Adventures In Frugality …Making a price book, finally

After reading the idea in Amy Dacyzyn's Tightwad Gazette, I've long intended to do a written-down price book --a list of items I regularly buy with the best prices I find at each store along with the date. Finally, I started one tonight. I'm still bumping my way around MS Excel (I can't remember how to do the …

An Experiment…

I'm doing an experiment... One thing I miss about getting the paper when we were in AZ was the Sunday paper coupons. Of course, I got my paper for free then since I was doing a route, but I've been wondering if using the coupons would total enough in a month to pay for the …

WE’RE (gonna be) DEBT FREEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

There. A slightly premature debt-free scream :). Just did the taxes, and not only will we be DEBT FREEEEE!!!!! but we'll have enough for 1) an emergency fund (since our old one got drained this summer in the transition to two cars), and 2) a new computer! Did I say I hate today? Never mind. …

Thoughts on Christmas Trees –a dilemma

After about 15 minutes of philosophical discussion on whether to get a real tree again this year or finally break down and get an artificial one, the latter choice became the one. We now have a genuine Made In China plastic and metal "tree" in our living room. The irony? We'd also talked a couple …

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry…

This is the August 2007 figures from the USDA on how much food for a family costs, on average. According to this, we should be spending ...are you ready for this???? $751.10 (!) a month for our family of five. On an extravagant month (like back last summer when I experimented with buying more organic …

A paradox…

It recently occurred to me that so much of the current trend of "simplifying" involves an obsession with our relationship to stuff. Does it seem strange to anyone else that people so interested in simplifying so often are, once it comes down to it, really obsessed with stuff? Okay, so maybe this is confusing. I'll …

Cool site to share…

File this under the "mommy files." An online friend mentioned this site in a post and I couldn't help but share it with y'all because, hey, you never know who you're going to meet who could use this. It's a site called miraclediapers.org, and it's an idea I've had in the past, but didn't have …

Yes, I’m still here!

Guess I'd better write something. Spring has seemingly finally wrested the icy grip of a much too long winter in Wisconsin. Seriously. Nothing like a year in Arizona to really make you appreciate how mind-numbingly LONG winter gets around here. One thing, though. When the snow finally melted about a month (?) ago, the grass …

Thoughts on Stuff and Food and …other stuff

We stopped by the library this morning and I picked up two books by Peter Menzel --"Material World," which (I've not read it yet, only scanned it enough to get the idea) compares the worldly possessions of various people around the world. The second, which I'm almost half finished with is "Hungry Planet," which is …

Don’t Buy Stuff You Can’t Afford

Here's a great new idea... ...click on the link above 🙂 ...thanks, Juanito! update 1/28 --I fixed this now, so it'll go to a transcript version. The video was removed from youtube. Bummer.