Gather Little by Little

As previously announced by Larry, aka GLBL guy, he recently sold his blog to a guy called The Financial Blogger. Well that guy is me, Mike, and The Financial Blogger is the name of my first blog. Selling a blog is a though decision to make for both the buyer and the seller. While Larry has to “leave a part of his life”, I am taking a risk that you won’t enjoy my articles as much as Larry’s. This is why I thought of introducing myself as my first article.

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Ecclesiastes 3 says:

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

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Wow! I received 231 contest entries: 165 via comments, and 66 via subscriptions with the secret phrase. Thanks to everyone that entered, and a very special thank you for all of the kind comments you left. They met a great deal to me.

Now, jumping right to it…

The Winners!

Winners were selected by placing everyone’s entries into a spreadsheet and using randomizer.org to generate a set of 8 random numbers for the 8 prize winners. Those numbers were matched to the rows in the spreadsheet and resulted in the following winners!

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Someday, I hope to own another home, but not until I am good and ready. We are quite happy with our rental situation at the moment.

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This article is part of the Ask the M-Network series. Over the past few weeks I received a few more questions, and my M-Nework partners have been kind enough to answer. Here’s the questions and the answers:

Should I rent rooms or the whole house?
Providing money to college students
College student with a tax refund
Rent or Buy?

Should I rent rooms or the whole house?

We need to increase our income, I am SAHM of 2 kids and dh is out of job for 5 months and we are running out of 6 month emergency funds. we have no major debts other than mortgage.

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In one of my first posts here at Gather Little by Little, I revealed that my personal finance history is not perfect. There have been some lessons that we had to learn the hard way . . . and there are certainly more lessons to come. I also said that I hoped to be honest with GLBL readers about our family financial journey. Today’s post is one such time that I thought about obscuring the truth a bit. I mean, it’s kind of embarrassing for a personal finance blogger to have a tax error, isn’t it? Here is the story:

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I was reading over on CNN Money this weekend that a health care market research company is seeing a growing trend in consumer use of credit cards to pay for medical bills. Due to high unemployment and ever increasing health care costs, consumers are reaching out to credit in order to continue receiving health care. Now, here’s the scariest part: CNN also reported that health care industry watchers see a multi-billion dollar opportunity to offer specialized “medical” credit cards!

If you haven’t figured this out already, let me explain this simply: “Consumers” (That’s you folks) visit the doctor one day, and potentially pay for that doctor’s visit for the next 1-5 years.

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After weeks of waiting, we’ve finally been able to enjoy the fruits of our labor from our home vegetable garden we planted back in May. As you can see in the picture above it’s very  different from the barren look it had in May. So far we’ve enjoyed a number of fresh spinach salads and more recently my second favorite garden vegetable: Squash. Unfortunately, it’s getting a little to hot for the spinach and it’s yellowing up quickly.  We’ve considered planting something in it’s place, any suggestions? Here’s a shot of our first two yellow squash:

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Neither I, nor my wife are all that excited about her taking a full-time job this fall, but she is going to do it anyway. There are a thousand reasons for her to take the job that she has been offered – and a thousand reason for her not to take the job.

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For

• The job will increase our household income by almost forty percent.
• The job will allow us to maximize our 401K employer match.
• The job will provide free private school education for our children.
• If she does not take the job, we would have to homeschool.

I’m pretty confident most if not all of you know that we’re currently in a recession or as the more politically correct like to call it: “An economic downturn”. When I say everyone, I mean everyone…even the crooks and scammers. During these lean times, con artists are out in masses looking for opportunities to scam people by offering what seems like legitamate solutions. These scammers aren’t just taking money from people, but from our economy as well.

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