I know someone who has been out of work for four or five months. (He had been a big-wig at a financial/investment firm and got laid off.) I greeted him the other day when we were both out raking leaves and asked how the job hunt was going.
“It’s been hard. I can’t find anything,” he [...]

Generally, I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. I tend to decide to do things throughout the year and then just get on with them. New Year’s resolutions come with to much pressure and they’ve always seemed forced to me. So I tend to avoid them. But this year is different. I have one New Year’s [...]

Although we are financially secure and tend to make wise decisions regarding our finances, we still screw up sometimes and do things that we later regret. We’re human. However, while we may have regrets I choose to look at them as learning opportunities. Whatever we regret from this past year is something that can be [...]

In my neighborhood, all of the houses have two car garages. What amazes me is how few people use their garages for their intended purpose. When I go out for a run, I see so many garage doors open and the garages are full of stuff, not cars. There is barely room to walk in [...]

Last week I was out walking my dog on trash day. As I was walking past my neighbor’s trash heap (I say heap because they always have more trash than will fit in the trash can and they just pile it up on the road), I noticed a cute wire basket that was decorated with [...]

Lately I’ve noticed that I have become quite the potty mouth. I wasn’t always this way. In fact, I didn’t even learn any good swear words until I was in college and my roommate taught me all she knew. (Yes, I led a very sheltered life.) Unfortunately, I’ve taken her teachings to a new extreme [...]

One side effect of a down economy is that many retailers end up going bankrupt or closing unprofitable locations. They are then forced to liquidate their assets and have sales in order to clean out the stores. Very often, even the fixtures end up for sale. With more and more retailers going out of business, [...]

I recently finished reading Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Empower America. It’s a very good book if you’re interested in the environment, but it’s also a good read if you ever wonder what a “green economy” might look like. He covers a lot of [...]

A neighbor recently confided that she had just paid off the last of her substantial debt.
“I can’t tell you what a relief it is,” she said. “It’s like having my life back again. All that time I was living under the crushing pressure, and now I’m free. I don’t know how things got so [...]

As the years have gone on, I’ve grown tired of the Christmas retail madness. We are a family of all grown ups so gift buying is almost impossible. Everyone tends to buy what they need and want throughout the year, leaving little left for Christmas except an exchange of gift cards. (Which is kind of [...]