When I was in culinary school, we learned how to filet salmon. Even if you are amazingly good (and we weren’t), when you cut the filet off a whole fish there is a little layer of salmon left against the bones. My instructor showed us students how to use a spoon to scrape the carcass…
Frugality and Finance
No Spend Month: Week 2 Review
Updated tally for this week: Last Week’s Total: $95.76Yet more strawberries (I’m done, I swear): $26 Birthday present for a kid’s party: $6.25* Pitcher of beer at a company farewell party for a coworker (Nick): $13 TOTAL: $141.01 REMAINING: $108.99 *Actually the present for the kid-friend was more than this but I had a $14…
Frugal Friday: The Budgeting Process And Advanced Fun Card Techniques
Last Friday I talked about our household’s budgeting tool, the Fun Card. It’s a very simple idea that helps keep our day-to-day expenses in line. But, like any tool, the value comes in the use, not the having. Homebrew Husband and I used to think budgeting was the act of making a budget. That’s like…
No Spend Month: Week 1 Review
Well $250 is going to be a lot harder than I anticipated. I managed to forget about provisioning berries for the year, and with the late spring, all the mid-June strawberries ripened in early-July. I’m looking at blueberries and raspberries coming down the line in the next few weeks and I’m wondering if I blow…
Frugal Friday: Fun Card Budgeting For Non-Budgeters
I spent most of my post-college years with a checking account that was perpetually overdrawn by $300. I once went on a three-week trip to Scandinavia and spent the entirety of my food money on my first dinner outside of the U.S. In my defense, food in Reykjavik during the holiday season is unbelievably expensive….
No Spend July: Be A Cheap Bastard For A Month
It’s July and that means our No Spend Month Challenge is in effect. If you’ve been following along on Facebook or on the blog, you know that June is a spendy series of weeks for us and July seems like a natural month to reign in hard on the spending. That’s where NSM comes into…
Hope In A Bottle
For the first 30ish years of my life, I enjoyed stuff as much as the average American. I bought a lot of it, and used it, and got pissed off when I had to dust it. When my stuff got a little long in the tooth, I tossed it out and bought more stuff. Several…
Can You Get Arrested if You Kill-A-Watt?
My local library system has partnered with my local power company to make Kill-A-Watt energy meters available for check-out, just like a book or video. A few weeks ago, I checked out a Kill-A-Watt. These things look like a remote control and a power strip had a baby. You plug your appliance into the Kill-A-Watt,…