Archive for the ‘Creative Finances’ Category

Don’t Fight Over Finances

Tuesday, January 8th, 2013

fight-over-financesIs money tight at your house? Does it cause stress in your marriage? Are you the opposite of your spouse as far as spending? All of these things were true for me. God transformed my mind to have supernatural peace about finances, even though we were still spiraling deeper and deeper into debt.

I came to a point in my marriage when I was yelling at my husband for how he spent money. I was so stressed over money that I felt like I was drowning. My husband wanted to go out on a date, but we didn’t have the money, so I couldn’t enjoy it.

I was bitter against my husband for how he spent money, even though I had no idea that I was bitter. If your marriage is strained, you might be bitter and not know it. Get into the silence and ask God if you’re bitter. Then be quiet, and you’ll know the answer. Ask God to help you get rid of the bitterness if it’s there. Only God can supernaturally take it away.

To be honest with you, money is still tight at our house. But all the stress is gone. I have complete peace. I don’t even care if I end up in a cardboard box on the street with my family, because I trust God, and my marriage is sweet. I trust my husband. He can buy anything he wants, and I feel sweet and happy and don’t judge him. How can this be? Yes, we’re out of credit card debt, but we were in deep credit card debt for 10 years, and I had this supernatural peace way before we were out of debt.

In other words, if you can actually manage to hand this whole finances thing over to God for real, even in the middle of your horrible finances, your marriage can be sweet, and you don’t have to fight, even if you’re still in debt.

I explain this way more in my audio, where I go into tons of detail, but please ask me questions, my sweet friends. I want so badly for you to have peace in the area of finances, and you can have that peace today.

I’m giving away three copies of my testimony “Don’t Fight Over Finances.” If you want to enter the drawing, leave a comment. Here is a description of what I’m giving away, which you could actually purchase if you don’t win the drawing: Don’t Fight Over Finances.  I will announce the winners (and e-mail them) on January 12, 2013.

Congratulations to the 3 winners of the giveaway, “Don’t Fight Over Finances”: Judi, Jane, and Brenda R. (I’m e-mailing each of you with the audio!)

Top Ten Ways to Get Out of Debt

Tuesday, January 1st, 2013

ways-to-get-out-of-debt

Here are the top 10 ways to get out of debt:

  1. Cancel your cell phone. You don’t need it. Your quality of life will improve, and you will be “present.” (Read How Technology Rules Us.)
  2. Cancel cable. If you spend less time watching TV, you will find things to do that will relax you and create joy and family bonding.
  3. Don’t eat out. Have easy meals that you can make for little to no effort. A speaker once asked the moms in the audience if they had ever served Cheerios for dinner, and a huge number of hands went up. I didn’t know I was allowed to serve Cheerios for dinner! But it’s better than going deeper into slavery (debt).
  4. Sell everything in your house that you aren’t using. If you were to pile all your stuff on your front lawn, the pile would be higher than your house. You have that much junk. Get rid of it and make some cash for paying off that debt.
  5. Buy used clothing. Brand new clothes are way more expensive, both for you and for your children. (Read Saving Money on Children’s Clothes.)
  6. Cut the hair of your family. I am a pathetic hair dresser, I don’t know how to cut hair, and I hate doing it. But I’ve saved over $1,000 by cutting the hair of my family. Buy the hair cutting scissors only, and buy them separately. You don’t need all the other junk in the kit.
  7. Buy groceries with cash. If you use cash, you will count the amount that you are spending as you put the items in the cart; you will spend way less and eat healthier. It’s been proven that you spend more when you pay with a credit card. (Read Saving Money on Groceries.)
  8. Cancel all of your credit cards except for one. Pay that one off every month. If you don’t have actual money for something, don’t buy it.
  9. Stop buying your coffee at Starbucks. Make your coffee at home.
  10. Pray that God will help you get out of debt. God is in control of the entire universe, and money sometimes comes from sources you would have never imagined. The truth is that in all of the points above, if you ask God to help you, He will. God has provided specific clothing needs, for example, and hunters have given us frozen meat to fill our freezer for free. God’s economy is outside the box and unconventional. Seek Him first, and all the rest will follow.

Here is a funny video about cutting up your credit cards:

Don’t forget to leave your comment: What are some ways that you have gotten out of debt or stayed out of debt?

Dollar Movies

Thursday, July 19th, 2012

dollar-movies

The summer is a great time to go to the dollar movies, and yes, they still exist in many cities. The tickets usually cost $3.50 instead of $1, but that’s still good when you have a family of six. The movies have been out of the real theaters by the time you see them at a dollar theater, which is about two months behind.

