This post will be a little different from the usual personal finance posts as this site is a #AwesomeBloggerAward nominee. Fire and Wide (@FireAndWide) has honored us with this distinction, and I’m flattered. I’ve been blogging for a long time and never got an award. Thank you very much Fire and Wide!! The #AwesomeBloggerAward is pretty straightforward; you get a series of ten questions that you then answer, then nominate a few people. That’s it, no crazy chain letters about misfortune or luck, and the only thing this has in common with them is that you pass the nomination along to at least 5 people with new questions. I’ll keep my nominations to the end. Now onto the questions: The questions are broken into two categories, the first five about blogging and the second five about my favorite person in the world, ME!! I hope the humor comes across in Continue Reading
Living within your means
One of the basic tenets of personal finance is that you need to do one thing and one thing only if you really want to get ahead. Surprisingly this one thing is both simple and, in some ways, very challenging. All of the tips and tactics are great, but if you only manage to achieve this one thing, you succeed. What is this magical, mystical unicorn, you may ask? It’s simply living within your means. If you’ve been around the personal finance space or read a few blogs, you’ve probably heard this fantastic term. I think instinctively, we all get it, but I want to step back and define this, so we’re all on the same page. This is partially because everyone’s circumstances are different, and when I say living within your means, pardon the pun, it means different things to different people. Taking a very simple view, ‘Living within Continue Reading
We’ve become a Throwaway society
We all know the pleasure of buying something brand new, the aura of freshness that comes when you first open the package. For me, this comes with an air of excitement as the packaging falls away, and the new item is first taken out still in its protective wrapping. That distinctive smell of ‘new’ in the air comes with the item’s promise radiating forth. Very often, as you open the package up, there’s a smell that comes with it, a real scent, not just a metaphorical one; it’s the smell of newness. When it comes to cars, they’ve tried to bottle that new car smell, which we all seem to know, though I think we might be collectively horrified if we knew what chemicals that produce it. All of this excitement, we feel for something new. Most of the time, we’re replacing something; BUT what happens to the old one? We’ve Continue Reading
Balance – I’ll take that with a dash of normal!
Last weekend we did something we haven’t been able to for a couple of months, we got out of town to go camping. For us, they just opened up the campgrounds with restrictions and since we already had a booking, we took advantage of it. Now I have to add a little context, our ‘camping’ is taking the RV which has not only a bathroom, but a stove, a shower, and most importantly air conditioning! I should adjust my earlier statement, we went glamping! It was a very nice change from being locked down in the house, we went hiking, cycling, and swimming. It was great! There was a distinct feeling of normal on our trip which was much needed. With everything that has been going on in the world a little bit of normal and balance were just what we needed. It got me thinking more about balance and Continue Reading