-200mo-for-a-family-of-four/

 This $200 also includes all toiletries, cosmetics, cleaning supplies, diapers/wipes, paper supplies and any sort of item like that.

1. Choose to do Without
While choosing to do without is not really popular or even always a fun, it honestly is probably one of the biggest ways we save.
Some of the ways we do without are:

• Vince takes sandwiches in his lunch almost every day to work. But he has insisted that he doesn’t need both meat and cheese so most days he just has a meat and lettuce sandwich. At first I felt bad but he really doesn’t mind and the savings of not buying all that cheese does make a difference.
• Speaking of cheese, we hardly ever eat cheese just by itself. I use it in cooking but we rarely have it just to eat as a side or snack. Do we not like cheese? No, actually we all love cheese! But it is something we’ve decided to consider a luxury around here to help keep our spending low.
• Orange juice is a splurge item that I get only when I can buy it for $0.99 or less. Again, we all love orange juice but it’s not something we need to have and we can easily eat fruit and get our recommended serving that way much cheaper.
• We don’t buy lots of snack foods. Talk about a fast way to jack your grocery spending up- this is one of them! We actually don’t eat many snacks and if we do they tend to be more things like raisins, nuts, fruit or homemade cookies and granola bars. I still buy chips and crackers sometimes if I can get them for a great price but they are not things that we always have on hand.
• We do several different things to save money on meat. But one of the big ways that we save is simply by not buying expensive cuts. In fact I have a maximum buy price of $2.00/lb. for meats (and actually for cheese too) which means that we don’t often eat things like bacon or steaks. But so far we haven’t suffered and I think we still have a great variety!

One of the side benefits to choosing to do without some things is that you learn to appreciate what you do have even more. For instance, because our sandwiches typically consist only of meat and lettuce suddenly a sandwich with meat AND cheese becomes a real treat and we enjoy it immensely. Somehow I think doing without helps us appreciate some of the little things in life more fully.
2. Don’t be Brand Snobs
When I began using coupons I started realizing that I could save a lot if I chose to be open minded about trying brands than I didn’t typically use. You don’t have to be very smart to figure out that if your usual brand of spaghetti sauce typically costs $0.99 on sale but you can get another brand for just $0.50 using a coupon that you are going to save a bundle! I’ll be honest, there are still a couple of products that I am a brand snob about but overall I purchase whatever I can get for the least amount of money.
3. Cook from Scratch
I grew up in a home where my mom cooked mostly from scratch so I was used to this. And fortunately I enjoy cooking and baking. But it was still convenient to buy pre-packaged things to save time. It didn’t take me long to realize that it also was often a quick way to blow money.
Yes, cooking from scratch might take a bit more time but with a bit of planning ahead I’ve learned that it can be relatively fast too. One of the things I do that helps save time is to cook up large quantities of ground beef and chicken and then put it in the freezer in smaller portions. That way whenever I need a pound of ground beef or 2 cups of chicken for a recipe, I’m saved the time of having to cook it up. I also often make double recipes of a dish and then freeze half of it. Making twice as much of something doesn’t take much longer at all and when I have an usually busy day it’s so handy to be able to just pull dinner out of my freezer. I also apply this same principle to baked things like bread, rolls, cookies and biscuits.
4. Have a Price List
This might seem a bit silly but it does really help. By keeping track of which stores have the lowest prices on certain items I have been able to save a lot. And it also helps me know when something is a good stock up price too. It’s something that takes a minimal amount of time and effort but does pay off.

Budget Notebook

Another way to budget from Sarah at memories on clover lane

A couple weeks ago I shared my really simple notebook daily planner. I use a similar system for my budget. I have tried different fancy-pantsy budgeting tools...on-line thing-a-ma-jiggers that give you all sorts of serious bar graphs and pies and tabulations and what-have-you. I hated them, and they did nothing for me, and I thought they were so much more work than I thought my notebook system is. I explained in the daily planner post how I need to put pen to paper to have my brain work correctly...a computer screen just doesn't do it for me.  Continue reading at www.memoriesoncloverlane.com