The online home of Will and Sara!
Posts tagged Charity
The Book I’ve Been Waiting For
Mar 19th
Your Money: The Missing Manual
In the past weeks, Will and I have found ourselves busy with a variety of things. Will was quite sick for a few weeks but seems to be mostly better now. I have been going haywire trying to finish cutting out all possible medications that I’ve been on since my diagnosis. We’ve been planning out some home improvements that will eventually help sell the house one day, and as a result have been poring over paint samples, hardware ideas, etc. We have been adjusting to changes with the recent Windstream acquisition. We have managed to cut out about a third of our book collection for donation. And last, but not least, I’ve had another MS attack (my 3rd since December of 2008). Not much could jar me from dwelling on all of this to come out for a blog post, but today I realized how close we are to the release of a book I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.
For the better part of our marriage (and lives) Will and I have been exceedingly unconcerned with money. Not because we had it, but because we saw it only as one of many tools in life for happiness. This has gotten us into a bit of a mess from time to time. As we’ve written before, my MS diagnosis and Vlad’s battle with cancer gave us a few epiphanies. Having money saved and using it for security and happiness is far preferable to having debt and striving to not dwell on it. Imagine that. We’ve been following the Get Rich Slowly blog for awhile and have learned a lot from it. The author, JD Roth, has finished his book, Your Money: The Missing Manual, and it will finally be available on Saturday. We have anticipated the release of this book for some time and can’t wait to read it. While we have used a lot of resources (family members, websites, neighbors, friends) to find out practical advice to change our financial state, I can state with certainty that Get Rich Slowly has had more influence and has been more helpful than any other source. Hands down.
There are a lot of blogs and ideas out there for getting your finances in order, and even more scams to screw you up more than you thought possible. Will found GRS and we became hooked. The site is full of great advice from someone who started out as a normal person, deeply in debt. He worked hard, changed his habits, and pulled himself out of the hole. He went on to learn a wealth of very practical information about savings, investment, frugality and more.
Once we’ve finished Your Money: The Missing Manual, I’m sure we’ll have more to say. Based on our experiences following Mr. Roth for the past few months I know we will have nothing but praise.
It’s that time of year again… Goodwill donations and eBay auctions galore!
Jan 11th
I think there are some missing cats in here somewhere...
Well it’s that time of year again, namely the new year. Each year Sara and I go through our stuff and find things that fit into either the Goodwill or eBay pile depending on what it is. If we think we can make some money on it then it goes in the eBay pile otherwise it ends up in a box bound for Goodwill. So far this year we’ve already made about $500 dollars in donations to Goodwill according to their pricing sheet and I’ve got about 30 auctions going on eBay with many more to come.
My favorite part of all of this is not a tax write off or the pay off from getting rid of stuff we didn’t even know we have (we made over $1,000 dollars on eBay auctions last year) but eliminating the clutter from our lives. It’s very cathartic to eliminate 15 – 20 boxes of clutter from our house and all of the sudden be no longer owned by our belongings. Last year Sara and I did some late spring / early summer cleaning and found 25 plastic bins like you see in the pictures there in our attic and closets and decided it was time to make some changes. Last April / May our office was full to the ceiling with these plastic bins and our spare bedroom was full of huge cardboard boxes of stuff of all manner that we had accumulated over the years. It was maddening because we couldn’t for the life of us figure out where all of this clutter had come from and it was driving us insane.
