397 Ways to Save Weight on Bad Garden Advice – A Weekend Review
06. Jun, 2009 
4 Comments
This week my fiancee and I finally got our garden going at our new place! We had a small box garden on the patio of my old apartment, where we grew a few tomato plants and some herbs. At our new place, we got a number of pots and planted some more tomato plants and some more herbs. We’re looking into expanding our garden, but we’re not sure what exactly we want to do just yet. Any suggestions?
At the beginning of the week I documented how we managed to significantly reduce our fixed expenses – yet again. I also posted some thoughts about showing grace and mercy while you’re combining your finances, and I crafted The Entertainment Matrix.
Searching For Serenity
I made blogs.com Top 10 Up and Coming Personal Finance Bloggers! Many thanks to Nickel for putting that list together. I am honored to be a part of such a prestigious list of individuals.
Over at Weakonomics, The Weakonomist included me in his weekly roundup.
I was also included in the Carnival of Personal Finance held over at Funny About Money.
Pesonal Finance Around the Web
By far, my favorite article this week came from a blog called Bad Money Advice. This is a fantastic blog, as it is essential one man’s rant against poor financial advice. It probably stemmed from the whole recession thing, and now he’s basically become some sort of personal finance police. Its one of the few blogs I really hope doesn’t link to me – because it meant that I gave some bad money advice.
Anyways, one of his articles this week was Any Printed Number is Believable. In it, he challenges some number claims, like the one that says we spend 6 years of our lives in the bathroom, or that the average woman spends almost $450k on cosmetics over their lifetime. He took the claimed numbers, and figured out how much time that would require every day (on average) in order to be true.
The Time article mentions that we spend six months (10 minutes a day) waiting for red lights to change. Not stuck in traffic, just waiting for red lights. And only as drivers, not passengers. The NYT tells us we spend 1 year (20 minutes) looking for misplaced objects, eight months (13 minutes) opening junk mail, two years (40 minutes) trying to return phone calls, and five years (1 hour 40 minutes) waiting in lines.
Frank has reminded me that I should take a little more time when I read certain numbers, just to ensure their accuracy. If it seems plausible, then I usually take it to be true. Frank doesn’t.
Over at Debt Free Adventure, Matt has put together a terrific resource for those that are trying to lose a little weight.
As one who has been at this weight loss & budget trimming game for nearly a year, I felt compelled to share how my wife & I have shed excess pounds from our frames while simultaneously trimming excess fat from our grocery budget.
It is full of great advice, tips, and links to more information, making it into a terrific place to stop if you need a little help getting your waistline or you budget under control.
Also, here is a great post from Your Money Relationship. 5 Motivational Tips to Start Saving Today is simply a quick post about a few techniques that Adam uses to motivate himself to save. This is something that I have written about in the past, with my post 6 ways to get financially motivated. My favorite one from his list was:
2. Write Your Savings Goals Down
I wrote a post last week that gave a step-by-step guide to creating a financial mission statement. I think this is a very important step in taking responsibility for your family and finances. Sitting down with every member of your household and explaining your financial goals will get everyone on the same page. With everyone on board with the financial mission of the family, things will run a little smoother.
Finally, head on over to squawkfox for a free book excerpt! Kerry has recently released a book, 397 Ways To Save Money. She’s been busy this last week doing all sorts of interviews and marketing stuff, so reward her hard work and head on over.
That’s it for this week.
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Matt Goulart
That title sure got my attention. I live on a successful organic farm so the gardening advice in "397 Ways To Save Money" is SOLID! LOL Thank you so much for the mention and enjoy the free excerpt!
[Reply]
Two ways to look at the garden:
1) what do you like to eat that’s expensive? Grow that.
2) look around the neighborhood, see what people are growing that thrives, and learn to eat a lot of that
In containers I like tomatillos, greens (we’re on our third cutting of komatsuna from a 5-gallon-bucket self watering container this spring), cucumbers, and potatos. But it’s not really thrifty to grow your own potatos, it’s just enjoyable because they’re so fail-safe.
[Reply]
How big of a pot do you need for cucumbers? We were thinking about doing some of those, but weren’t sure how much room they would need.
[Reply]
I’ve grown cucumbers in a 5-gallon bucket and I think one time in the slightly-smaller pickle buckets.
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