Frugal Babe

I spent most of today helping a friend unpack her kitchen after a recent move.  We’ve been friends for ten years, and I’m thrilled that she and her husband have moved closer to where we live.  They’re only about 20 minutes away now, instead of an hour. 
They just bought new dishes as a housewarming present [...]

We decided a few weeks ago to make our HSA a priority, ahead of retirement accounts for the time being.  HSA’s double as retirement accounts if you don’t have to use the money for medical expenses, but the same is not true in reverse.  And we have our HSA invested in a great growth fund, [...]

It still doesn’t feel real, but I have some exciting news to share.  My husband and I found out a few weeks ago that I’m pregnant!  The baby is due just a few days after our 5th wedding anniversary next spring.  We’ve been planning for this for years, and we’re both very excited. 
We met today [...]

The Festival of Frugality is up at Money and Values.  Penny Nickel did a very yummy job this week!  Very impressive use of cakes to illustrate…
Caustic Musings has a fantastic post with all sorts of links to nutrition and fitness information - tons of info there.  Great job!
And the post from Money Smart Life about [...]

Money, Matter, and More Musings has written a great pollwith 20 questions everyone should ask themselves regarding personal finance.  I feel like I’m pretty much on top of our finances, but I was not able to answer yes to every question.  There were five questions that made me realize that I still have work to do:
Do [...]

I made up a recipe for ”apple pie pancakes” this morning, and they turned out great, so I thought I’d share. 

2 cups whole wheat flour
3/4 cup unbleached white flour
3/4 cup oats
1/2 cup ground flax seed
3 Tbsp baking powder
3 packets stevia (or sugar if you like)
3 eggs
1 cup soy milk
1 shredded apple
1 shredded pear
cinnamon - as much or [...]

Our house has a very small fenced back/side yard.  We have a white picket fence, less than four feet tall, so the view of the open space behind our house is not blocked at all and makes the whole area feel bigger.  But the fence is about nine feet from our house.  It goes along the south side [...]

I update our networth every two or three months, and I always do it right after we get our mortgage statement in the mail, so that I have an accurate debt amount.  How nice that we got our statement yesterday, when the Feds lowered the interest rate and my IRA  jumped nearly $1000.  Always nice [...]

After my husband made an appointment to have his knee examined, we read the details about the doctor he was going to be seeing.  Turns out that he’s a world class elbow and shoulder doctor, but knees seemed like more of a side thing for him.  We decided that if my husband is going to [...]

Back in May, my husband hurt his knee in a unicycling mishap.  We have a friend who’s nearly finished with medical school and he determined that none of the major ligaments were torn, but thought that there might be some damage to the miniscus.  My husband has been doing intensive rehab at the gym all [...]