Grasshopper New Media Presents...

My husband works with computers for a living, and I’m a blogger. You would think that with all the time we spend on our computers that surely our kids must be playing computer games. The answer is no. It’s not that we have strong opinions against kids playing computers games. It’s [...]

The kids are busy, I get that. They have school, homework, soccer, etc. But I still want them to contribute to the house and its upkeep. Yet getting them to do chores is like asking them to swallow hot coals. Still, I needed to solve this problem. Parenting advisers say, “Pick Your Battles.” Well, this [...]

Watching the news lately is starting to give me generalized, free floating anxiety. Every day, I hear about another friend who has been laid off, and is trying to network to find a new position. Sometimes I have great places for them to look and connections to help them. Other times, [...]

The economic forecast is grim. Cloudy with a chance of relatives… moving in. Many of us our looking for ways to tighten our belts, many are in dire straits, dealing with job loss, plummeting values on all our assets; it ain’t easy and it doesn’t look like it is easing up any time soon. Yesterday [...]

Last night I went to a moms group meeting on how to save money when shopping. I already knew some of the tips like waiting until a product is on sale and further knocking the price down with a manufacturer’s coupon. Other ideas made sense and consisted of things that I should be [...]

We’re all worried about all the doom and gloom about the economy we hear every day. Each piece of news can seem like one more pill to cause, rather than alleviate, generalized anxiety. I thought I’d try to paint a picture of what we should expect to happen next, so no one’s surprised.
Firstly, [...]

I was listening to the radio today, and they were discussing the ways state and local governments are looking to save money. Some of them might seem like good ideas at first blush, but many would have downstream disastrous consequences.
For example, one of the suggestions was to cut the school week back to four [...]

There can be no doubt that we are living through times of significant change. The economic climate is, ahem, in a bit of a bad way. You have a new president, a ray of light? And then there’s the state of our Earth.
I recently read the bestseller Your Money or Your Life, it’s [...]

One of the things I realized after a while of being an at-home mom, was how similar running a home was to running a business. While the “widgets” you produce are children and hopefully happy adults, in some ways, it’s very analogous to any other business venture.
For example, household finances are just another version [...]

Last week I shared a goal for reducing our grocery budget by 1/4.  I am back to report success.  I started a few days into the 2 week period,  but I tightened things up enough to actually end the week with money in my pocket.  Granted,  no one needed clothes and we didn’t need cleaning [...]