Gather Little by Little

I can’t believe it’s the end of November and Christmas time is soon upon us. We haven’t even put out our Christmas decorations or started our shopping yet!

You may have noticed, but my posting schedule was a little off this week, including this one (it’s a little later than usual). As I posted about in my Friday Gathering from last week, my wife was unfortunate enough to get a kidney stone last week and the process of getting that taken care of was highly taxing on both of us. She ended up requiring two surgeries and was in a tremendous amount of pain most of the week. The good news is, she almost back to normal and feeling significantly better. Thank you for your thoughts and prayers for her recovery.

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I’m big on goals and believe in setting them and doing your very best to accomplish them. This is particularly true of personal finance goals, as if you don’t have goals or a vision of where you want to be with your finances, it becomes very difficult to make the right decisions about you money. I’ve discussed the financial goals and planning topic before in my article on creating a financial plan.

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Picture by roujo

It’s a slow fade when you give yourself away
It’s a slow fade when black and white have turned to gray
Thoughts invade, choices are made, a price will be paid
When you give yourself away
People never crumble in a day

You just read the chorus to a song on Casting Crown’s latest CD named Slow Fade. The song basically states that people don’t go bad or get into trouble or compromise their values all at once, but that it’s really more of a gradual process. A slow fade as the song is named. You can read the full lyrics on Christian-Lyrics.net.

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One of the recent changes we’ve made to our spending is buying generic products. This includes generic branded medicine, food and non-food products. I’ve found that you can save a significant amount of money purchasing generic products and in general with no sacrifice in quality. There are generics for almost everything: trash bags, plastic wrap, aluminum foil, canned products, frozen products, milk, bread, etc.

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I’ll never forgot the first time I heard this song, and how much it moved me. We were searching for a church home and while visiting a local church, two teenagers sang this song and they did an outstanding job. We immediately went home purchased the CD, and fell in love with Mark Schultz the singer, performer, minister and person.

If you haven’t heard Mark Schultz, you are truly missing out on one of the most outstanding Christian musicians ever. The best part? He is the most humble and down to earth person you could ever meet. A true man of God.

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I hope everyone had a wonderful and joyful Thanksgiving! I also hope those of you that braved Black Friday found some great deals and stayed within your budgets! I also hope those of you that did venture out early this morning get plenty of rest this weekend!

A yearly tradition with my wife and I is to head out early on black Friday. We enjoy the time together and the adventure. Unfortunately we didn’t have a traditional Thanksgiving or Black Friday this year. My wife has been fighting a kidney stone for about 3 weeks and on Wednesday she had surgery to have it removed. Needless to say she has been is a great deal of discomfort and not feeling too great. So we stayed at home both days. She does seem to feeling a bit better this evening though.

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Just a quick post to wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving. I won’t be posting an article today as I’ll be spending time with my family and eating way too much. I sincerely hope you have a wonderful and blessed day. I would encourage you to spend some time with your families sharing the things you are thankful for in your life. Oh, and keep a few Pepcid ACs handy ;-)

Here are a few Bible verses for Thanksgiving:

Psalm 107:1 – “Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.”

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Picture by: Manuel W.

You may have noticed a new Amazon.com widget on the bottom of my right-hand sidebar. I added this new widget as I noticed it was offering some outstanding deals on other blogs  that had it installed. Well, today, the “deal of the day” is a $19.99 blood pressure meter.

The last few times I’ve been to the doctor, my blood pressure was higher than it should be. Each time, this was attributed to “white coat” syndrome. Recently, I went to have my broken wrist checked and my blood pressure was high again. I decided to test the “white coat” theory by getting my own blood pressure monitor and checking it at various times during the day.

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Photo Credit: PocketAces

Moolanomy is doing a book giveaway this month and this article is my entry. I’d encourage you to share your story, even if you don’t have any experience. As you’ll read, I don’t have much either.

You have until November 30th! Don’t have a blog? No problem, head over to Pinyo’s giveaway article and you can add a comment about your experience instead. …

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Photo by English Invader

The big shopping time of the year starts this Friday or Black Friday as it is often called. It’s called black Friday as it is one of the biggest shopping days of the year, and frequently moves retailers from “in the red” to “in the black” from an earnings and profit perspective.

Until this year, we were always scrambling to come up with enough money for Christmas gifts and frequently relied on our credit cards to get us through.

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