This weekend, Mr. Money and I took a mini vacation to meet our best friends in Indianapolis, Indiana.  We haven’t had a vacation since last year, and I couldn’t wait!  I set aside some money in my “secret account” so that we’d be able to pay cash for everything.  Here’s what we spent: Hotel & Travel $45- Hotel (we stayed at the Embassy Suites in Downtown Indianapolis and this was an employee rate-score!) ~$30- Gas $20- Parking at hotel $12- Parking at Hard Rock Cafe for lunch Food $26- Saturday lunch at Hard Rock Cafe $44- Saturday dinner at Rock Bottom Brewery $20- Drinks with my BFF at Champps bar $0- Free breakfast buffet at hotel $0- Didn’t eat lunch $23- Sunday Lunch/Dinner at Olive Garden $4- Walgreens for water (us) and snacks for my nephew. Total: $224.  Not bad! Here are the positives and negatives: + Saved money by visiting the Indianapolis Children’s Museum on free day + Enjoyed the pool for free entertainment + Got an employee rate on an amazing room – Parking! We spent $32 on [...]

The other day my car insurance came due and I decided to call to see if I would get a discount for paying in full for six months versus paying monthly. We’ve always had our auto insurance automatically deducted from our checking account, and I recently noticed that they’ve been charging us a $2 fee to do so. I thought that was stupid, considering we could pull the six months of car insurance out of savings if we needed to and then just pay it in full. When I talked with the customer service representative, I was informed that my new premium for six months would be $846.82. We had been paying $744 for six months. Our insurance went up over $100 for no reason! I was so mad. I asked her why that had happened, because we have had no tickets, accidents, etc. (Knock on wood) She said something about the state we live in and blah blah blah and I told her that I would hate to have to switch insurance companies because I really liked them, but [...]

The worms go in, the worms go out. The worms make yummy compost for my garden! One of the best things you can do to help cut the amount of unnecessary garbage that ends up in our landfills is to compost. We at the Money household eat lots and lots of greens, veggies, and fruits. Not only does that cut down on our household waste because they don’t have any packaging (or very little), but we can also use the scraps for compost to put nutrients back into our garden. Free fertilizer!! Win-win. When we first bought our house, we were stoked because we had enough property to have our own organic garden. Lucky us, the previous owner had installed raised beds, and we were fortunate as well to purchase our house in February when we could start plotting a garden. As soon as we closed on the house and moved in, we started to compost. Composting is so easy anyone can do it. Seriously. We have a pretty good system set up here, and we do it year round. [...]