As far as I know, only one reader of Get Rich Slowly knows me personally. And last week, I was having lunch with my one-person fan club. (Actually, I am not sure she's even a fan, but she did buy my lunch. Thanks, Lisa!)

"You really stirred up some controversy with one of your recent posts," Lisa said, a forkful of salad in hand.

"You must mean the one about not paying for our kids' college, right?" I said.

For a few years, I got to skip Dave Ramsey's Baby Step 5. Save for our children's college education? That was an easy one…since we didn't have children, that answer was NO!

But now we have two kids (soon to be three), which means our days of delaying that decision are over. And since our oldest child is ten, we've already missed out on a decade of compounding.

Most personal finance experts, including Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman, recommend saving for your children's college education only when your own financial house is in order. If you still have student loans, credit card debt, or anemic retirement savings, it's much better to get yourself out of that hole. Continue reading...

When I (or others) want to improve our financial situations, most excuses involve time. I am too busy to take on another job. I don't have time to start that business I've wanted to start for the last three years. I wish I could really get my financial ducks in a row, but I feel like I'm already using every spare minute of my days.

While time budgeting and money budgeting share a lot of similarities, the interesting thing about time budgeting is that, while we all have the same number of hours in each day, we just don't get the same number of days in our lives. As my life gets more full, I experience more challenges balancing the demands on my time. I want to use my time wisely so I have more time to do the things that really matter. And maybe, just maybe I will have time to start that business that I definitely was going to start in 2013. Ha.

Mind over matter

As I write this, the back side of my house is mostly exposed to the studs with loose fiberglass hanging out in the area where landscaping will be someday. That's right: Some crazy people choose to do remodeling projects in the middle of the coldest part of winter. Which doesn't make a lot of sense, considering this article is about winterizing your home. Having one wall with very little insulation during sub-zero temperatures is not winterizing.

The (expensive) changes we're making this year are supposed to pay off in lower heating costs in the years to come. And they are expensive. All-new windows, spray-foam insulation in the basement and outer walls, and some new siding all add up to one pricey, pricey project. But it wasn't always this way. We have lived in our drafty house for almost seven years. The windows are old and allow for plenty of ventilation (which isn't what you want when, baby, it's cold outside). However, windows are expensive, so we've spent the last seven years limping along while still winterizing our home as cheaply as possible.

Cool Down Your Heating Bill

Most of our changes have been small. But enough small changes added together did make a difference on our heating bill.

When I was considering leaving my full-time job, I had some concerns. My main concern? Health insurance. And it wasn't just me. Since my husband didn't have health insurance coverage through his job, he had been covered under my policy for years. Plus, we were going to be adding kids to our family, so we needed to think about them too.

First, we took care of my husband's needs. About a year ago, he started looking for a private health insurance plan -- and since he is a healthy guy, he found an inexpensive one rather easily. And once we adopted the kids, they could also go on his plan with no problems.

So that left me. If I quit my job, I had a few options: 1. Find my own private health insurance plan 2. Go without insurance 3. COBRA 4. Find a non-insurance alternative.

Few questions are as unwelcome or unanswerable (at least in my house) as "What's for dinner?" Every few months, I make futile attempts to meal plan or grocery shop smarter. I spread out cookbooks, I write down recipes, I make shopping lists, and then everything disappears (it seems) and I am back to my usual chaotic "It's 4:45 and what are we going to eat again?!"

In these moments, I am much more likely to order pizza or stop by for a supermarket rotisserie chicken. Not only are these choices probably not as healthy as what we could make at home, but they are also more expensive. And at the moment, we need to cut our eating out/convenience food spending as much as possible.

I am no domestic diva, as you have already discovered. But there are plenty of people of who are. And some of them don't even require googling. Take my mother-in-law, for example. She raised eight children on a tight budget, and I think she came up with a genius idea. Listen to this: She served the same seven meals every week. For instance, Monday was always spaghetti night, Tuesday was always chicken potpie, and so on. It meant her shopping list was the same every single week. Of course, it also means that my husband was burned out on repetition, so we definitely can't adopt the same policy in our house. But I do think it's a great idea.<

In 2000, I graduated from my first round of post-secondary education and landed a job. My first annual salary was about 13 times more than my entire education had cost me. It wasn't that my job paid so well, but that my education had been so inexpensive.

Now that my husband and I are parents, we have some decisions to make regarding our children's education. We, of course, want to find the best value possible…you know, an inexpensive but good education. With the average student holding over $26,000 in student loans, though, do "inexpensive" and "education" even belong in the same sentence?

I keep hearing that it's a different environment now than it was when I got my first job (and it is). But is it so different that an expensive education at a four-year institution is the only option? Continue reading...

Once, I couldn't find a matching pair of shoes, so I put one foot in a ballet flat and the other in a tennis shoe and acted like I had sprained my ankle. True story.

You may wonder then why this girl is writing an article on decluttering and disorganization and their relationship to finances, especially since I still have a lot to learn. While there are definitely others who are more organized, I have come a long way.

I have no idea how much being disorganized has cost me directly, or how much a cluttered life affected my finances indirectly. But it's significant: Paying credit cards late, getting overdrafts, losing bills or other important papers, buying stuff only to find out I already had it, and on and on. It was painful in so many ways.

The two worst years of my financial life were 2007 to 2009. Before 2007, our income was low, but our expenses were low, too. We didn't save much, but we didn't spend more than we earned, either.

Then we saw our dream house. And we bought it while we still owned our first house. For two years, we had two mortgages. Suddenly, even though our income was slowly increasing, our expenses had skyrocketed. We cut our expenses as much as we could, but you can only cut them so much when you bought a fixer-upper with squirrel holes in the siding, leaking toilets that threatened to fall through the rotten bathroom floors, and desperately needing a new roof. (I guess we have low standards for our dream house!) As if that weren't painful enough, I was also trying to finish grad school. It was an ugly time, and I was desperate.

Along with our finances, my desperation also manifested itself physically: I gained about 25 pounds, and developed heartburn and other GI difficulties, along with some self-diagnosed depression. I was so tired all the time.

I barely brushed the surface of combating food waste in a recent article, but the comments added so much to the article that I thought I could stop at just one. And then I found some more statistics.

In the U.S.:

• We waste 40 percent of edible food
• It costs $750 million just to dispose of the food we waste
• And when you consider the extra costs of packaging, transporting, and storing wasted food, the overall cost of wasting food goes up to $165 billion.

But there's more -- 33 percent of purchased meat is wasted, followed by 25 percent of seafood. Even 15 percent of purchased fruit is wasted. That's not good, especially when you consider that meat is so expensive, not to mention all food. Continue reading...