Car Lock Down Challenge

This is our car. It's not broken down. It's not being repaired. It's in jail. Yep, we've locked our car into our backyard and we're going to see how many days we can go without driving it. So far we've gone a day and half and we haven't missed it yet! Want to join our Car Lock Down Challenge? Leave a comment below. We'll check back in next Monday and see how everyone did.

Forgotten Money

I have a lot of money. Vast quantities of it, actually. And I almost never think about it. In fact, I often look in my wallet and complain that I only have five dollars. You see, all that other money--it's forgotten money. Want to know why I forget it about it? Because it looks like this:
Not too long ago my husband and I made up a shopping list of things we needed. We only had $17 to spend and it looked like the items on our list would total that amount. My five year old asked if we could get some ice cream while we were out. It was a super hot day and ice cream sounded sooooo good. But, "Sorry, buddy. We might not have enough money for ice-cream," my husband said patiently. My son replied, "But you have lots of money! It's all over the place!" And he proceeded to point out our change jar, the pile of change in my husband's nightstand, the bulging coin pocket in my wallet, and then he reminded us of all the coins on the floor of our car.

He was right. We had lots of forgotten money! We each took a handfull of coins with us to Fred Meyer and when we were ready to pay we used the U-Scan. Our total was $17.82. If our son had not reminded us of all our forgotten change I might have thought to scrounge around in the bottom of my purse for 82 cents. I probably would have chosen to put one item back. Instead, we started plugging all our change into the U-Scan machine and watching our total go down, down, down.

At the end we only needed to pay $11.81. We still had a five dollar bill! Plenty of money for a carton of ice cream. It was a happy day indeed!

Now we try to use the U-Scan as much as possible so that we can play "The Change Game." (We could use the regular line but it seems rude to ask a real person to count all our change and to hold up the line for other customers.) It's amazing how much our dollars can stretch when we actually use all of them!

So where's your forgotten money? Do you have any tips on getting the most of out your change?

robot teaching green?

today we went to see the new pixar movie: wall e. now, i know going to the movie theatre isn't exactly frugal, but maybe you could catch this at the redbox when it comes on dvd or do a matinee with no concessions:) it does fall into the green category, though. no preaching. not even much dialogue. just a picture of what can happen when we care more about convenience than beauty. more about ourselves and the immediate then those we share creation with.
i'm a person who feels almost any information about a movie is a spoiler so i will stop typing, but has anyone seen this flick? any thoughts?