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We have an old house. It’s either 100 years old or very close to it. The last few winters, it has done very well with keeping in the heat. It always amazed me how well insulated the house was. This year is different and I’m not sure why. I don’t have any bills yet to back this up, but I can tell things are different this year with how often the heat turns on and how quickly the temperature drops when the heat turns off. It also feels drafty.
The main thing that we do every year is put plastic on certain windows. That’s basically it because our home already has blown-in insulation and we have a few trees that are nice windbreakers.
Wait a minute. Our neighbor cut down some trees this summer. Could that be affecting us even though the trees were a distance from our house?
According to the USDA:
The reduction in wind speed behind a windbreak modifies the environmental conditions in this sheltered zone. The sheltered zone extends as far as ten to fifteen times the height of the windbreak downwind from the windbreak.
Wow. Those trees were close enough and they were in the right position to block the wind. I was sad to see them go to begin with (there was an owl that liked to hang out on the top of one of them), but now it could be related to our home not being able to fight the winter winds like it used to. I guess we were spoiled and we didn’t even realize it.
I have a few ideas of things we could try to help combat the extra wind this winter. One is to create a small windbreak using snow. That’ll be some good exercise for me and a fun project for me and my son. Doing that should help to at least keep the basement warmer. Then I am going to borrow a trick from a commenter at Lifehacker. To find drafts in your home, burn a stick of incense and take it around your doors and windows. The smoke will change directions when you go by a draft. I can definitely feel them – it’s time to find them and seal them up!
For our future dream home, we are definitely going to incorporate a windbreak.
Take that big bad credit card debt! We finally reached a big milestone. Two years and 9 months after starting our debt reduction journey – we have paid off over $30,000 of our debt.
That brings us to a debt total of $7,299. I’m thinking we may be able to get under the $7K mark by the end of this month. We do have some bills that can arrive at any time (medical-related). If we have extra money and those haven’t come yet, that extra money is going towards our debt. We have our savings account to pull from if needed to pay those bills when they finally arrive.
I do still have weaknesses in spending and one of them is Christmas. I love giving gifts and buying for Toys for Tots. We have a budget in place, but if they money isn’t in our account – there is no way I can spend it. That’s my safety net during Christmas.
I’m not sure what the next milestone will be. Maybe it’ll be when it’s completely paid off 
I have to thank Frugal Babe for this awesome tip on how you can help a school and it doesn’t cost you any extra.
Since we have a son in school, we are familiar with the Box Tops for Education program. You clip the coupons from products that have them. Give them to your school and then they will receive 10 cents for each one submitted. We have collected some for the school, but we mostly make things from scratch now and we rarely come across the box tops. But there is another we can help.
If you go to BoxTops4Education.com, you can sign up and then shop at their marketplace. A portion of your purchase will go towards the school of your choice. There are many retailers in their marketplace – maybe one of the places you like to shop online is listed.
If you were going to shop there anyway, it’s an easy way to help a school.
If I was more creative, I would try right now to make a poem about how I love the internet. I’ll spare you. Instead, I’ll just share some thoughts I have had lately about the internet.
Sometimes I am very thankful we have come so far technology-wise to have the internet. There is so much information at your fingertips. You think back to the time depicted on Little House on the Prairie (one of my favorite shows) and if something went wrong and you didn’t have a solution, you had to ask around town to see if anyone else knew. If you didn’t have luck there, you could try the next town which could take a while to do. With the internet, you do a search and chances are good that you can find something regarding what you are looking for within a few minutes.
For instance, we had a bad smell in our basement. I did a search on Google and came across a few home repair sites that said the smell was likely due to the water evaporating in our open drain (normally there is a layer of water in it to keep the gases below from escaping into the basement). Just pour some water down there to replenish the layer. Viola – problem fixed and no calls to a plumber.
I started thinking about it some more, and we have saved quite a bit of money by trying to find solutions from the internet. Word of caution, though. Sometimes it can cost you. We had to pay money because we followed some advice about a water heater that was knocking. It ended up being bad advice and we could have really broken our heater. But we lucked out and only had to replace one part that ran about $15. I’m really cautious now and do not stop searching with the solution I first come across. I check multiple sites.
For learning about things, books from the library are great. But the internet has some great resources that combine videos and written instruction. My son and I are learning American Sign Language and we came across this awesome site: Michigan State University ASL Browser. For more structured lessons, we found the ASL University.
