goals

Progress On Our Projects And Some Good Links

May 14, 2012

I hope you all had a great weekend!  Our was spent working on the rough wiring in our basement, with a lot of help from my parents.  I have a circuit map that I’ve been drawing onto a blank floor plan, adding x’s and o’s for all the outlets and lights.  The whole basement map [...]

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$10 For You To Spend At My New Favorite Online Grocery Store

March 12, 2012

I have no idea how I’m just now discovering Vitacost, but I’m pretty darn excited about it.  Keep reading and I’ll tell you all about it – including how you can get $10 to spend there on your own groceries!  I’ve been focusing on our grocery bill this year, working to reduce the amount we [...]

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Saying No – So That You Can Say Yes To What Matters

January 10, 2012

I’m a people pleaser.  Always have been, probably always will be.  I want to make people around me happy, and that means that saying no is not my strong suit.  If people ask me to do something or go somewhere or help them with something, I usually say yes.  That’s fine most of the time, [...]

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Small Steps To Create A Great Year

January 2, 2012

Happy New Year!  I hope that 2012 got off to a good start for you.  I’ve never been one for New Year’s Resolutions, simply because the date seems so arbitrary.  I prefer to make changes throughout the year as I think of them, and January 1 is no different from any other day in that [...]

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Changing Our Mortgage Payoff Strategy

December 12, 2011

Ever since we bought our first house in 2003, we’ve always paid extra on our mortgage.  Even in the early days of being self employed when we had barely any money, we always tried to put at least a little extra money towards the mortgage principal each month – even if it was only ten [...]

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Why I Don’t Make New Year’s Resolutions

January 3, 2011

Happy 2011!  I hope you all had a nice, relaxing holiday season.  Right now, we’re really enjoying the fact that our holiday decorations were limited to a little Christmas bear hanging on our wall clock, an evergreen bough on top of our kitchen cabinets, and a homemade reindeer ornament that our son’s cousin made for [...]

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Our No-Spending Week

November 11, 2010

We made our final contribution to my IRA for 2010 last week, and it feels great.  Still another month and a half left in the year, and we’ve finished contributing to our HSA and both of our IRAs.  In order to fork over the final lump of cash to my account, we focused on spending [...]

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The Luxury Of Frugal Thinking

July 8, 2010

I don’t know the exact demographics of our town, but it’s definitely a lower-income area than the city where we used to live.  There is only one grocery store in town, and it’s not stocked with organic produce and ten dollar jars of coconut butter.  Houses here are lot less expensive than they were in [...]

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Are You Spending To Impress Other People?

January 22, 2010

Lately my husband has been spending huge amounts of time researching investment strategies.  While we’ve both been committed to long-term savings goals for years, he’s really been getting into the nuances of it lately, and it’s made our retirement portfolios much more interesting to look at (of course they haven’t been much fun to look [...]

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Big Picture Goals Make Frugality Fun

January 8, 2010

My husband and I started our business in 2002, and have been growing it ever since.  The first few years were pretty rough financially.  We incurred a lot of debt, were earning very little, and basically had a life of forced frugality.  Eight years later, things are quite a bit different in terms of debt [...]

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