Frugal Living
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6 Easy appetizers you can make with pantry staples
Are you planning a get-together or need something to bring to a holiday gathering? I find that planning and purchasing the ingredients for appetizers can be fun but also a bit overwhelming because there are so many amazing recipes! Inevitably I find myself at the grocery store buying expensive ingredients I don’t usually use – and so may not use all of. This week I started thinking about how helpful it would be for budget, food waste and overall simplicity purposes if I could make several easy appetizers with ingredients that I already have on hand. I started to look around for recipes that will use items I already have…
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Turn Dreaming into Practical Steps: 3 Financial Necessities to Change your Life
Changing our lives, whether it be a career change or a change of location, can be daunting. Every change comes with a financial cost to it and that can be a hindrance to us following through on our dreams. I’ve been dreaming with a friend lately about some big life changes, so I wanted to share how some essential financial habits can help make those dreams a reality. My Journey to Making Life Changes I’m going to preface this entire post with the fact that I’m not an accountant, nor a financial advisor, nor anyone qualified/educated to give financial advice. Financial decisions are very personal and should be talked through…
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Getting Up Close and Personal with Ocean Waste
This year for our big summer vacation, my family and I decided to travel down to the Oregon coast and then work our way up through the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. While we were expecting to see beautiful beaches, inspiring viewpoints, and lush rainforest, we weren’t expecting to get up close and personal with carefully curated ocean waste. But that’s exactly what happened! While in Forks, Washington, we visited John’s Beachcombing Museum which houses about four decades of beachcombing finds from the local area and beyond. John’s towers of reclaimed buoys and floats were eyecatching and the uniqueness of some of the items such as a whole binder of letters…
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Project DIY: Making a Photo Wall on a Budget
We love a good DIY project! Not only is it fun to give new life to old things, it is a great way to keep items out of the landfill. Part of a sustainability mindset is finding ways to use what we already have and therefore purchase less. The DIY Project: How to turn a bland corner or empty wall into something amazing! Photo wall: Why I love it My photo wall was created out of a desire to do something with a very boring corner in my house, but not having a lot of money to do it. The photo corner has now become a photo wall as our…
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10 Reasons to Keep Track of Every Purchase you Make
It has been a while since I’ve written a post about finances, so am diving back in with something I’m passionate about doing: I keep track of every purchase I make. Doing this is one of the things that helped change my financial habits and helped me gain control of my finances, but often people react negatively to the idea. Because of that, I want to share 10 reasons to keep track of every purchase. Looking Closely at our Finances A number of years ago I was in a financially abusive relationship which left me in a pretty poor financial state once I got out. Rebuilding my life and regaining…
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Climate Change Collective: Sustainable and Simple Change
What are sustainable and simple change? This week on the blog I’m sharing our response to the monthly Climate Change Collective lead post about sustainable and simple change. This month the lead post shares several Tiny Steps to Save the Planet as encouragement that collectively we can all do small things that add up to large impact…and these small things don’t have to take up a lot of time and money. Our blog name was born as Alison and I thought about the changes we wanted to make in our lives as a response to issues in our world, but also wanted to recognize that these changes would have to…
