Last October I decided I was going to participate in a “No Spend Month”.  Needless to say, it didn’t go as well as I had hoped, and I spent $13,500 more than I had planned on spending. Um, yeah, I’d say we failed miserably. So after feeling like we’ve had unnecessary spending this month, I’m going to track every penny we spend for the month of October.  I’m not going to limit myself to no spending, but I’m going to try to cut back and live on less for the month.  The point of this experiment is to find out where our money is going and where we can be more disciplined.  As I’ve shared before, I’m not the best budgeter. I do know that I will be making some changes that I probably won’t be the happiest about. -I will make my lunch every day and take it to work. I’m so bad about not grocery shopping and then we end up with no food in the house and I can’t pack a lunch.  Then I go out to [...]

I can be the world’s worst (or would it be best?) procrastinator. If there is something that needs to be done, either I’m on fire to get it done, or I put it off until I get so stressed about it that I’m about ready to snap. Not the best thing. For example, the wedding pictures that I shot Labor Day weekend? I only have a handful edited. I shot something like 1300 images. Of course all of them are not good, so I have to go through and weed out which ones I think are good enough to edit. I’m still not done with that, and I’m having a hard time deciding which ones are good and which ones aren’t. I need to just do it and stop putting it off. I’ll feel a lot better once it’s done. One thing that I’ve realized about myself is that one of the biggest reasons I do put things off is because I’m afraid of failure. I’m afraid of messing something up or that it’s not going to come out perfectly. [...]

This is a guest post from David Sterik. Enjoy! My grandmother’s knack for creating natural cleaning products came out of necessity, not environmentalism. Growing up near Escondido, Calif., during the depression money didn’t come easy. No doubt this period made a significant mark on her life. Conservation was a concept she tried to pass on to her children and grandchildren in everything she did. Whether it was buying clothes second hand at rummage sales or using every part of the chicken for meals, she was the epitome of frugality. Here are a couple of the best green cleaning tips I had the honor of receiving from my dear grandmother. In Southern California one item that was plentiful even during the depression were lemons. In fact, my grandmother had the good fortune of growing up with a large lemon tree in her front yard. And when life gives you lemons during a depression, you make just about anything you can imagine with it. In my grandmother’s case, she used them for cleaning table tops as well as dishes. In addition to [...]