Growing Vitamin C…Growing Roses For Your Health

    
     In order to growing food frugally, it’s important to think about how much the inputs are costing you versus the benefits you are receiving.  For me, the cost/benefit ratio of buying organic food in a supermarket has never been high enough to justify doing so.
 
     Among the investments I’m making this year to the [...]

Thrifty Thursdays #2

 
·       If you are paying for extra cable channels AND a service like Netflicks, perhaps you are paying twice for the same enjoyment. Consider getting rid of one (or more if you are really indulgent).  If it were up to me, I’d ditch cable altogether and watch things on youtube and hulu.com.  I find enough [...]

Find a Penny..

     You should have guessed by now that I’m the kind of person who picks up every penny I see on the ground. And from the last post, you should know that I accept any and all things people are getting rid of. If I can’t use it, I find someone who can or donate [...]

Pantry and Freezer Challenge

     After Christmas, I try to eat out of the freezer and pantry so we have very little grocery expense.  It makes it easy to pay off credit cards that we used to buy holiday gifts.  We keep a budget and do all our shopping with credit cards that we pay off each month so [...]

Debt Snowball

     Related to my last post “Be Your Own Bank,” is Dave Ramsey’s  concept of “ debt snowballing.”  The idea is to pay off a small debt balance, then roll that money that would be going to that debt to the next largest debt.  In our case, we went after the highest interest debt we [...]

Be Your Own Bank

     Anyone can see that a 700 billion dollar bailout of the banking industry has to have some effect on our schools and pocketbooks.  It will be difficult to pay for these budget deficits with taxes alone—especially if you expect that there will be some loss of jobs due to the economy going south (you [...]

Dollar a day Eating Plan

A couple of California teachers ate food costing only $1/day for a month to prove it could be done. You can read about their project here. 
The wife is a vegan, so there was no meat involved in their diet. But, if you think about it, most of the world eats little meat. For years I could [...]

Hustling for Part-time Jobs

I was reading a blog the other day about financial security and the author mentioned using the time of our youth to earn some extra money and skills. Often, we think of our youth as the time to have fun and party.
Since I put myself through college without benefit of financial aid or scholarship (my [...]

Curriki: My New Online Education Community (and Friend!)

The other day I was in a panic because the activity I’d planned months before, a nice webquest of the civilization we are studying, suddenly wasn’t working due to our newly installed firewall at school.  We can, in certain circumstances, request that certain sites be restored, but the process is slow and doesn’t always mean [...]

Free Ivy League Online Video Lectures

My degrees are not from an Ivy League institution, but I “take” Ivy League classes now via free online video classes.  Just for fun, I always intended to sit in on history lectures when I retire. But now with the magic of the Internet, I can do this in my comfy chair and snuggly slippers [...]