If you would like to start 2012 on the right financial footing and want to do something that is attainable, consider taking a challenge.  Two of my favorite challenges are spending challenges and pantry challenges.  Take either or both of these challenges, and you will find extra money to do with what you please—to save [...]

Ninja, over at Punch Debt in the Face, wrote an article last week about being addicted to savings that got me thinking. Or, thinking harder, I suppose.  The attitude that he talks about towards savings is one that I’ve noticed in myself and others who have gone the way of the Frugaler.  He calls it [...]

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 [...]

Despite the best of intentions and the clearest of budgets, sometimes holiday spending can snowball out of control. It can start with an innocent extra box of ornaments or a gift for someone not on your list, and before you know it, you’ve charged the entire month of December on your credit cards and you’re [...]

With Christmas less than two weeks away, you may be feeling the crunch to get the perfect gift in time. Or perhaps, your gift budget is running low, yet you still have quite a few people on your list to give gifts to. Here are easy last minute solutions to earn free or cheap gifts [...]

My family and friends can’t stand going shopping with me. I used to be easily influenced into buying anything. Now I simply don’t want to buy anything. I’m the worst person to go shopping with now. I second guess every purchase. If I do end up buying something, I ask myself, “what will I get [...]

During a typical year, children get two weeks off school during Christmas break, often a week or so before Christmas and a week after.  However, this year, Christmas falls on a weekend, and if your school scheduled vacation as my son’s did, you will see kids who don’t get out of school for Christmas vacation [...]

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 [...]

Holiday shopping is in full swing now, and you may be feeling the financial pressure.  Shane recently quit his job and is working on a tight holiday budget.  My husband and I are in the midst of being gazelle intense, so we don’t have much extra money for gifts.  Yet even though we don’t have [...]

With the recent changes in my employment, it’s become pretty darn important for us to not only keep to our budget, but to reduce our budget as much as we can in order to keep from sending our finances into the whirlpool of red ink that is broke. One of the ways that we’ve got [...]