10 Easy Ways to Save Money in a Recession

Being frugal has been a big part of my single mother’s life. Raising two children on my own while surviving on student loans and rental income from the other side of our duplex has been one of my greatest accomplishments of the last few years. Many of the other mothers in the neighborhood often as me “How do you do it!?” My first response to this question is always to chuckle first. I find it amusing that they see me as this beacon or wonder woman who magically comes up with the money to pay for all our basic needs and bills when all it takes is a little thought and creativity. Let me share a few tips on what I’ve come up with that truly works:

1. Get a large jar (we call ours our Penny Jar) and start putting every penny, nickel, dime, quarter or other coin you can find. We find coins all over the place including our car, my pocket book(s), in pencil holders around the house, in jean pockets, and even on the ground! We did this last year and saved up over $100 to use towards a trip to our local ski area!

2. Set up an online account with reputable companies like IngDirect.com and have at least $10 or smaller, a week taken out of your bank account automatically. You won’t even miss it but by the end of the year you’ll be glad when you see the balance.

3. Clip coupons both from online and your Sunday News flyers. I save approximately $30- $60 a week on groceries and I don’t even spend more than an hour each week on doing the clipping. Coupons are abundant these days due to the recession. Take full advantage of any you come across and you’ll have extra money to spend on other essentials.

4. Get a good cookbook like the Better Homes Cook Book and start learning how to make restaurant style meals. We save hundreds a week by eating at home and my food almost always tastes better than the restaurants! I’ll be featuring my new cookbook on my website below soon so check it often!

5. Tithe some of your earnings when you can. God does send it back to you three times fold like He promises in the Bible. I can’t count the times He’s sent it all back to me and then some!

6. Insulate all your windows and doors to save on heat. Since I’ve done this I’ve noticed my heating bill decreased by 20%.

You can also do a lot of your own home repairs and save a bundle on contractor’s fees. I saved over $4,000 dollars last year alone by putting up my own stockade fencing and flooring. Home Depot gives free classes every week or you can ask one of their employees to show you how to do a task when you go in to buy the products you need.

7. Sell all of your old stuff that’s in reasonable shape, even your old books. Amazon will help you sell your books and pay for most, if not all, of the shipping! Craig’s List is also a great place online that you can sell your stuff locally. I sold a canoe we used once for the same price we bought it for!

8. Keep your car after you’ve made the last payment on it. We save $300 a month and only have to pay for repairs when we need them. The trick to this is to refrain from buying new until you absolutely have to. We’ve been car shopping 3 or four times this year and I always decide to stick with the car we have now. I just love having no car payments!

9. Do things with your families that are FREE!!!! Taking your kids sliding down park hills in the winter is so much fun and great winter exercise, most of all it doesn’t cost a cent! Rent FREE movies on Comcast. Some of the classics are worth seeing again and again. Make something crafty with the kids, ride a bike, take a walk through your state parks, go for a jog around your local high school’s track, plant your own garden this year or just start reading a good book.

10. Last but not least, trade savings tips with your friends or family. You might find some new and exciting money saving tip just by talking about it with other people. For example, I recently began trading magazines with some of my friends and have saved a bundle in subscription costs!

If you look at this recession as a blessing, than you might notice the good things that might come out of it. Spending less time on stuff and more time with your friends and family can be just what you all needed. I no longer feel I have to have every new gadget that comes into the market or take fancy trips with my family to be happy. As a matter of fact, I’ve been so content just doing simple, fun things with them I barely give them much thought anymore.

Where are "the people's voices"?

As I watch the 6 o'clock news on Channel 9, I hear the voices of mortgage lenders and auto makers arrogantly asking for money from our U.S. Senate. I have to think to myself, "What gumption it took these CEO's to waltz into this meeting after walking off their private umpteen million dollar jets, boasting of their 9 million dollar annual salaries while the rest of us "little people" struggle just to be able scrounge up $100 to buy our children Christmas presents this year!"

My daughter said her class discussed this bailout fiasco with their teacher and they came up with this formula if the bailout money were distributed to us instead: if each adult in America where to get a cut of that money, we would have each gotten $200,000.00! Can you believe this? Now, I can't speak for all of you readers, but this is what I would do with my share: I would pay off my debt, donate some to charity, put some into one of the local banks, buy a much needed new car, invest some in the stock market and, by doing all of this, be helping the economy tremendously! Think about it, if we all did this with our share there would be no failing banks or mortgage companies and the car dealerships could be sitting pretty making their huge salaries, still.

