Earn, Save, and Live Joyfully.
In July, the television at our rental home in North Carolina was damaged by a nearby lightning strike. The rental company called to let us know that renters were complaining and that we’d need to replace the TV as soon as possible. I agreed to let the rental company purchase a similar TV from Walmart … Read more
I sent my husband out to Petco on Friday to pick up five, very large tubs of cat litter and an eight pound bag of cat food. I printed out a picture of the store’s sale circular and circled the sale price of the litter. I also printed out a 10% coupon, clipped a coupon … Read more
I have tried time and time again to stop playing the CVS ECB game. I know there are hundreds of websites dedicated to telling frugal shoppers how to buy $2000 worth of supplies for $2. A dozen or so well known personal finance bloggers have written about the drugstore games and hundreds of dedicated followers … Read more
There are certain things I should do every day that somehow or another I always seem to forget. None of them take a particularly long time, it’s just that somehow or another I find myself failing to do them. They are all simple things. I should stretch every morning. I should exercise every day to … Read more
Being the good person that he is, my husband recently arranged the night’s festivities for a good friend’s bachelor party. The plan involved six groomsmen boarding a boat and sailing around Annapolis for a few hours. The boat books quickly, so my husband purchased tickets a few nights in advance. He charged the entire bill, … Read more
The rental company for our beach home provides a welcome basket to each of our guests. In my personal opinion it’s a sad excuse for a welcome basket. It contains two rolls of toilet paper, one roll of paper towels, a dish rag and two pitifully small bars of hand soap. This season I decided … Read more
Last week while we were vacationing at our beach home in North Carolina our refrigerator started to leak. This isn’t the first time we’ve had problems with this particular appliance, so we headed down to Sears to order a new one. In the case of a rental home, hundreds of miles from our primary home, … Read more
As I was driving around the beltway today in 5 o’clock traffic I noticed the temperature gauge in my fourteen year old car ticking higher and higher. It was miserably hot in DC today, somewhere between 95 – 100 degrees, and I feared the car might overheat, so I turned off the air conditioner and … Read more
Today I received an automated email that my cell phone bill was available for viewing. I know this is going to sound rather odd, but I almost never look at the phone bill. Our phone bill is usually over 15 pages long. It contains all of the calls and text messages we’ve made and received … Read more
This morning I unhappily opened my credit card statement and found yet another finance charge from our failure to pay the credit card on time back in January. My husband usually pays the credit card online via bill pay, but he was out of town in January and simply forgot to schedule the payment. He … Read more