To help our son with his learning, I am thankful there are sites out there with printable worksheets. Here’s a few of my favorite sites for free ones:
TLSBooks.com
SchoolExpress.com
Teachnology.com
Oh, and the recipe sites! Or Google Books! It has been suggested in the past that we cut our internet out of the budget to save money. We couldn’t do it because my employment depends on it. But even if we could cancel internet we wouldn’t. Now that I am really thinking about it, it has saved us more money than we have paid for it ($25/month).
When it comes to our holiday finances, we like to have a budget in mind. That’s why we set a budget of $150 for this year. I had to say it was tentative to allow for other things that could pop up.
One such thing would be being approached by other relatives to split the cost for a big gift for another relative. Since we live far away, the gift is already determined by the time we are contacted. Same goes with the price. In the past, we haven’t had a say in the gift selection and are only contacted to contribute money.
It’s a very awkward position to be in. If we contribute, we spend a lot more than we wanted to spend and it doesn’t leave anything for getting gifts we may have had in mind. If we don’t contribute, then we get a bad rap because the others have to pay more since we didn’t contribute (it is often worded that we all have to contribute a fair share to make it work).
We haven’t heard about anything happening for Christmas this year. Usually we hear sometime after Thanksgiving. It is tough being a frugal family when others are not as frugal. I know there are a lot of frugal readers out there that may find themselves in a similar situation. How do you handle it? Do you contribute to keep the peace or do you have a good response to decline participation?
This year, we are scaling back our Christmas spending. In the past, we’d have a general budget in mind and if we found some great deals that just meant that we could buy more gifts. Not this year. We will still have a budget in mind but if we get some great deals, we will take the money saved and put it towards our debt or stash it in our savings account.
Our overall philosophy is that gifts need to be useful and have a good lifespan to them. So many times we have purchased things for our son that were only played with a few times and then forgotten. But there have been successful purchases (mega bloks purchased years ago are still used at least every other day by our son). We will take more time to think through every purchase.
Our tentative budget? $150. I say tentative because other things may pop up. More about that tomorrow. This budget does not include purchases for Toys for Tots or anything like that. It is only for gifts for our family and friends.
It will be tight, but I think it can definitely be done. What about you? Are you scaling back holiday spending this year?
I don’t know how many times I’ve called my credit card companies and asked them to quit sending me junk mail about new cards and offers. It’s a waste of paper and it’s a waste of electricity to shred them all. I also get tons of new credit card offers in the mail, thanks to our new business.
This article from MSN made me smile:
Expect Less Junk Mail as Marketers Cut Back
Not only are credit card companies scaling back, so are some other companies that send out catalogs. That makes me happy because so many catalogs received just go in the trash upon arrival without even looking through them. We’re in debt – we don’t need to look at them! Especially those catalogs with neat doohickeys that look so cool but would probably only be used a few times and then collect dust.
Although I love getting mail every day, we were getting way too much junk in our mail. It was becoming too wasteful and getting off their lists was sometimes impossible.
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My Debt
- Original Debt: $97,293.06
- Paid: $1,927.89
- Remaining: $95,365.17
- Emergency Fund: $1100
- Broken Down
- Line of Credit 2: $0.00
- Line of Credit 1: $0.00
- Credit Card 1: $0.00
- Credit Card 2: $245.00
- Credit Card 3: $405.00
- Credit Card 6: $1,785.00
- Credit Card 7: $2,381.17
- Consolidation Loan: $11,000.00
- Credit Card 10: $14,519.00
- Auto Loan 1: $16,093.00
- Credit Card 11: $23,873.00
- Auto Loan 2: $25,064.00
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- Beachgirl’s Budget Blog
- Becoming and Staying Debt Free
- Boston Gals Open Wallet
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- Dual Income No Kids
- Everybody Loves Your Money
- Financial Hack
- Free Money Finance
- From the Brink of Bankruptcy
- Generation X Finance
- GRACEful Retirement
- Grad Money Matters
- It’s Your Money
- Josephsangl.com
- Kick Debt’s Butt
- Lazy Man and Money
- Low Income Life
- Make Love Not Debt
- Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge
- Mighty Bargain Hunter
- Money, Matter and More Musings
- My 1st Million at 33
- No Credit Needed
- One Million and Beyond
- Personal Finance Advice
- pfblogs.org
