One simple change can make life, money management easier

In a house with four children, I can easily become besieged by laundry. It mounts quickly, but takes hours to tackle all the tiny socks and spaghetti-stained t-shirts. On any given day, there is a load of laundry sitting somewhere, waiting to be stain-treated, washed, dried, folded, or put away.

Laundry isn’t complicated (unless you end up drying a piece of wayward gum, which has been known to happen at my house), but it is a process that can be overwhelming. That’s why I decided to remove the hampers from my children’s rooms and set up a canvas cart with three separate bins.My children now drop off their dirty clothes in a centralized location, where it immediately gets sorted by color. When one bin gets full, I can do laundry without having to walk all over the house dumping out hampers and sorting clothing.

My experience with the laundry cart reminds me how valuable one small change can be. Though I’ll never be free of laundry, I have found a way to streamline the task. In the same way, you will always have to deal with money, no matter how much or little you have. Too often, people get overwhelmed by the idea of getting their finances under control. When they don’t know what to do first, they often end up doing nothing.

You can learn to manage your money effectively by making one small change at a time. Start by asking yourself, “What isn’t working well?” For example, do you have a habit of paying bills late and ending up with late fees? Do you scramble when the holidays approach, then overspend on your gift purchases? Do you eat out more often than you would like?

Once you identify one area you would like to improve, then you can consider a simple solution. Suppose you want to stop paying your bills late. Start by putting your bills in one place and setting aside one or two specific days every month to pay them. If necessary, set up e-mail reminders or ask a trusted friend to keep you accountable.

If you want to build an emergency fund, set a relatively small goal--$500 to $1,000—and sign up for an automatic payroll deduction. You’ll never miss what you don’t see, and you’ll be encouraged when your savings balance grows each month.

If you want to spend less eating out, pack your lunch the night before. You can also stock your desk or work area with hearty, non-perishable foods such as trail mix, dehydrated soup mixes, granola bars, juice boxes, beef jerky or almonds. In a pinch, you can eat what you have on hand, and you won’t be tempted to dash out and buy something instead.


Planning ahead can help you rely less on convenience foods, too. You could cook and freeze several meals for later. My husband’s thrifty 89-year-old grandmother does this, creating complete, individual meals for herself. Even learning how to cook one or two new dishes can help you to spend less on expensive, ready-made food.

Advance planning also can help you avoid the last-minute holiday crush. If you can’t avoid it this year, start fresh in January. Make a gift list at the beginning of the year. Then, commit to making or buying just one gift a month; come next December, you—and your budget—won’t be stressed.

Ultimately, you’re in the best position to decide what solutions will work for you. Starting small will let you build on your success, allowing you to get your finances under control one simple change at a time.

Find budget-friendly holiday items in your own backyard

As I prepared to host Thanksgiving dinner for 20 guests this year, I contemplated buying a decorative porcelain turkey for my table. At $20, it wouldn’t have broken the bank, but it was an expense I hadn’t planned for. Plus, I would have had to find a place to store the colorful gobbler for the 11 months of the year that he wouldn’t be gracing my table.

So instead of bringing home the turkey, I sought inspiration in the grocery store and bought a half-pound of unshelled mixed nuts, a few pears, and as many red apples, which cost me less than $10 (and that have the added benefit of being consumable). Then I “shopped” my own home for items I could use to complete my display. I used brown craft paper to make a table runner and filled three glass hurricanes with my grocery store goodies. As a finishing touch, I wound gold ribbon through the hurricanes and scattered harvest-colored paper leaves down the center of the table.

Inspired by the idea of using what I have on hand, I plan to use creative, budget-friendly ways to decorate for the Christmas season, too. That effort started this weekend with some evergreen boughs leftover from a cut tree. I plan to use the boughs to make a wreath and a garland for the picket fence in front of my house. I’ll also make a garland from pinecones collected from our yard and repurpose a few unworn (and itchy) wool sweaters into handmade ornaments and stockings for our children.

The idea of using what you have on hand can be applied to budget-friendly gift giving, as well. With a little time and ingenuity, you can transform everyday items into special gifts. Using a book about drawing that I picked up in the discard box at my library, for instance, I plan to frame pictures of my 3-year-old son’s favorite cars.


I may even try drawing him a Volkswagen Beetle myself. I’ll also transfer one of my daughter’s drawings onto linen I have in my stash and embroider it to capture a piece of art she’s created. For my other son, who is so smitten with baseball that he draws and cuts out paper bats and balls, I could cover a pillow with a baseball jersey. Or, I might trace one of his drawings onto a favorite, outgrown shirt and sew it into a small stuffed toy.

