When I first purchased my 80+ year old home I had countless, uncontrollable, urges to renovate every square foot of the house; I wanted a period kitchen with white, maple, cabinets, a claw tooth soaking tube with 1inch hexagon tile, and new cedar clapboards for the outside of the house with luxurious copper gutters.  When I explained everything I wanted […]

Let’s get right to the tips this morning, but before we do so I wanted to highlight my recently posted, and highly relevant, article on Wisebread.com entitled 10 Life and Money Lessons Learned From Immigrant Parents: 1. Auto renewing products and services. This can be a magazine subscription, Netflix service, cell phone with unlimited text messaging, emergency/repair service offered by […]

Smart or Just Lucky: The Home Buying Roll of the Dice Excerpt: My point in sharing all of this is, we’re not all that different from someone that stretched to buy a house in the last few years, and then got burned by the tanking housing market, increasing unemployment, a catastrophic illness, or the stock market’s decline.  All the circumstances over […]

Our traditional, homemade tomato sauce, uses crushed, uncooked, tomatoes from our annual Fall tomato canning event.  Tomato sauce is easy to make and incredibly versatile.  We use tomato sauce for pasta, other sauces, soups, etc.  Making homemade sauce is a no-brainer, so don’t purchase the canned variety at your local supermarket.  Plus, our recipe hails from Calabria, Italy – a region that produces […]

Bringing your lunch to work every day is one of the easiest ways to save money and control your diet (trust me, you don’t want Sal at the local deli making your hero sandwich).  So, when the Canadian, frugal living, blogger SaverQueen asked me to do a guest blog post for SaverQueen.com, a make your own lunch entry came immediately […]

5 Reasons Why It’s Important to Have Good Social Skills Italians are  generally viewed as a very social and outgoing.  Italian society puts great emphasis on communications and  personal relationships and its part of the reason why Italians have a reputation for conveying warmth and openess with both native and non-natives alike. In turn, here are five advantages associated with […]

Melinda Beck of the Wall Street Journal’s Health Journal column has an excellent piece on everything you wanted to know about the common cold (and, yes, your mother was right, chills may lead to a cold).   Here are some great tips / info to help you get through the last few weeks of winter: 1. When we experience a […]

Free Money Finance hosted a Carnival of Personal Finance this week and included Scordo.com’s article, “Starting Your Own Business: An Interview With a Practical Entrepreneur”  Cindy at Small Homestead hosted a Carnival of Homesteading and included Scordo.com’s article, “How To: Canning Tomatoes”  Both Carnivals have tons of other great content including: – How to Manage Job Burnout at Digerati Life  […]

I’m often asked how and what I purchase for food each week given my love for food and my desire to save money.  And my answer is: I look for fresh, high quality, food first, then price, and finally food items that gave me pleasure.  My first stop at the local, independent, market is the produce section.  Fresh fruits and […]