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Refrigerator Energy Usage – How Much Electricity Does It Use?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I found my Kill-A-Watt buried in my bedroom closet amongst a bunch of other cords in a bag.  Over the past year several times I have longed to test the electricity usage but couldn't bring myself to buy another one.  Of course since I have it back in hand, I've been testing out some electrical components in our home to find out how much electricity they use, determined to find out why we… Read the rest

Helping Family Members

Recently in the personal finance blogosphere there have been some posts about helping family members financially, so I thought I'd share my own “helping family members” story. As I read through all these posts, of course I thought of my own family, and our current financial situation. We are not in a position to help anyone at this point in time, which makes it simple – I mean, we don't have to feel any inclination or obligation to help anyone.… Read the rest

Cash System for Groceries Week 3

Week 3: Monday September 21 to Sunday September 27 Last week we borrowed from this week's grocery budget and were left with $140.30 for the week. I was actually a little anxious sitting here entering the receipts, hoping we met our goal to stay under the budget amount.  Mr. A is the one buying the groceries and trying to stay under budget. I'm just reporting the facts. Here's how we did: Whoo!!  We did really good staying under the $140!… Read the rest

Did You File An Extension For Your Income Taxes?

If you did file an extension, and if you haven't already been working on getting your taxes prepared, you better get busy because your extension lasts only until October 15th.  Oh, I scared myself just for a minute there, I was hoping it was October, and not September. Whew. Anyway, I have worked on getting all of Mr. A's information from 2008 into Quickbooks in the past few weeks. Curse the day I chose to use Simple Start; I'm sure… Read the rest