Prepping for the Winter Heating Season

I know fall is just beginning, but my mind is edging toward winter. Why? I’m reviewing our family savings and looking at how much we’ve saved to buy heating oil. (We still have an oil furnace). And I don’t want a repeat of what happened last winter. There was a day,...

Fix the Small Stuff

When our family recently traveled to England, we stayed in a rented flat part of the time instead of a hotel. It was a real apartment, so we cooked in the owner’s kitchen, learned how to turn on the boiler for hot shower water, and figured out how to use their TV...

International Family Travel on a Budget

I’m over at Equifax’s Family Money blog talking about budget family travel—outside the United States. Yep, it’s actually possible, and our family lived to tell about it during a recent journey to England. Our daughters are 10 and 14, which we decided was a good age...

Saving Money Caring for Sick Pets

For the past two weeks, we’ve been running a “chicken urgent-care clinic” in our backyard. Well, sort of. We have three backyard chickens. Urban chickens are a huge deal here in Portland, Oregon. To our family, Lily, Ernestine and Cocoa are pets–just as if they...

7 Ways to Teach Kids to be Gift-Givers

Right now, there’s a chore list on our refrigerator with dollar values next to each one. “Wipe down lower kitchen cabinets: $1.” “Clean lower living room windows: $1.” And so on. What does that have to do with holiday gift-giving? Our kids are earning extra money to...

Un-Budgeting

My latest project: Un-budgeting. What does that mean? Un-complicating our family finances a little. I happen to be a very, um, detailed person about our family budget. So over the years, I have dived into it deeper and deeper, creating categories for everything under...

Saving Money on Textbooks

If you’ve got kids in high school or college, you’re facing the same unpleasant expense we are: Buying textbooks. As if tuition wasn’t already high enough, you also have to pay for books. Expensive books. That are used for only a few months. And get quickly dinged up....

Grappling with College Costs

At a recent holiday barbecue, a group of our friends had a “lively discussion” about college and what we expect for our kids. Collectively, our kiddos range in age from 7 to 14. Some of the main questions that came up: Should we encourage our kids get a general...