My friend and fellow aspiring writer, Autumn Heartsong, has honored me with an Honest Scrap Award. The award is for bloggers who post honestly and from the heart, and in order to accept the award, I must:
So, here goes with my acceptance lists:
Many people have a habit of purchasing their Christmas gifts on their credit cards each year, acting as if they were suddenly surprised to find that Christmas came on the 25th of December…what, again?! Others frantically try to scrape together enough money to buy gifts by cutting corners in the months of October, November and December. Again, they seem to be surprised to find that there’s a major expense in the fourth quarter of the year. If you’re in one of these groups, here’s your clue: it’s time to start planning for next year. [Read more →]
If you have a partner in your life—a spouse, someone you live with as a committed couple, anyone who affects or is affected by your financial decisions—please do everything you can to make sure that both of you stand on equal footing when it comes to money. By “equal footing”, I don’t mean that you have to both work and earn the same amount of money in your paychecks. Equal footing is when you both know everything about your individual and joint financial situations and you make decisions for the present and the future together. It is not when one of you earns the pay and the other receives an allowance determined by them because “it’s my money and I will decide what you need”. It is when all household income is pooled and it goes from being mine or yours to become simply ours. [Read more →]
This one is for folks who have a real problem with impulse control. You know who you are, even if you won’t admit it out loud to anyone else. You’ve got credit card balances that are beyond your ability to keep up with the minimum monthly payments, or they’re rapidly approaching it. You believe that any available credit on your card(s) is as good as cash and you’ve just got to spend it. (If you pay off your credit cards each month, never carrying a balance on them, feel free to disregard this post, or keep reading if you think there’s someone else that this may help.) [Read more →]
As the days grow colder in the Northern Hemisphere, we often find ourselves with higher utility bills due to the need to heat our homes and keep the lights on longer. One simple way to save on those bills is to turn down the heat. According to Energy Star, “On average, for every degree you set back your thermostat, you can save 3% on your energy bill.”
You can adjust your thermostat a degree a day and probably not notice any difference. [Read more →]
Our current social environment has conditioned us to believe that credit cards are necessary, that we have to have them in order to live our every day lives. We are a nation that thinks that living beyond our means is normal and that savings accounts are old fashioned. Credit cards are commonplace, but what we know about the business of consumer credit is woefully little. [Read more →]