In Spokane, the dollar movies are at the Garland Theater, which is huge and quite beautiful for an old movie theater. Yes, the floors are sticky, but who is going to complain? Oh, and every summer they show a free movie certain mornings, to help people get out of the heat. (Or to get them hooked on going to that theater so that they can stay in business throughout the year.)

dollar-movie-concession-stand

We’ve watched several movies at this theater over the years, including “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and “Tangled.” It made us want to build boats out of sandwiches and float lanterns up into the sky. My kids love seeing movies on the big screen.

If you have a zero budget, another way to watch fun movies during the summer with your family is to get some entertaining DVD’s from your library. Not all the videos are educational. Some of them are just for fun, and many are recent releases. Check them out, go home, pop yourself some popcorn, and declare a movie night!

Related article: The Aftermath of a Movie

Tips for Throwing a Fabulous Yard Sale

Tuesday, July 17th, 2012

yard-sale

Here are the top 10 tips for throwing a fabulous yard sale:

  1. The first step in throwing a fabulous yard sale is to de-clutter your entire house. Get rid of everything you can, including any pieces of furniture, putting them into your garage. If people drive by your yard sale and don’t see much, they won’t bother to stop. So if you don’t have enough stuff, ask relatives and friends if they would like to get rid of some stuff. My mother contributed to my yard sale, for example.
  2. The signs need to be clear, written with the thickest marker that exists. Find light-colored construction paper, and use your thick black marker to write “Yard Sale” with an arrow underneath. Do this on 12 large pieces of construction paper, all the same color. When someone is looking for your yard sale and they see the same color on the signs, they know that they are on the right track. Tape the construction paper to the side of a box. You will need 6 boxes, which you can get at Costco or any store that stacks boxes to the side. I forgot to say that your arrows should be 6 to the right, and 6 to the left. When taping the papers to both sides of the box, make sure the arrow points to the same location (opposite arrows).
  3. You will put a brick inside each box to make sure your boxes don’t fly away when you put them on the corners of major streets, leading the cars to your house. You might need more signs depending on how far you are from a big road.
  4. Borrow lots of card tables from neighbors and friends. Label the tables on the bottom to make sure you get them back to the right people. The more tables, the better. No one likes having to crouch down to the ground to see your stuff. You will sell more if the items are on tables.
  5. A free-standing iron bar for hanging clothes is ideal, but I didn’t have one, so I improvised. I hung shirts from a long bush along the side of my driveway. Throw away any clothing with stains, because stained clothing causes people to see your clothes as pieces of garbage, and they won’t buy the good ones either. If everything you display looks nice, people will walk up to it and buy some. I sold lots of clothing for $1 each. Most yard sales can’t sell their clothing because they are heaped up on a table, and who wants to weed through a mound of garbage? Not me. If each garment is hanging individually, people will go up and grab them. Put kids’ clothes together, women’s clothes together, and men’s clothes together.
  6. Several days before the yard sale, put up the card tables in your garage. Divide the stuff into sections. Put toys on one (or two) tables, housewares on another table, sheets and blankets on another table. I was selling a lot of sports equipment this time, so one table had sports stuff. (Unfortunately my driveway is a steep incline, so when people picked up the baseball mitts, an avalanche of balls fell down the driveway, and my customers were alarmed. Then they started laughing and running across the street to see who could grab the most balls before they slammed into the front door of the neighbor’s house across the street.)
  7. Now that you’ve sectioned off the categories on different tables, label the tables with the prices. Paperback books should be 50 cents, hard cover $1. If you charge too much for books, nobody will buy them. DVD’s should be $1; CD’s 50 cents. For my sports table, I put “Balls $1, mitts $4 each.” Toys should be marked individually. I hate those sticker labels that ruin stuff and won’t come off the items. I prefer to write the price with a normal Sharpie marker on white strips of paper, taping them to the item with clear Scotch tape. They always come off without ruining the object.
  8. If you have kids, consider having a bake sale, too. When I’m out yard saling with my mother, I always find it charming to buy a cookie or brownie for 50 cents from a kid. My kids baked the previous day, and we sold out of brownies quickly. My kids felt successful. Banana bread can be sold as a loaf for a higher price, $4.
  9. I don’t pay for newspaper advertising, because I don’t want to be forced to have a yard sale if it’s raining, or if I have no energy that day, or if the kids are barfing or sneezing with snot. Nope. Just put up signs the day you feel like doing it. I made over $200 last Saturday at our yard sale and had a steady stream of people. I only had one piece of furniture. I don’t think I would have had more traffic if I had advertised, and feeling trapped by the date is not a feeling I enjoy.
  10. Only have the sale one day. You make the bulk of the money on the morning of the first day. During the afternoon, you are lucky if you make $20. The whole next day, you are lucky if you make $20. For this reason, I always throw my yard sales from 8am to 1pm on a Saturday. This maximizes your time investment. Take the leftovers to Goodwill immediately after the yard sale. Then sit back and count your money in an air-conditioned house, whooping for joy with your children, who realize that they can now go on a short family vacation.