So why didn't our Senate think of that proposal for the country instead? This is a question that keeps going through my mind every time I hear of another large, filthy rich enterprise going to Washington to beg for a cut of the bail out money.

What is wrong with this picture people? Why aren't "the people's voices" being heard in front of the U.S. Senate? I have not seen or heard of one organization that helps the poor going before this committee to request funds to bail us out, have you? Instead, I hear of our local governments making more deep cuts into government run programs like Health and Human Services and Medicaid, programs that actually help the poor.

Don't they realize we are the backbone of this country and provide the salaries the rich so boldly show off as their badges of honor? We are the "consumers" of this nation, the wheels and the grease of our economy. We are the ones who keep the larger companies in business. Without us there would be no economy. Why can't they see that we, "the little people", are being pushed down into more financial trouble than anyone else out there in this recession? We're the ones losing our homes and our livelihoods and this is why the larger companies are failing.

If these companies fail it is because of their own greed. I find it hard to believe that they've all made trillions of dollars profit over the years and haven't saved any of this for a rainy day. Maybe they should be the ones sacrificing and making cut backs in their CEO's salaries and luxaholic lifestyles instead of taking money away from the American people to fund their own greed and desires. Maybe they should be trying to help out the American people by sharing their wealth and reinvesting it back into their own companies by creating jobs for us or allowing us to keep our jobs.

My college sociology professor brought up an interesting theory that she felt most of the rich uphold, and that is we, "the little people", are an expendable burden on our society. Because they believe this, they then discriminate against us because of it. No longer are the colored, the women, the foreigners and the children considered the less valuable in this society but now it is anyone who makes under $250,000.00 a year and to some others it's anyone who makes less than a million. We are no longer considered useful to this society but only weigh this country down. Our lives have no value and no matter how hard we try to get a foothold and pull ourselves up, they, the rich, will not give us that last bit of support to help us reach our goals and succeed. What are they so afraid of losing? Why has their wealth come to have more value than human lives?

If you try to ask them to give up some of their wealth to help this country as a whole, you will have insulted them. Life is not about sharing or acting as a group in their world but it's more about who they believe they are. It's not having empathy for their fellow human beings, but how comfortable they are and how how much status their money gives them. As long as they have this lifestyle, they consider themselves happy. But are they really? I don't believe I've ever met a truly happy rich person. Have you?

Personally, I have never been wealthy and probably never will be but rest assured, I am happy and content 99% of the time.

What brings me this joy and happiness is the love of my children and having friends I can trust. I have so many riches I didn't have to buy at a store and I can access them anytime I want. I haven't been to the fancy beaches of Mexico but I have been to the beaches of Maine and N.H. and had a blast! My life is filled with love, laughter and true joy beyond what I could ever describe to you on paper and it's all free!

I think I know why the poor aren't headed for Washington to beg for some of that bailout money. It's because we know something these wealthy people haven't figured out yet. We've found the secret to our own happiness, the true secret. We don't need to beg for more money because even if we can't afford to buy the expensive Christmas presents for our children this year, we know we'll still enjoy our holiday season with each other. We know it is love that makes us truly happy. Good, pure, honest love for each other. It's that simple.

Food for thought: Jesus's answer was right on target when he told a very wealthy man that asked him how he could enter the gates of heaven. Jesus told this man to give all he had to the poor and follow him, God would provide for all of his needs. The wealthy man looked at Jesus in surprise and said he could not do that, to which Jesus replied that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven.

America’s Stonehenge; a Glimpse into Time

My two children and I arrived at America’s Stonehenge in North Salem, NH around 10:30am on a cool, crisp fall Sunday morning. As we entered the dirt driveway we observed the main wooden lodge which sat on the base of a wooded hill. Here is where we begin our journey into a time and place that is slowly revealing many secrets into our New Hampshire history through the uncovering of its’ ancient walls of stone.
Inside the lodge the kids and I were greeted by a woman who gave us a map of the site they once called Mystery Hill Caves and now known as America’s Stonehenge. She then directed us to a darkened room where we watched a short video movie of the stone site that lay on top of the hill. We then proceeded outside to an outside foyer where, on the right, were a few tan colored Alpaca’s contained in a fenced in area and two paths that lead in and out of the stone ruins up ahead.

