It’s a Wrap – Baby Savings and One Car Households

TGIF! Have an awesome weekend everyone! I haven’t done a Friday wrap-up with awesome links in a loooong time (like years). And of course, it’s time I changed that.

I am a glutton for learning. I usually have 20 books checked out at the library at any given time, I am toying with the idea of taking some foreign language classes at a nearby college, and I have many hundreds of blogs in my RSS reader. I LOVE to learn and read about new stuff. That is what makes life so wonderful IMO. I am here to learn and absorb like a sponge. Lately that has been headed in the financial direction so many of my links will be to awesome financial resources and blogs.

The book that has recently changed my whole outlook on money and finances is first at bat. I have never been very responsible with money even though I have read tons of books about the issue. We don’t struggle to make ends meet but we can never manage to save much. For people who have two VERY old cars that could break down at any moment and who want to buy a house soon… this is not good.

At the library last month I picked up The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach and I am sooooo glad I did. The title almost put me off because I hate cheesy titles like that and I don’t aspire to be a millionaire either so it seemed like a waste of paper to me. It was the “automatic” part that made me check it out. In my job (I work from home) much of my income is passive… it is on autopilot. So the idea of set and it forget it is my kind of tactic. I ended up devouring the book in a couple hours an haven’t shut up about it since. It motivated me to reactivate my Mint account (which is a most awesome free money management program), encourage my husband to double his 401K contributions, set up a ING account for myself, and an IRA fund. The book not only demystified a lot of financial jargon that eluded me before … the automatic process that he recommends is spot on. I now have a habit of taking any income that comes to me and taking 12% off the top immediately… for our future.

The only thing that slightly bothered me while reading the book was that it was several years old and written before the 2008/09 financial mess. But alas he also wrote a book written last year called Start Over, Finish Rich which addresses finances in bad times. It is equally awesome.

Oh and if you are looking for good fiction books to read… I read an amazing one recently. Wither is a new trilogy that knocked my socks off. It is about a young girl who lives in the US after an attempt to genetically engineer humans so they are disease free, goes terribly wrong. A genetic mutation spread the world over now causes men to die at 25 and women to die at 20.

Okay… on to other links.

On Mint Life I spied the article Don’t Let Your Baby Blow Your Grocery Budget. It has some great advice that is pretty green too.. aka not buying that yucky processed baby food and not buying all the baby gadgets that are marketed to us.

On My Dollar Plan this morning is a great article titled 6 Surprising Benefits of the One Car Household. We went with one car for so long that even now we mostly use one car out of habit. Our second vehicle is parked 95% of the time and it saves us tons of money but there are other benefits to.

Did you know that people with cluttered and messy houses are typically the same people who have have messy finances? Yikes! Yesterday I picked up an ebook that I am actually enjoying quite a bit. I posted a link on my Facebook page along with a coupon code to get the book for 1.00. That deal is expired but you can get it for $2.00 at the moment. The book is Creating Your Perfect Cleaning Schedule. Ironically I was thinking the other day that I wanted a chore chart of some kind to check off loads of laundry and see a visual of my “success” when I manged to stay on top of it. This ebook has a couple printables and one of them is a checkbox list where you can check off each load of laundry to go in the washer and dryer. I ended up doing 5 loads yesterday! Still can’t see the bottom of the basement floor but hey.. progress is progress. Code: 200for2

LOVED this Slow Family Living Post: Do You Want to be Right or Connected? Powerful stuff.

The Artful Parent posted an awesome tutorial on making Leaf and fern print t-shirts. I have some blank tees that could really use some fern printing on them to spice them up! I so want to do this!

DealPulp is offering a  group buy deal on stainless steel cups. We have had some of the steel tumblers for years and we love them still. They are actually pretty hard to find so when I saw this deal I knew I had to share it. There is also a sale on BabyLegs until 9/6. Use code HALFOFF to get 50% off. That makes most pairs only $6. We had to get some of the candy corn BabyLegs.

And lastly the Nourished Kitchen is offering an awesome ecourse on How to Cook Real Food. Learn to prepare wholesome, traditional foods easily with this online course.

Spied any awesome articles or blog posts this week? Share below.