Due to the small size and everyday use of bathrooms, they can very easily become cluttered.  Take a look at these Tips to Keep Your Bathroom Organized Without Being Cluttered.

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Well, we have survived the first quarter. March was monumental in that we paid off our first credit account!

We were fortunate to get a very nice bonus check from Steve’s employer. I will admit it was extremely tempting to go on a shopping spree after being so frugal for the past few months. In previous years we would not have hesitated to “reward” ourselves with some frivolous expense.

We used most of his check to finish filling up the tile budget category, paying for our daughter’s trip to NYC this summer, and couple of home improvement items. The rest ended up helping balance our budget as our primary income was lower in February (only 4 checks). read more…

I recently was turned on to The Clutter Diet. There, Lorie Marrero offers her services as a Certified Professional Organizer to help you on your journey to be clutter-free. Her site offers a wealth of online education, motivation, and support including multimedia tutorials, tools to track your progress, and access to experienced Professional Organizers. read more…

Since I have been scanning all of our papers, pictures, and manuals to an external hard drive, it occurred to me that it would be a very-bad-thing should any tragedy befall my handy little drive. I know that an online storage solution would be best but it always seemed cost prohibitive to me. That’s until I found Mozy.
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We completed our second month of our journey to become debt free. Our budget is going well, and we are keeping each other on track. We agreed on a couple of bigger expenses that we want to buy in the next few months and decided to add these to our budget so we can save up for them. We didn’t get any supplemental income in February. However, thanks to tightening our other budget categories and making some expense-saving adjustments in January, we were able to meet our goal of putting $3,000 towards debt repayment. In addition, we had a budget surplus of $721 that we promptly paid as an extra payment to our focus account balance for a total of $2,668 for February. It was really exciting to see that the balance is now $2,112, which means it should be paid in full in March!!

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Would you believe a simple phone call can help you get rid of that pesky credit card debt faster? It’s true. Five minutes could save you thousands.

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If you are serious about paying off your credit card, you should pay more than the minimum payment every month. However, even if you can only afford to pay the minimum, you can pay the same amount until it’s gone. In order to understand this, first let me explain the two ways that credit card companies calculate your minimum payment.

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The first step to paying off your credit cards is the most important.

Stop using them.
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I had posted earlier about scanning all our paperwork into Paper Valet. I am still in the trial period but I think I am going to go ahead and buy it. It’s made the process of scanning and virtually filing our mountain of paperwork much easier.
Some things are not so easily scanned. Manuals are at the top of my “I wish I could scan this” list. I have been thinking of several ways to minimize various manuals from cluttering our space.
The best option would be to have the manual in digital format. read more…

Wow. I can’t believe how quickly time passes when you are busy. Every day I have told myself that I need to write one of the many post ideas I have in my head, and every day, I haven’t found the time.
In truth, I have had the time, just not the ability to concentrate. I seem to have an inordinate amount of thoughts in my head, all reminding me of the things I need to do. All these “to-do” thoughts become so distracting that I can’t concentrate enough to do them. I realized that this is a form of clutter; mental clutter.
One of the more popular methods for task management I have read about is David Allen’s Getting Things Done or GTD. read more…