Gather Little by Little

Photo by: Tracy O

I recently wrote an article answering the question: Is the economic stimulus package a loan? That article stimulated some discussion between my wife and I about what we will do with the money when we receive it. For us, how we will spend it is a pretty big decision. See, we have 6 kids and based on the Economic Stimulus Payment Calculator we’ll be receiving $3,000 ($1,200 for us and $300 for each child). Some of the ideas we came up with include:

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Photo by: Andy Welsh

This article is part of an ongoing series called Money Saving Monday. Each Monday, I share tips and techniques you can use to start saving money.

Instead of sharing one focused tip with you as I normally do, I’m going to share 6 completely random things that I do (and you can too) to save money and reduce overall expenses.

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I’ve been a fan of Michael W. Smith for a very long time. The very first song I heard from him was Friends. Michael has so many powerful and beautiful songs, it’s hard to choose just one favorite, but if I had to pick, would be my favorite.

Below are the lyrics and you can listen to Michael sing it here.

Jesus, I’ve forgotten the words that You have spoken
Promises that burned within my heart have now grown dim
With a doubting heart I follow the paths of earthly wisdom
Forgive me for my unbelief
Renew the fire again

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Photo of Taipei 101 by umm

The following is a guest post by Becky at Family and Finances, a blog about finances and saving money. If you like this post, consider subscribing to her feed via RSS.

Remember the tech stock boom and, later, the bust? Doesn’t it bear some resemblance to the housing boom and, now, bust? In both cases, investors put too many eggs in one basket, and that basket broke.

Obviously, the key to successful investing is to diversify your investments. Here are some tips:

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Photo by: rachel_thecat

The past two weeks have been nuts for my family and I. We just can’t seem to shake being sick. When one of us gets better, seems someone else gets sick. My wife was up most of the night last night with a migraine headache due what we think may be a sinus infection. I was sick the previous week, and our kids have been sick off an on in between. Fortunately it seems the kids are past it, as they’ve been healthy overall for the past few days. I’m praying that once my wife gets past this one we’ll be past all of the sickness mess!

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I previously shared with you that my wife and I decided to purchase her a replacement engagement ring through Amazon.com and we were anxiously awaiting its arrival. We were both excited to see how it would look, but at the same time nervous that it might not be what we expected. After all, we had paid a considerable amount of money for a ring we hadn’t even seen yet.

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Debtkid recently shared his dumbest purchase ever and is asking others to “fess up”. As further incentive, he’s giving away his dumbest purchase ever. Unfortunately, my dumbest purchase ever isn’t near as cheap or small. Sure wish it was…

Prelude to the dumbest purchase ever

I had never been camping before in my life until I met my wife. Her family had been camping for years and as I started seeing her more frequently and we began dating “steady” I started to go camping with her and her family to the beach. At first I really hated it. Not the camping so much, but the sand. I wasn’t much of a beach person at the time. I hated the fact that the sand just plain gets everywhere…and I mean everywhere. Funny though, after a few trips, I learned to love it and looked forward to the trips.

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Photo by: saturnism

My wife is involved in a few “mommies” forums on the internet and ran across a discussion about the upcoming economic stimulus package. Many of the ladies were saying it was a loan and not really a rebate at all. I had read/heard similar things while browsing the internet as well. Before I answer the question, let’s understand a little more about the package and it’s intent:

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This article is part of my ongoing Money Saving Monday series. You can read the rest of the series here. Have a tip you would like to share? Then contact me!

I’ve written about kids eat free deals before and how given we have 6 children we are the constant prowl for restaurants offering kids eat free deals. One of the restaurants we found recently is Dickeys BBQ. They offer a free kids meal with the purchase of each adult meal on Sunday afternoons. Unlike a few other kids eat free restaurants we’ve ran across, the food is awesome!

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Photo by: Indy Charlie

If you haven’t seen the movie Amazing Grace, I’d highly recommend it. It’s a touching story of a man who makes it is mission in life to stop slavery and how the song came to be. Amazing Grace has always been my favorite song, every since I can remember. No matter how many times I hear it, I enjoy it.

Chris Tomlin’s version from the movie Amazing Grace is particularly beautiful. You can listen to it here on YouTube. Below are the lyrics, which I am pretty sure your all familiar with :-) I hope you had a wonderful Sunday!

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