Our dishwasher may have died, but I’m finding ways to give its parts a new life. I’m a scrapbooker, and I love pens. I do a lot of writing on my pages, and have quite a few pens. Until today, they lived in a drawer, all jumbled together. Now they are neatly organized in the cutlery holder from our old dishwasher. It’s perfect – portable, organized, and big enough for all my pens with room to spare:
Here’s some good stuff I found around the blogosphere this week:
At Green And Crunchy, they are hibernating and making some amazing food. Their pictures look like something from a food magazine. I was inspired by their creations, and today I made bean burgers from scratch (with beans I cooked in the sun oven) and buns to go with them.
The Thrifty Chicks have a wonderful article about children and thrift stores. I grew up shopping at yard sales, and I remember looking forward to it all week. We would get the newspaper, plan our route, and spend all of Saturday morning at yard sales. When I was in high school, we took a family vacation to a big city several hours from our home. It turned out to be very touristy, and everything was expensive. So on a whim, my parents stopped at a Goodwill. We discovered that the city had several great thrift stores, and spent the rest of our vacation happily hunting for bargains. After that we would return every summer for our thrift store vacation. We never did visit the tourist traps – the whole family had so much fun in the thrift stores that there was no need for anything else.
In the Frugal Blog Network,
Tight Fisted Miser has a compilation of his best posts from 2008 – check them out if you missed them the first time.
Almost Frugal is saving for retirement with a budget that is already so tight it squeaks. A few years ago, we were working to pay off debt and didn’t have an emergency fund. We set up an online account and put $100/month into it. The payments went in automatically, and after a few raids early in the process, we managed to stop dipping into it 2 years ago. It’s tough to build savings when you’re paying off debt at the same time, but the psychological boost is considerable, and I wish Kelly and her family all the best.
Frugal Zeitgeist did a little shopping. I would say $1.09 over-budget is pretty darn good. Well done, FZ!
Frugal Duchess has the scoop on how to watch the inauguration for free, in the comfort of your own home. As much as I’d love to be at such an historic event, I think I’ll enjoy it more on my couch.
Not Made Of Money has written about paying down the mortgage early. This is our number one financial goal at the moment. We cleared out the rest of our debt in 2007, and we’ve ramped up our mortgage repayment schedule. Even if we end up moving, we do not want to be making mortgage payments for the next 20 or 30 years.
Related posts:
