Gather Little by Little

Seems it’s that time again, time to hear that familiar ringing each time you walk towards the entrance of a large store. The Salvation Army is just one of the many charitable donation requests we’ll begin to receive as the holiday season approaches.

Although I feel a bit guilty about it but to be honest, I often feel a little overwhelmed with the number of charitable companies looking for money and donations. Not to mention the often stressful situation of trying to determine if they are truly reputable organizations or just plain scams.

Click to continue reading...

One year ago today was a life changing day for my family and I. Honestly, it doesn’t even seem like a year ago, but more like yesterday. See, on November 7th 2006 our lives suddenly took a huge turn for the worse, it was the day we had what I will refer to as a major life crisis. The crisis itself is actually quite personal, so hopefully you will understand if I don’t share the details, but suffice it to say it vividly stopped us in our tracks, I was out of work for 3 months, and we wondered if I would even have my job again.

Click to continue reading...

live. shop. die. is the saying I found on a small magnet displayed prominently on the outside of a cubical at my “real job“. I am sure this is just one of those “cute little sayings” people like to hang outside their cube, but it did make me think.

First it made me wonder how this person truly views life and made me wonder what is really important to them.

Second, it made me consider society as a whole and if this cute little sign, along with other cute little signs I’ve seen really accurately represented the mojority of society as a whole.

Click to continue reading...

October was by far the best month ever for Gather Little by Little. Here’s a quick summary of my October stats on 11/1:

• Unique Visits: 13,049 (up from 4,672 in September) +179%
• Page Views: 27,170 (up from 9,579 in September) +184%
• Subscriber Count: 297 (up from 122 on 10/1) +143%

Those are huge increases, and I am completely floored at the amount of growth. You are all a huge part of this and I appreciate it very much.

Special thanks to both my top commentators and referrers. Not only are you listed and linked here but I’ve included a favorite post from your site and stumbled it as well.

Click to continue reading...

Every Monday, I provide tip(s) on things you can do to save Money. This article is part of that series.

We recently took a long weekend to the mountains for some well deserved R&R and family time. Given our focus on being debt free we didn’t want to spend a lot of money and therefore tried to be as frugal as possible. Of course having our debit card stolen and our account cleaned out made it even more frugal.

Anyway, here’s a few tips to help you make your next vacation a little more frugal:

Click to continue reading...

To be honest, I’m glad this week is almost behind me. Between trying to get my finances bank in order, recovering from my debit card being stolen, and trying to dig out of being off from work for 2 days, this as been a very busy week.

Just a few quick updates that you might be interested in:

Click to continue reading...

• I’m heading to the orthopedic doctor this afternoon to get a new and more comfortable cast (yeah!). My wrist is healing up well and is getting better each day. Thank you again for all of your thoughts and prayers.

I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but over the past 2 months I slowly stopped tracking my budget. I made minimum payments on my debt and even forgot to make a couple of payments and incurred late penalties. To top things off, I screwed up and accidentally moved a little to much money into savings and incurred a couple of overdraft fees in my checking account. I am a little embarrassed to admit that my wife and I haven’t had a budget meeting in more than a month!

Click to continue reading...