As you decorate your home this year or look for gifts to delight your recipients, start by surveying what’s around you. For example, branches collected from your yard and tucked into a small vase make a perfect foil for hanging handmade or miniature ornaments; the end result could become a centerpiece or serve as a hostess gift. Store-bought paperwhite bulbs planted in an old wooden bowl or a thrifted pot—embellished with Spanish moss and a satin ribbon—make an elegant gift or mantle display.

Food items made with inexpensive ingredients and presented in creative ways also make memorable gifts. With a few simple ingredients, you can make hot fudge sauce and present it to a friend or a child’s teacher in a Mason jar with a handmade label. Or you can tuck loose tea and a jar of honey in a pretty vintage tin you’ve been saving.

Décor and gifts that start with items in my home and yard give me a special sense of satisfaction. They require more imagination than money, and the results are uniquely personal and original. Look around your own home or yard this holiday season – you never know what wonderful ideas you’ll come up with.

Holiday Manifesto

I’ve confessed before that I have a knack for making things far more complicated than necessary. It’s a trait that often leaves me scrambling and my husband tearing out his hair. “Why can’t anything just be simple around here?” he’s been known to ask. Though I’ve balked at his question over the years, I have to admit that my husband is right: simple is better than complicated.

Yet it’s easy to make things complicated, without fully realizing I’m doing it. Perhaps this is no more the case than when it comes to the holidays. Holiday schedules fill up too quickly, the gift budget gets stretched, the dinner menu keeps growing and the days seem to morph into one another, sometimes becoming one frenetic blur.

To help keep us focused on the simple things we enjoy, we’ve revived our manifesto idea from last summer and created a Holiday Manifesto. Together, we’ve made a list that will help us to be intentional with our time and money and to savor the best of the season.

List suggestions for our manifesto run the gamut from traditional activities, such as sledding and making snow angels to more unique ideas that include making super hero ornaments and homemade peppermint ice cream. At the urging of our stick-obsessed four-year-old son, we plan to play broomball on a local pond. We’ll also work on building a snow fort and roast marshmallows in our backyard.

Like our summer list, the suggestions our children offered tended toward the simple (except making super hero ornaments, perhaps). And almost all of the ideas we compiled will cost virtually nothing.

When my husband suggested we add “have a slumber party by the gas stove” to the list, for example, the kids got so excited that I thought they’d jump out of their skin. Their excitement had me recalling my own childhood memories of camping out on the living room floor, of waking up and seeing the twinkling lights of our Christmas tree. Dragging out sleeping bags and sprawling out on the floor couldn’t be simpler, but it’s very likely that we’ll be making memories that last a lifetime.

My own contributions to our Holiday Manifesto include sending out Christmas cards (the first time I’ve done so in more than 11 years), making candy bar hot chocolate with real whipped cream, and decorating our home with natural elements we already have or that we can forage from our property.

Some other items that made the list include decorating cookies, singing Christmas carols, and baking an apple pie. Perhaps my favorite suggestion came from my six-year-old who thought we should make sleeping in one morning a priority. For parents who almost always get woken by the sound of four pairs of stampeding fit, sleeping in would indeed be a welcome treat.

The point of our list isn’t to put pressure on us, but to give us a visual reminder of how we really want to spend our time this holiday season. To make your own list, you might try taking stock of what you did last year. What did you truly enjoy? What activities seemed to cause chaos and stress? What did you want to do but didn’t?

With answers to these questions, you can craft a list that will help you to prioritize how you want to spend your time and your money this year.

Family gifts inspire imaginative play and memory-making

Our Christmas list this year includes 13 children who range in age from 7 months to 13 years – nine nieces and nephews and our own four children. When there are so many children, with such a wide age range and such divergent interests, it’s challenging to buy gifts that are personal, meaningful, and that stay within our budget.

To give personal and meaningful gifts that the children (and their parents) will appreciate, we try to focus on family gifts. Instead of spending $15 or $20 per child, we choose to pool the money we’ve set aside to buy a gift that is of higher quality and that the entire family can enjoy. When it comes to settling on exactly what we’ll buy, we use a list of focused questions. First, of course, we have to ask: “Does the gift fit into our budget?” Then we ask, “Is the gift built to last? Does it have multiple uses? Will the recipients enjoy the gift over a period of time? And will the gift help the recipients to build memories?”

