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Image by Marcin Wichary via Flickr

TV is causing problems in my life.

We watch too much TV. Often, we’re only watching because there’s a crappy show in between two shows we do want to watch. In the winter-during the new seasons-my son has wrestling practice 4 or 5 nights per week, which means I miss the [...]

10 Tips to Help Parents Stay Out of Debt

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People say that when you have a baby, your world gets flipped upside down. That’s not true. Your world gets dropped in a martini shaker and left to the whims of a sadistic bartender with a shaking fetish. Everything changes. That sounds like an exaggeration and nobody believes it until it happens, but [...]

The Virtues of Blow Money

When we initially developed our budget, we built it tight. Every penny was accounted for and had a place to go. I was so proud.

Money, money

Unfortunately, there were some problems with habitual-even compulsive-shopping in our house. The change from “whatever we wanted” to “it’s not budgeted” was too much, too fast.

After a few months of [...]

Budget Lesson, Part 8

This is a continuation of the budget series. See these posts for the history of this series.

This time, I’m looking at our discretionary budget. These are the things that don’t have a fixed cost. Any individual item is largely optional, and, ultimately, we don’t track these purchases closely. At the [...]