More Than a Little

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 into about [...]

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 [...]

Sometimes you need to think outside the box.  This rule applies to everything, really, but especially when you’re shopping for deals.  Thinking outside the box is at the heart of extreme couponing, if you think about it–the “normal” way to use your coupons is to just get a few cents off of a purchase.  The [...]

The price of stamps is rising two cents on May 11, to 44¢ from 42¢.  This would be a great time to go pick up some forever stamps.  I don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea to go crazy buying up stamps just to save money on potential future increases… the return on your investment [...]

I just off the phone with one of my credit card companies.  While paying my bill this month, I noticed a charge from Saturday to an equipment trading company for $101, and a charge of $40 (and then strangely, a credit in the same amount) from an equipment magazine company of some sort. Apparently, our [...]

The FedEx guy brought me a happy little surprise yesterday–$500 in Shell gas gift cards!

These came as a result of signing up at an online offer website.  You know those sites that promise to send you money or a laptop or gift cards?  I had never even considered clicking on one of those links because [...]