Entertain your chickens for free! You likely have a lot of this stuff already (or can find it on the side of the street any given weekend) to be re-purposed into your very own chicken carnival. Yeah! Take the girls to a carnival! So, naturally, when you arrive, you, as the responsible adult, will be analyzing all the activities at the carnival to make sure you and your girls hit all the important attractions with minimal inconvenience. Everyone’s so excited, aren’t they? So while you’re passing by the ticket booth,…
Month: July 2016
How to Build a Budget in 7 Easy Steps
Want to take a sweet trip to Venice to ride a gondola guided by a singing gondolier in traditional Italian garb in five years? Maybe you want to retire a millionaire long before you hit minimum retirement age? Want to adopt a child in four years, but $20,000 is a lot of money and you don’t know where you are going to come up with it? Have you visualized yourself at the exact moment you are out of debt? What does it feel like? What does it smell like? All of…
How to Get on With Life When You’re in Debt
Let’s talk Debt for a minute. Dirty, Dirty Debt. Debt makes you feel all kinds of negative things– shame, fear, anger, hopelessness, guilt, regret. You just wish it was gone, over, paid in full. Every day seems like a struggle just to make ends meet. Every day you regret buying that two-seater that will be taking your fun-money for the next six years. It’s going to take 6 months to pay this diamond off, two years to pay off that credit card, five years to pay that medical debt. I feel you. I’ll be…
One Rocking Marigold: Garden Update 7/17/16
I am marigold growing genius superstar! Just kidding. Kind of. All right, so recently, I told you how I had been completely unsuccessful with my marigold-from-seed attempt (uhhh-gain!), but this week one finally flowered. I let my fingers do some walking over the interwebs and found I’d been doing marigolds wrong. Today, I’m admitting my faults and promising a new day for marigolds on Burton Farm! How I’m remedying what I’ve been doing wrong with my marigolds: Because marigold seeds are so feathery and paper thin, I have always scattered…
It Never Seems to Rain on the Mountain
It was supposed to rain yesterday. The weatherman had been promising “rain on Saturday” all week. After a hot, dry day with the boys, I figured it wasn’t coming. I screwed the hoses back together, pulled the heavy out to the garden and noticed for the first time the heavy, dark rain clouds overhead. “Nope,” I thought. I’m already out here now, so it’s getting watered. I started watering the garden. It needed the water yesterday. I bet my neighbors (if either of them see me) will think I’m nuts.…
Net Worth & Debt Payoff Progress – June 30, 2016
Oh, June. June. June, June, June. So glad you’re gone. I’m reminded of those “Black Eyed Peas” lyrics, “Let’s get ignorant. Let’s get hectic,” except it wasn’t nearly as fun as they suggest. I knew I shouldn’t have told you how much life sucked there for a minute, because you know what? After I hit “post,” lousy things kept happening: Prime example: While I was investigating an on-the-job accident, I dropped my phone, shattering the screen. I put packing tape on it to keep the shards from falling out. It’s not an…