PearBudget beautiful, simple budgeting. (This is our blog.)

For those of you who celebrate Christmas, hopefully there’s a “Christmas” category in your budget, and hopefully you’ve been setting aside some money for it so it won’t come out of the blue and throw everything out of whack.

But for those of you who’ve had to divert funds to other categories, or who weren’t thinking about December back in March when you set up your budget, Tsh at SimpleMom.net has some great advice, both for this year and for next.

For next year, she notes “This year, jot down every. single. expense associated with your holidays as you spend money, and next year, use that as a basic template for your holiday budget.”

For this year, she has a number of suggestions that are worth reading. Her whole piece is here — Plan Your Peaceful Christmas: Prepare the Budget — and is well worth checking out, especially if Christmas has been totally off your radar up until now.

One of my favorite sites for eclectic advice is Ask MetaFilter. In a span of about 10 minutes, you can get everything from “help me find this book from when I was a kid” to “I’m having this problem with my estranged sister … how do I handle it?” to “help me find movies where the good guy turns out to be a bad guy” to “how do you get your kids to sleep through the night?” Also, part of the appeal is that the commenters are thoughtful, critical thinkers who often have very good insights on the problems at hand.

Today, there was a good post: “How do I shop and cook to maximize my grocery budget?”

I won’t bring the answers over here apart from saying that there are a lot of votes for the Dave Ramsey Special (beans and rice), and a couple of good comments that suggest doubling the size you cook, then saving the second serving for a later meal. Also, there’s this helpful heuristic: Dried → Canned → Fresh → Processed. I feel like there’s a mnemonic waiting to be created for that one. Debt Can Feel Prettybad? Debit Cards something something? I’m not sure.

ANYWAY, go check out the question on MetaFilter if you’re looking for good cheap food options.

What’s a day in my life look like? What are the things that, as an entrepreneur, I think about? Those were the questions posed to me by Dr. Ram Ganeshan, operations professor at the Mason School of Business at The College of William and Mary.

In Dr. Ganeshan’s blog, Operations Buzz (designed by the great Veerle Peters), he investigates what it takes to run “smart and sustainable business operations,” and he asked me a few questions about what my day looks like.

You can check out my answers here: A Day in the Life: Pearbudget’s Charlie Park. In it, you’ll read a bit about how we started, some advice I have for budding entrepreneurs, and — oooh — a little bit about what I think about Mint and other competing services.

Thanks to Ram for the interview and the piece!