Now my SHOPPING list and KIDS CLOTHING SIZES and LIBRARY BOOK IDEAS and DAILY TO-DO's are right with me all the time, and as long as I don't leave my I-pod at home, my grocery list is always handy.
Showing posts with label Favorite Things. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Favorite Things. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Favorite Things: Lists and Apps
I'm a fan of lists.... I like making goals and checking off my progress. I also LOVE paper. I've had such a hard time switching to any sort of digital lists, I just don't feel the same sense of accomplishment, BUT paper is easy to lose and to forget. So I wanted to share with you one of my most-used Apps: WUNDERLIST! It's free and it's great... you can customize as many lists as you want and CHECK THEM OFF AS YOU GO! I love it.... once checked it grays out and goes to the bottom.
Now my SHOPPING list and KIDS CLOTHING SIZES and LIBRARY BOOK IDEAS and DAILY TO-DO's are right with me all the time, and as long as I don't leave my I-pod at home, my grocery list is always handy.
Now my SHOPPING list and KIDS CLOTHING SIZES and LIBRARY BOOK IDEAS and DAILY TO-DO's are right with me all the time, and as long as I don't leave my I-pod at home, my grocery list is always handy.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
What I Wish I'd Known...
I am NOT a "B.O." as FlyLady would put it! (For those non-fly-ers, that's a Born Organizer). I am NOT one of those people that cleaning and organization come by naturally. I'm more the "borrow-the-brilliant-ideas-off-Pinterest" kinda girl. I also borrow a lot of ideas from friends, and today I'm going to share with you my FAVORITE MOP!
Wow, this is SO exciting! (no sarcasm intended... wink, wink) But it MIGHT actually be exciting if you were like I was....
I HATED MOPPING! It takes forever, the floor feels sticky afterwards, I get super paranoid about my kids dropping ANYTHING on the floor for the next few hours, or minutes, since that seems to be how long it takes before it's DIRTY again. Argh! Not to mention... What is that YUCKY SMELL coming from my mop that I made sure was thoroughly cleaned between use, thoroughly dried, and nicely soaped up for the job? This is why I HATED mopping!
Well in our last move this WONDERFUL woman from church came to help us clean and she is a cleaning GENIUS. She was smart, and brought her own mop ;) After watching her work her magic I knew it would be one of the FIRST purchase I made when we came to Alabama.
You can order it from Amazon here, or I just picked mine up from Wal-Mart for under $20. I LOVE this mop! One side can catch all the dust bunnies and the other side can scrub. Best part: the cover is VELCRO, so when it gets dirty, you pull it apart and rinse it out with some soap in your sink then throw it back on to finish the job. THEN, when you are DONE, you throw it in your washer and hang it up to dry! SOOOOO EASY!
The HANDLE is nice and LONG and has a great PIVOT joint at the bottom so you can maneuver it really easily. It's so easy to get out and use that I can have my room mopped in less than 20 minutes, setup and cleanup included.
For the Cleaner I did a hack on the Swiffer WetJet "Open Window Fresh Scent" bottle. I just took some pliers and popped off the white cap then screwed on a standard squirt bottle sprayer and it fit PERFECTLY and the smell is WONDERFUL! (Goodbye Pine-Sol, not sorry to see you go.) The kids love to spray the floor for me then we just mop over the Swiffer spray trail and if they get a little TOO much spray down, we'll mop over with a water spray after.
I love it! Mopping now makes me HAPPY! My floors feel cleaner, my house smells AMAZING and it's FUN to do!
Wow, this is SO exciting! (no sarcasm intended... wink, wink) But it MIGHT actually be exciting if you were like I was....
I HATED MOPPING! It takes forever, the floor feels sticky afterwards, I get super paranoid about my kids dropping ANYTHING on the floor for the next few hours, or minutes, since that seems to be how long it takes before it's DIRTY again. Argh! Not to mention... What is that YUCKY SMELL coming from my mop that I made sure was thoroughly cleaned between use, thoroughly dried, and nicely soaped up for the job? This is why I HATED mopping!
Well in our last move this WONDERFUL woman from church came to help us clean and she is a cleaning GENIUS. She was smart, and brought her own mop ;) After watching her work her magic I knew it would be one of the FIRST purchase I made when we came to Alabama.
You can order it from Amazon here, or I just picked mine up from Wal-Mart for under $20. I LOVE this mop! One side can catch all the dust bunnies and the other side can scrub. Best part: the cover is VELCRO, so when it gets dirty, you pull it apart and rinse it out with some soap in your sink then throw it back on to finish the job. THEN, when you are DONE, you throw it in your washer and hang it up to dry! SOOOOO EASY!
The HANDLE is nice and LONG and has a great PIVOT joint at the bottom so you can maneuver it really easily. It's so easy to get out and use that I can have my room mopped in less than 20 minutes, setup and cleanup included.
For the Cleaner I did a hack on the Swiffer WetJet "Open Window Fresh Scent" bottle. I just took some pliers and popped off the white cap then screwed on a standard squirt bottle sprayer and it fit PERFECTLY and the smell is WONDERFUL! (Goodbye Pine-Sol, not sorry to see you go.) The kids love to spray the floor for me then we just mop over the Swiffer spray trail and if they get a little TOO much spray down, we'll mop over with a water spray after.
I love it! Mopping now makes me HAPPY! My floors feel cleaner, my house smells AMAZING and it's FUN to do!