As we began our walk up the slightly sloped hill, we first encountered an area that held a wigwam made out of tree branches and a cooking area also made out of tree branches. We found the actual shape of the wigwam interestingly round instead of like a t-pee form we are accustomed to seeing on T.V. movies and text books. As we continued our walk, stone walls began forming on the sides of our path and we observed the stones to be very flat rather than rounded as we see sometimes surrounding our countryside in N.H. Some of the stones had a triangular shape to them and appeared to look like mini sundials. We observed many of these stones in larger form placed strategically around the main structures found at the top center of the hill. The picture of the stone in this article is a picture of one of these stones which directly faces the sun during this time of day.
When I downloaded the picture I noticed this beautiful rainbow bursting right out of the stone giving it a mystical sense of awe.

We proceeded to walk around the main structures in the center and observed the many unique stone formations within the stone walls that divided them. One area contained the “Sacrificial” like stone slab. This slab appears to have been used for this purpose and I would have to agree it may have been at one time, but after giving it some thought the kids and I came up with some of our own theories which included a table where the leaders either religious or political or both gathered to discuss issues at hand, or a table where they just worshiped their gods, not necessarily making sacrificial offerings. We also discussed they may have used it to eat at as a family to celebrate different holidays. We felt the sundial stone near the table itself would have been set there to announce the different times during the year each holiday would have been celebrated or times when they would worship their gods according to where the sun was positioned during the day. Because these many sundial type stones could be found all around the site, we theorized that they may have served as the tribe’s time clock which they observed in fulfilling whatever duties they actually performed there at the appropriate times of the day.
Although the literature we were given dates this site back to prehistoric times, it is still a mystery to us who actually built this structure. Upon entering the Oracle Room and observing the picture of the running deer on the stone wall, we got the sense that Native Americans were one of the cultures who may have inhabited this land and used the structures for their own purposes at some point. One theory we came up with was that they used the table like structure to gut their deer and possibly eat on it as well as store their food in the different caverns in and around the site. The Oracle Room was also extremely isolated and could have been used for protective shelter during war times.

We observed water in and around the top of the site and thought there may have been a time when it flowed more heavily from different points on the hill and may have been used for drinking, bathing, or spiritual rituals. Any number of different tribes from various periods of time could have used this site for reasons of their own but it is the original builders who leave us in wonder of who they might have been. Early prehistoric tribes were mainly hunters and gatherers and may not have believed in sacrificial uses for such an elaborate stone alter like the one seen here but there are tribes such as the Mayans who were. We concluded that it would have had to be someone like the Mayans who actually believed in sacrificing to their gods and had great knowledge of time and dividing time into a calendar year that would have gone to these great lengths in establishing such an area as America’s Stonehenge.
After walking around the western trail a bit we realized it would take us an entire day to explore the vast majority of this site so we decided to make our way back down to the main lodge and come back another day to do just that. This experience opened up our minds to an awareness of our past we have not thought of until now. When we think of New England history we usually only go back as far as the earlier settlers and Native Americans who inhabited these lands before them, but after visiting America’s Stonehenge we now have a better sense that man existed and walked this earth long before then as the earth reveals her secrets underneath her cloak of sand.

The Single Mom's Survival Guide Blog Site: We have a new President...

The Single Mom's Survival Guide Blog Site: We have a new President...

We have a new President...

and it's going to be interesting to see if his word's match his actions. He came from a single mother household and this is why I voted for him, in hopes that he would understand our struggles. I believe one has to understand another's struggles in order to help them to the fullest. Will Barrack do this for us? I sincerely hope so. What are your thoughts, NH moms?

A summer of rain...

Although we need the rain for our vegies and plants to grow, we also need some sunshine. My tomato plants are still green and we are well at the end of July! I'm looking forward to them changing into their bright red colors soon and using them on sandwiches, salads and hamburgers. Yes, rain is good but these gray gloomy days are too frequent lately and I need that glorious sunshine to lift up my spirit and warm my soul. I know you are all feeling you do too.

Because of this miserable economy, I was forced to cancel our summer vacation, but now I'm glad I did. I would have been paying a small fortune for these rainy days. Once again, I was saved from a disaster.

Now I just have to come up with more things the kids and I can do in the house! Any suggestions?

Looking for money to go to college?

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