Gather Little by Little

My wife loves working outside and gardening. As a child, she worked with her parents on their home vegetable garden and has always had a vegetable garden of some kind since we purchased our first home. Until now, we never had much room for a large vegetable garden. Prior to this year, we used alternative methods which included a container vegetable garden and square foot gardening. Those worked well of course, but never really yielded a large amount of vegetables, at least not enough for canning which is something I’d really like to do. I love canned green beans and corn.

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Okay, I am going to lay it all out and see what you think.

We own a home in another state. I am gainfully employed and making a decent wage – at least for us – in our new location. We are coming up on fourteen months since our move and we have had little or no interest in our home. When we last refinanced, our home was 90% mortgaged. We used most of the money from our second mortgage to improve the home just before the subprime mortgage crisis hit.

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This is a guest post from the blogger behind Studenomics a personal finance blog that offers common sense advice for college students and recent graduates. Studenomics is the ultimate resource for young people looking for advice on how to survive this current recession, grow their careers, manage their finances, and still be able to enjoy the weekends.

How many times in the last 8 months have you used the excuse, “I would attend church today if I didn’t have so much homework.” Well guess what? You can longer use this excuse for not attending church since college is out for the summer. I’m realistic and I know many college students won’t read the Bible daily or attend church services regularly, but there are many ways you could help your local church.

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I remember the first time I saw my father use an ATM or automated teller machine. I can still remember the name of the bank my parents used and picture the whole ATM setup in my mind – right down to the now-ancient looking digital numbers on the screen. I was quite inquisitive about how a machine could spit out cash. I mean, how much cash must have been in that metal and plastic box? Or did it print the money on the spot? Was there a tube leading from the bank vault that kept the ATM loaded with cash? Why was there a $200 withdrawal limit? Why were ATM bills so crisp? What if I watched closely and figured out my dad’s pin number?

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77 comments were made to my YNAB Pro giveaway post. I visited random.org and the random number it provided was: 14. The 14th commentator was:

Linda Jacobsen who is the winner of the free copy of YNAB Pro! Congratulations Linda!

For those that didn’t win, don’t despair.  For the next week, you can purchase a copy of YNAB or YNAB Pro and receive a 10% using the discount code: MAYDAY. This code is only valid through Monday, 5/18. You won’t find discounts to YNAB products often.

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My fellow blogging and non-blogging citizens: I write here today, grateful for the trust bestowed up on me to host this 1st edition of the revived Carnival of Money Stories. First and foremost, I welcome you to the carnival and also  to Gather Little by Little. Similar words of welcome have been spoken throughout blogging history: during rising tides of prosperity and still waters of peace…

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Photo by: My wife

First and foremost, Happy Mother’s day to all of Mom’s out there. I sincerely hope you have a wonderful day and that your children and significant others show their appreciation for everything that you do and have done! If not…well, take a few days off and I’ll bet they will real quick ;-)

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I wrote about a using a firewall account with ING Direct sometime back. Using a firewall account is a concept I use to insulate my ING savings and ING checking accounts from the outside world. Any income I receive comes to my ING firewall account and then I transfer it to the appropriate ING savings account. My firewall account has a $0 balance 99% of the time or at least it did…

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“Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. The man who had received the five talents went at once and put his money to work and gained five more. So also, the one with the two talents gained two more. But the man who had received the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.

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I’ve been on a quest for the past few months to to find a better way to manage my blog accounting for my blogs and business accounting for my Empty Cabin Media blog consulting business. I’ve been using a mixture of spreadsheets which were marginal, but didn’t offer some of the automation I was looking for such as invoice creation, payment tracking, and integration with Paypal.

Thanks to an article in Daily Blog Tips I discovered Outright and subsequently Freshbooks.

Outright.com

Outright.com is simply: simple online bookkeeping software and offers the following capabilities:

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• Tracks sales and business expenses