Every month, my wife and I track how much time and money we spend growing food. This is the report for June 2009. (Here are the results for 2008.)
It’s the beginning of summer, and that means our garden is lush and green and growing. It also means there’s nothing exciting to write about. We’ve begun [...]

Kris and I had a l-o-n-g day today. We rose early and drove to one of Portland’s nicest neighborhoods for the 24th annual Eastmoreland Garage Sale. Officially, there were 141 families hawking their Stuff. Unofficially, there were well over 200.
For seven hours, Kris and I walked up and down the quiet residential streets — not [...]

I keep telling myself I’ll share reader e-mail more often. You folks send me great stuff. For example, here’s Ruth’s story about her own millionaire next door.
I loved reading about J.D.’s “secret millionaire” neighbor. This is a story about my own “secret millionaire” neighbor. He actually lives in the next suburb.
This local middle-school math teacher [...]

Is it possible to eat local organic food on a food-stamp budget? That’s the question Salon’s Siobhan Phillips set out to answer recently. For one month, Phillips and her husband gave themselves a budget of $248 to “eat ethically” in New Haven, Connecticut. She writes:

I had wondered about the elitism of ethical eating ever since [...]

Today’s a momentous day. For the first time in the history of The Personal Finance Hour, both Jim and I should be on Skype with headsets that work. That is, of course, unless I do something stupid again. (Last week I had the microphone on “mute”. Ugh. So dumb!) This could be the first episode [...]

This is a guest post from my wife, who has her own fan club around here. “You should have a section at GRS called Kris’ corner,” one reader wrote recently. That’s unlikely to happen, but she’s happy to drop by now and then with recipes and helpful hints. Here’s what she has to say about [...]

Every month, my wife and I track how much time and money we spend growing food. This is the report for May 2009. (Here are the results for 2008.)
What a difference a year makes! Our fruits, berries, and vegetables had a slow start last year (and then were further slowed by a cold, cold June). [...]

An Experiment in Cheap Living
Earlier this week, I shared some of the highlights from three years of GRS articles about saving money on food. Brett from The Art of Manliness, who knows that I collect old self-help books, sent me an excerpt from Dio Lewis’s 1872 volume, Our Digestion, or, My Jolly Friend’s Secret. Here [...]

Earlier this week, Aaron asked whether repaying debt should be an obsession.
I replied that for some people, “gazelle intensity” makes more sense. (Trent from The Simple Dollar is one of these folks.) For others — including myself — it’s important to exercise balance, to allow a budget for fun.
Everyone who opts for a life of [...]

While driving to our monthly book group discussion on Saturday, Kris and I had a conversation with our friend Courtney. Courtney’s family is beginning to feel a financial squeeze. Her husband’s employer is cutting jobs. To keep working, he’ll have to take a pay cut and move back to the position he left a couple [...]