Monday, April 14, 2014
My Favorite Things - Budgeting
I came into our marriage MONEY STUPID! My first experience with a budget was when my mother-in-law sat down Ben and I and wrote out a basic list of the money we make and the bills we would have. What?! Money just doesn't appear? It doesn't just cover everything you need when you want? Really, I just hadn't THOUGHT about it. She was the beginning of my thinking. Since then I have thought a LOT about it and tried a LOT of different things to make our money work for us and it has been HORRIBLE!
Luckily, there are much smarter people out there, and with a lot of help and good influences I think I've finally found it... you know, the way to look at a budget and feel empowered, not stressed. So in hopes that any of you out there might be MONEY STUPID like I was, maybe my experience can help.
My money journey:
So I told you about my first budget already, it was kept like a checkbook, just paper lists. For the next SEVERAL years, I used Quicken, which was great, because I could show my husband EXACTLY "where all the money went." But it stunk as a budget program, and I always seemed to come up short.
Then my sister-in-law told me about some finance books she'd read in High School. They actually MADE all the students take a personal finance class... genius! So I read those books... the first was The Richest Man in Babylon. It was great on a conceptual basis and I'd definitely recommend it. The next one was what really changed my mindset and that was Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover. So many principles rang so true and the stories were very motivational. He outlined the steps to getting started and highlighted amazing stories of people with INCREDIBLE debt who got out of it at unnatural speeds.
The Ramsey method is that you start by telling your money where to go... also called a zero-based budgeting system. He says to use CASH in ENVELOPES. You take the money, put it in the right budget envelope until you have 0 left. When the money is gone, you're done spending. You then build a $1000 EMERGENCY FUND so you can stop going into debt with every bump in the road. I LOVED this method, but found cash in envelopes a hassle, not very efficient, confusing, and HARD to TRACK.
So, I still used his concepts but I found different ways of implementing them. I found this video VERY HELPFUL, and if you are NEW to BUDGETING, this is a GREAT place to START:
These things worked, but not perfectly, and I was still frustrated. Which led me to YNAB! OH MY GOODNESS... it SERIOUSLY is the VERY BEST BUDGETING TOOL I have every found! The concept was similar to Ramsey, but the software is amazing!
Here are the YNAB Rules:
1) Give Every Dollar a Job (aka zero-based budgeting)
2) Save for a Rainy Day
3) Roll w/ the Punches - By far THE BEST RULE EVER
4) Live on Last Month's Income - This one right here is PEACE OF MIND
I've been using it for 9 months now and LOVE it! It has a month FREE TRIAL, after that, yes, you pay for it, but you pay ONCE... no subscription, no yearly fee. And I swear, you'll probably save the amount of the software in the FIRST month you pay for it! Oh ya, and it sync's to your Iphone, so you can see what money you have, when you are out on the go.
I know I'm a dork that I get so excited about this, but the feeling I get when I do my finances now is worth getting excited about! I'd be happy to help you out if you decide you want to try it.... happy budgeting :) If you wanna give it a try, you can use this link and get a $6 discount:
YNAB Discount Link
Luckily, there are much smarter people out there, and with a lot of help and good influences I think I've finally found it... you know, the way to look at a budget and feel empowered, not stressed. So in hopes that any of you out there might be MONEY STUPID like I was, maybe my experience can help.
My money journey:
So I told you about my first budget already, it was kept like a checkbook, just paper lists. For the next SEVERAL years, I used Quicken, which was great, because I could show my husband EXACTLY "where all the money went." But it stunk as a budget program, and I always seemed to come up short.
Then my sister-in-law told me about some finance books she'd read in High School. They actually MADE all the students take a personal finance class... genius! So I read those books... the first was The Richest Man in Babylon. It was great on a conceptual basis and I'd definitely recommend it. The next one was what really changed my mindset and that was Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover. So many principles rang so true and the stories were very motivational. He outlined the steps to getting started and highlighted amazing stories of people with INCREDIBLE debt who got out of it at unnatural speeds.
The Ramsey method is that you start by telling your money where to go... also called a zero-based budgeting system. He says to use CASH in ENVELOPES. You take the money, put it in the right budget envelope until you have 0 left. When the money is gone, you're done spending. You then build a $1000 EMERGENCY FUND so you can stop going into debt with every bump in the road. I LOVED this method, but found cash in envelopes a hassle, not very efficient, confusing, and HARD to TRACK.
So, I still used his concepts but I found different ways of implementing them. I found this video VERY HELPFUL, and if you are NEW to BUDGETING, this is a GREAT place to START:
These things worked, but not perfectly, and I was still frustrated. Which led me to YNAB! OH MY GOODNESS... it SERIOUSLY is the VERY BEST BUDGETING TOOL I have every found! The concept was similar to Ramsey, but the software is amazing!
Here are the YNAB Rules:
1) Give Every Dollar a Job (aka zero-based budgeting)
2) Save for a Rainy Day
3) Roll w/ the Punches - By far THE BEST RULE EVER
4) Live on Last Month's Income - This one right here is PEACE OF MIND
I've been using it for 9 months now and LOVE it! It has a month FREE TRIAL, after that, yes, you pay for it, but you pay ONCE... no subscription, no yearly fee. And I swear, you'll probably save the amount of the software in the FIRST month you pay for it! Oh ya, and it sync's to your Iphone, so you can see what money you have, when you are out on the go.
I know I'm a dork that I get so excited about this, but the feeling I get when I do my finances now is worth getting excited about! I'd be happy to help you out if you decide you want to try it.... happy budgeting :) If you wanna give it a try, you can use this link and get a $6 discount:
YNAB Discount Link
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