It may sound like a tall order to answer yes to all these questions, but we’ve found plenty of gifts over the years that have fit the bill. Last year, for example, we bought a restaurant-quality waffle maker for the family with a trio of teens and tweens. And while it may not have been an awe-inspiring gift to a 10-year-old boy, I know he’s already eaten his weight in home-cooked waffles. His parents save money and no longer rely on boxed waffles from the freezer section. Plus, the gift gives this family the opportunity to build memories by starting a tradition of Saturday-morning waffles.

This year, we plan to continue giving family-focused gifts for our nieces and nephews. For the youngest recipients on our list, which include boys ages 2 and 7 months, we plan to buy a set of wooden, interlocking blocks. It’s a gift that will allow the unsteady hands of a toddler to build curved walls and tall towers. The boys and their parents will be able to play together with these blocks for years to come.

Art supplies, including scented colored pencils, bright beeswax crayons and tempura paints, are on our list for another family with two children. For yet another family, we’re giving games that suit the ages of the children and that will allow them to play with or without their parents. Still another family with girls ages 5 and 2, who love to spend time in the kitchen with their mother, will receive a gingerbread mold for making their own little villages and an accompanying storybook about gingerbread men.

We plan to apply the same principles to the gifts we buy for our own young children, focusing on quality gifts that they all can enjoy together. In the past, such gifts have included a wooden kitchen and a giant pop-up tent, both of which have inspired many hours of collaborative and imaginative play.

Though we’ve not made any final decisions about the gifts we’ll give them this year, we do have a few ideas that include a play parachute, an “ice cream ball,” where you drop ingredients into a canister and roll it back and forth until you make ice cream, or some new additions to their collection of dress-up clothing.

Birthdays and holidays can be rich opportunities to invest in the lives of the children we love. Ultimately, we hope our gifts will spark their imaginations – or perhaps help them discover a talent or interest that can bring them joy for years to come.

What’s for lunch? Small choices add up to big changes

When we found ourselves away from home last week at lunch time, we were faced with a decision. Should we dine at home on leftover baked macaroni and cheese and garlic-roasted cauliflower? Or should we eat out?

Our children were hungry and had overheard the lunch conversation my husband and I were having. They favored eating out and were shouting their opinions from the back of our van. We had fully intended to indulge our own desires (and theirs), when something made me rethink the decision.

To eat out, we would have driven past our home (and perfectly good leftovers waiting in our fridge), had to wrangle four squirmy, overtired children into a restaurant, and would have spent about $30 on a meal that we would have only marginally enjoyed. It didn’t exactly make sense to eat out when we considered all of these things.

So we went home and ate our leftovers, eating food we’d already paid for and that tasted better than the fare we might have driven out of our way to get. It seems so simple now, but making decisions about how and what to eat aren’t always so easy. In fact, food can be downright complicated.

We eat because we need food to survive, but the way we eat is influenced by many factors, including our habits, social circles, our lifestyles, our jobs, and our expectations. Once we start a pattern of behavior, it’s difficult to examine just why we do what we do. We just keep doing it because it’s what we’ve always done.

Maybe you are so accustomed to always being busy that it seems natural to order take-out or buy frozen lasagna. Perhaps you’ve never felt comfortable in the kitchen, so you feel it’s easier to buy convenience foods. If you’re single, it can be more palatable to eat out than to eat alone. If you have a large family, it can be overwhelming to come up with new meal ideas every day, so you rely on prepackaged foods instead.

Over the last several months, my husband and I have become increasingly aware of how we spend our food dollars. To break out of our own patterns of behavior, we had to acknowledge that we wanted to make a change. Then, we had to find the motivation to help make this change possible.

One particularly effective method for creating change has been to ask ourselves, “What if we did (x) instead of (x)?” For example, if you’re tired of eating lunch out but never seem to have the time or motivation to pack one, what if you spent an hour preparing make-ahead meals instead of watching television? Or what if you got out your slow cooker and tossed in the ingredients for a meal instead of scrambling to make dinner when you got home?

What do you really want? What choices could you make that will help you reach your goals? For example, if you made your lunch instead of buying it, how much money might you save? What else could you do with that money? Perhaps you want to build up your savings so you have an emergency fund, or you want to buy a new car or computer. Maybe you could take a vacation.

It might take months of choosing to pack your lunch instead of eating out to save enough money to reach your goal. But when you’re enjoying your car or relaxing on a sunny beach, will you regret those burgers you didn’t eat?

With thoughtful planning, the choices you make now (including eating leftovers) can pay off in satisfying ways in the future.