Pantry clutter can happen to anyone. It’s when you look at a shelf full of food and think, “There’s nothing to eat.”
Tool Lending
Via unconsumption:
“The Northeast Portland Tool Library is a non profit lending library of tools located at NE 20th and Killingsworth Sreet. Open on Saturdays and Wednesdays, the checkout of the tools is free; it works just like a lending library for books. It began a year ago with 100 members and has now exceeded a membership of 500 patrons. On any given day, over a 100 tools are checked out and being used within the community.”
(Thanks, MAKE)
Happy Canada Day! To Celebrate: Toronto PearBudget Meetup!
There’s a very good chance I’ll be in Toronto within the next month. I’d love to meet up with any of you in the area. We can talk about budgeting, eat some Tim Hortons’ (my treat … that’s one less receipt for you to enter!), and generally have a good time. Send me an e-mail (charlie at pearbudget.com) and we’ll work out the details. Thanks!
The Basics Behind a Budget That Works
Link: The Basics Behind a Budget That Works
If Real Simple weren’t so focused on getting you to buy stuff to make your life simpler (?!), it might come close to being as good as Simple Mom.
If that last sentence didn’t make sense (I’m only one coffee into the morning), let me rephrase it: SimpleMom.net is an absolutely awesome blog, and if you aren’t reading it, you should be. Ostensibly, it’s easy to lump it into the “mommyblog” grouping of blogs, but it’s about so much more than that, even if you aren’t a mom (or a dad), you should check it out.
Anyway, Simple Mom’s post from today, The Basics Behind a Budget That Works is outstanding. She’s written about budgeting and personal finance before, but this post is her best yet. It’s easily in the top 5 blog posts I’ve ever read about personal finance, and is certainly the best I’ve read on how to get started with budgeting. As much as I love Get Rich Slowly and The Simple Dollar, neither one has really nailed budgeting yet. Simple Mom completely blew it out of the water.
One point she makes that I’ll just highlight, as it’s rare to see someone explicitly state it: if you’re trying to create a perfect, master budget, you’ll almost certainly give up in frustration. Instead, you should be building a series of monthly budgets … each based on the budget from the month before, but each unique to the situations you’ll be facing in the coming month. Nobody ever talks about this, but it’s an important distinction to make. This is, in part, why we don’t let you budget way in advance within PearBudget. The furthest you can go into the future is next month. Because things (priorities, needs, situations) change, if you’ve set up something far into the future, the ground’s liable to shift underneath your feet, leaving you unsteady and ill-prepared. Your own “preparedness” can end up being a big liability.
Anyway, you should check it out: The Basics Behind a Budget That Works.
You have enough.
From Derek Sivers:
Companies spend a fortune begging you to want their stuff. I won’t add to that noise.
Retail therapy is the worst kind.
I’d like to get 100 parrots and teach them to say “It won’t make you happy!” — then let them loose in shopping malls, big electronics stores, and car lots.
Then, when people are considering spending thousands of dollars on a giant TV, or going deeply in debt with a new car, a surprising squawk might shock them back to their senses.
The quickest way to double your income is to halve your expenses. Any study of happiness will tell you it’s best to actively appreciate what you’ve got.
Emergency Binder!
If you happen to have some downtime (like, oh, if you’re waiting for PearBudget to move to its new server), you might take a minute to check out a new (free) project we’ve started up, Emergency Binder!
As you’ve probably guessed, it’s a resource where you can gather important documents, records, and instructions for how to handle an emergency. For example, if a pipe bursts in your home, does everyone know how to shut off the water supply line? If you need to leave your home, do you have a coordinated meetup spot where you can all rendezvous? Do you have the name and contact info for your college-aged child’s Resident Advisor / Landlord / Dean of Students? All of those are things that Emergency Binder! deals with.
Emergency Binder! is young (about a week old), but it’s already got some good stuff. And, as I mentioned, it’s completely free. Check it out!
Moving to a New Server
A quick note on our downtime: Our hosting provider, Media Temple, is currently in the process of transitioning PearBudget from it’s current “cluster” to a new “cluster” — this should make the site more stable, and faster (although I’m not sure how to interpret “faster” … will it be noticeable to humans? Or just to computers? We’ll find out.).
Anyway, I contacted them to see why the site was down during this transition. They weren’t sure, and noted that, normally, sites are moved from one cluster to another without any downtime. Once the migration is complete, PearBudget should be back online without any problems. If there are any issues, we’ll troubleshoot them.
We’ll keep you updated with the PearBudget server migration. Hopefully, it won’t be long, and we’ll be on a nice, fast, stable machine. Thanks, as always, for your patience.
Great, great, great post from Rachel, at Small Notebook:
Great, great, great post from Rachel, at Small Notebook: How to Move in 6 Weeks or 6 Days, and Keep Your Sanity. This is something Sarah and I especially need right now, as we’re going to be moving in … oh … 3 weeks, and the urgency of that hasn’t yet hit me. Thanks to Rachel’s post, though, I think it just did.
Great PearBudget recommendation from Kirsty
Had a great recommendation from Kirsty, at Momedy, in her post Easy Peasy Money Management. She described PearBudget as “incredibly intuitive, non-intimidating, friendly and easy.”
Thanks for the recommendation, Kirsty!
Preparing Your Information for Disaster
Preparing Your Information for Disaster
Trent has, as usual, a terrific post on how to prepare a binder of key information for your family. I’d strongly encourage you to read it, and to put it into practice.
In fact, I’m going to need an accountability partner to make our own family’s binder. Let’s do it together! Interested? Send me a note on Twitter, @charliepark.