the Waste-Not Blog

A lot of parents treat picky eaters like a given. Memes about kids who eat nothing but cheerios and chicken nuggets abound, as do memes about animal crackers all over the house and kids who aren't hungry at dinner but want a gogurt twenty minutes later. "Oh, yeah, mine do that too." "Have you tried letting him put ketchup on it?" "Wow, your kid eats raisins? You're lucky, the only fruit my kid eats is Welch's Fruit Snacks." So when people meet my kids and see their eating habits, they are... incredulous. Because my kids eat literally everything. I've had to stop them from picking up the baby's... used... animal crackers off the floor ("But we like baby slime!"). So how did this happen? Did I starve them for weeks so even the most repulsive foods became desirable? Do I put ketchup on everything? Did I hire a voodoo practitioner to pull the stuffing out of a voodoo doll with my kid's name on it, to make their stomachs fee...

What makes you want to reduce waste? There are loads of valid reasons to choose a lifestyle that utilizes all resources well. Maybe your rationale is an awareness of earth's limited resources or of endangered species threatened by human refuse or habitat loss. Maybe you have financial goals that just aren't being reached, and you want to plug the holes in your revenue stream, spending less and saving more. Maybe you want to be more self reliant and resilient, able to handle the disappearance of a few paychecks into the auto mechanic's pocket or a disruption of SNAP funds due to government shut down. Maybe your friends like to brag about how they saved money and you find the concept inspiring. Whatever your reason for reducing waste in your household, I am on board with it 100%! There's absolutely no possible bad reason for a Waste-Not Life! But, just as an investment advisor will tell you not to put all your financial eggs in one basket, I'm here to say that in ...

When I thought of the title for this blog post I had this little thrill, like, "Wow, if I can come up with something like financial fire drill, I must be really cut out for this blogging thing!" I started planning what I would do with the money when sponsors started paying to advertise on my site, and made a note that I really need to at least outline my planned cookbook. And then I googled financial fire drill and found out that literally every financial blogger talks about them, and so do most of the frugality bloggers. Oh well. What most people mean when they talk about a financial fire drill (outside the investment world) is to write down a plan of how to pare back expenses if you lose your job or have a major expense that suddenly arises. Things like having a list of non-essential monthly services that you need to cancel (like Netflix and your YMCA membership), knowing in advance how to apply for student loan deferment, and having some idea of what your minimum gro...

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."--Rahm Emanuel Don't worry. The above is the first time I have, and the only time I will, open a blog post with a quote from a left wing terrorist! And this post is not a manifesto regarding the use of tragic current events to further one's own political ends. No, the crises that I'm focusing on today are personal and specifically financial in nature. How can a crisis go to waste. you may ask? After all, for most people a crisis is something that happens , and must simply be survived. Your bread winner loses his/her job. The car needs a transmission. The power goes out for 36 hours. These things can and do happen through no fault of your own, and present major challenges that have to be overcome to the best of your ability; it can feel at the time as though anything beyond mere survival is asking too much. Furnace broken? You'll just have to fork over that $450 and live on old Rice-a-Roni and tuna fish for ...

What a summer we've had. Because the last dairy farm in the town of Manlius finally succumbed to low milk prices and high land taxes we had to move into our Fixer-Upper investment house before it was done being properly renovated. All the main living areas had electricity before we moved in or immediately thereafter (I put a light fixture in the kitchen ceiling and hooked up a couple of wall outlets within the first week or so), but we've spent the summer with no water save that provided by the garden hose--which is often suspiciously black , unfortunately. So potable water is obtained from WalMart's kiosk at a rate of $.35/gallon or sometimes from the church's taps if our supply happens to be low on Sunday. For most of the summer the hose produced water when the well's breaker was switched to "on," since the system hadn't been tested under pressure yet, so we tried to fill as many buckets as we could at a given time--which translated to being as spar...

It seems to be an oft-dreamt dream these days: a little homestead, or perhaps a small farm, enough to sustain a family and perhaps pay for its own land taxes. A few chickens, a dairy animal or three, maybe a team of work horses or oxen, some pigs to eat the vegetable scraps and be bacon . But with  a half acre empty lot in a subdivision selling for $40,000, and farms and their lands disappearing every day, it seems every day more like an unreachable fantasy. Who can afford to buy five or ten acres? To build a barn, let alone a house, that would satisfy local zoning ordinances and codes? With tens of thousands of dollars in college debt and good jobs seemingly always harder to come by, the average young couple who wants to farm faces a nearly impossible proposition. And so, as someone who has managed to put together the capital to start on the path to homesteading independence, I would like to present a fairly brief history of our life choices that led us where we are. We haven't...