More Than a Little

Near Christmas, there are often gift card specials at restaurants–like give a $25 card, get an extra $5. We will take advantage of those at places we eat often, but of course, the trick is not buying so many gift cards that mean you will eat out more often! Anyway, we bought one at Max [...]

I have gotten a rash of correspondence from banking establishments in the last few weeks, and they are all saying the same thing: after August 15, if you purchase something with a debit card that you don’t have money in your account to cover, they will deny the charge unless you have overdraft protection. So, [...]

I mentioned yesterday that we booked a trip to Sweden.  We’ll be leaving June 27, so I have a little less than three months before we depart.  Because of that… I have decided that it’d be fun to create an Official Savings Goal. I want to create enough additional income to pay for our tickets [...]

I used two $5/$20 at Rite Aid yesterday, plus a coupon for a free Bayer Contour (to get my total up over $20) to purchase two brand new books by two of my favorite authors for $3.17 each.   I paid with a $25 gift card that I got for free. There are things other [...]

Last night, we went out to dinner at Chili’s.  We hardly ever go there but I had read at slickdeals that they’re doing a promotion for two meals, an appetizer and dessert for $20. That’s a pretty good price for a meal like that, so we thought we’d go.  Once we got in there, though, [...]

I have a confession to make. I don’t track any sort of financial savings/earnings. I used to. I used to have this super-complicated budget spreadsheet that I maintained for a couple of years.  I split up every dime we earned and logged it into this spreadsheet by date and category.  I was splitting up every receipt [...]

This is just a reminder that a few minutes of shopping preparation can save you a lot of money!  This is actually a good rule in many circumstances, but specifically, I’m talking about preparing for Christmas shopping, or a shopping-for-fun trip.  The women in my family have a girls-only shopping trip planned for tomorrow, so [...]

If you have kids, you know that disposable diapers are stupidly expensive.  I actually switched from cloth diapers to disposables when my daughter was about 18 months old because I figured out how to spend so little on diapers that I was spending more money to do diaper laundry–which is such a minimal expense!–than I [...]

After Evelyn was born in May 2007, I desperately wanted to stay home with her.  I had a daycare lined up, I had promised to come back to work after a long enough period of time that our HR department had to call the state department of personnel to find out if it was okay [...]

My parents just had a new roof put on their house this week.  It’s a lovely roof, and it will hopefully have the benefit of not leaking.   The thing about roofs is that they’re not cheap, not even a little bit.  My dad, however, was pretty creative about the whole deal and has saved [...]