Show of hands.  How many of you actively participate in recycling endeavors in your community?  You schlep around your empty cans, jugs, and bottles.  You pile them up with your used papers, then sort them all into bins so some poor schmoe down at the recycling center doesn’t have to.  All so your city can [...]

Saving money isn’t the only thing out there if you want to become wealthy.  All it does is reduce the amount of money you spend.  You’ve still go to find ways to make more money through a better paying job, passive income, or a second job.  But, it’s still an important part of a well-rounded [...]

Everybody knows it’s great to go green, but have you ever considered why? Here’s some advice for homeowners on how greening their homes can lead to a higher quality of life. 1. Homeowners with greener homes pay less for water and electricity each month. If you’re one of the green-savvy homeowners who have installed solar [...]

One of the most common things we hear in the computer repair shop that I work part-time in is that the computer has crashed, and could we please make sure to get the data off of the hard drive before we reinstall windows.  And, the first question we always ask is, “do you have your [...]

We got a lot of snow last winter.  We get a lot of snow every winter, in fact.  But, last year was exceptional.  If I remember correctly, we had over 80 inches of total snowfall.  Most of it blows around and drifts, so it isn’t all piled up, but, it was still a lot of [...]

This post on behalf of Emortgage Calculator One of the more important parts of buying a house, is not over spending on the house that you plan on buying.  Despite all the headlines during the recent real estate boom and crash, people are still trying to buy much more house than they can reasonably afford.  [...]

In my opinion, buying a house is a lot more complicated than it really should be.  Making an offer on a house plays it’s part in that complication.  You’d think that making an offer on a house you want to buy would be as simple as telling the owner that you offer $xxx,xxx amount and [...]

When we decided that it was time for a new house, (read this post for the reasoning) we knew that we had to be smarter about it than we had been when we bought our first house.  We weren’t going to just jump into it and make a rash decision that might cost us down [...]

Way back when, before we were even married, we decided that we wanted to buy a house.  The idea, at the time was that it was terribly difficult to find a house/apartment to rent that would take a dog and that was affordable.  We’d been looking, but everything we had found was $600 or more [...]

According to the USDA’s 2010 report, raising a child born in 2010 to the age of 18 will cost on average $226,920.  This cost is the average cost a middle-class family pays for shelter, food, health care, clothing, transportation, child care, education and other expenses.  They further break down the average cost per child per [...]