Oh Dear, oh deer! We have deer, again. Deer love to visit our garden. Between them and the bunnies we lose a lot of our harvest. Last year I lost over 50 tomato plants when we went away for the 4th of July. I came home to find them mowed down to the ground and deer tracks surrounding the plot. Talk about heart wrenching. I did a lot of crying that night as I witnessed what was left of all my hard work. I vowed to never let them get my garden again. Well, so much for that. I literally go outside almost every single night to chase them out of my garden. They ate half of my tomato plants the night I planted them. After that I had them encased in netting. They have however been feasting on my peas. This was a new one for me because they had never ate them before. Oh well. I will keep working on finding the right combination of to prevent them from dinning on MY buffet line.

Other then that my garden is looking great. We are still eating the lettuce almost everyday. The peas and green beans will be ready soon. The squashes and some melons are blooming. The tomatoes, pepper, carrots, potatoes and eggplant are growing really well. We have been harvesting some onions too. So yummy. I did have to re-seed most of my herbs. They were really spotty. I did use older left over herb seed this year instead of buying new seed. I waited until last week when I could find seed on sale locally to buy some for reseeding. We will have to wait to see how well it fills in.

So that is my lovely garden update. How is your garden growing?

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Well, this is it. Week 13 of 13. It's been an incredibly challenging 13 weeks for us, and we weren't even trying to get out of debt during that time!

Despite all the trials, all the difficulties for anyone leaning and applying this material, week 13 will really rock your world.

I was in the car with a couple of co-workers the other day - one listens to Dave's show occasionally, the other had never heard of him. The listener and I had got to talking and he was 'quizzing' me on the Baby steps - "Baby step 1 is....?" "$1,000 in the bank." "Baby step 2 is...?" "Debt snowball.....". And so on. My other co-worker was listening to all of this. "Baby step 7 is....?" "Build wealth and give a bunch of it away!"

My other co-worker finally piped up, "What!?!" I think it was the second part that got him.

The point of all this material is not to be greedy or hoard money. If you think the end game is just a bunch of numbers in a bank account then you've misunderstood.

You see, none of its ours. It's all His.


The first part of beginning to unravel this is to understand the ownership we have mistakenly applied to money. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills - and He owns the hills too. As Christians, the Bible explains that we are not the owners - we are not the Lord of the realm. But rather the steward for the Lord - we are His managers. He has simply entrusted His money with us. And it doesn't take much Bible study to get that He has not entrusted it with us solely for our own gain.

Now that's just a small bit of this lesson. And I know that there are a lot of you who totally tuned out of the 'God stuff' and are still parsing this post for the personal finance part. Well this is it, baby. Until you have your spiritual life in order, you'll never truly understand financial peace.

This is a powerful, powerful lesson. So much so that a former priest asked us to edit it down to 20 minutes so that he could show it in place of a sermon. This is one not to miss.

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Over at the Nesting Place the Nester challenged us to join her in pricing out a room or wall in our homes to show how easy it is to decorate on a budget. Of course who am I to turn down the chance to brag about my good deals? I thought that I would start with our living room.

1. Our queen sized sleeper sofa was bought for $750 but originally was $1899! Here are the details of that sweat deal. We just bought it a couple weeks ago.
2. The Lazyboy recliner was actually the Mr.'s parents. When they bought new chairs for their living room they offered to give us this one for free. We have had it for 11 years.
3. The lamps were purchased at Home Depot on clearance for $7 two years ago.
4. I bought this set of Ethan Allen end tables at an auction back in college and refinished them.
5. The curtain rod and tie backs we found at Lowes last year on clearance. The rod was damaged so were able to get it for $2!!! The best part is that no one can even see the damage because it is facing the wall. I sewed the curtains myself using fabric I bought at JoAnn's for half price.
6. The lovely mirror was a fun and frugal project. I found the frame at a thrift shop for $3. It had an ugly dated green color where the gold is now. I took some left over acrylic gold paint and painted over the green. Then I was able to have a custom mirror cut for about $10-15 at a local glass and mirror shop. It was the perfect size to fit over our old couch in our first apartment 8 years ago.
7. These beautiful 1950's tv cabinet was carefully refinished and made into a storage cabinet. We purchased it on Craig's list for $85. It now houses all of our games, puzzles and movies.
   
8. This fun 1960's stereo cabinet came with this house when we bought it. It the record player is broke so the plan is to gut the cabinet and use it to hide all our modern day tv tech stuff in it. It is hard to tell when we will get to it but I would guess that it is at least a year away.
9. Who would throw away an Eames chair? Well, someone did. The Mr. fished this one out of trash pile destined for a landfill. It took a little glue but the base and shell are now one again.
10. This blush faux leather chair and ottoman were also in our house when we bought it.
    

As you can tell we don't spend a lot of money on furnishing and decorating our home. As we find the right items for the right price we pick them up. It takes time and patience. If you can be content with what you already own you can make it happen on a budget. Not all of our furnishing match perfectly or are all one style. The walls are not painted and we are still constantly trying to reconfigure the space to work for us with our current furniture. Once the rest of our major remodeling projects are completed we will be able to focus on completing the details of each room. Until then we just enjoy what little down time we have in the living room.

Join us for the next Price my Space to learn about other great deals in our home.

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For those who are wondering... We did get the two old layers of shingles removed yesterday and had to completely remove the flat roof section (about 10x8 ft) over the entryway. It had rotted through from water damage. It looks like we will be rebuilding the flat roof almost from scratch today as well as clean up the roof and lay the underlayment stuff as well as rebuild the valleys.

Our biggest concern is the chance of rain/ storms starting at noon. Please pray or send good wishes our way for the rain to hold off until Monday. We have a wide open roof at the moment.

More updates to come as we progress.

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This year the weather has been perfect for our lettuce. We have been enjoying it for weeks now. There is lots to do with lettuce.

Ways to use Lettuce:

• Salads- We have been enjoying cranberry walnut salads, ceasar chicken salads, taco salad, and small side salads
• Tacos- We have been loading our tacos with lettuce to make them a little healthier
• Burgers- We have been adding lettuce to our hamburgers and porkburgers

I'm sure there are tons more ways to use all the yummy healthy lettuce. What are some of the ways you use your fresh garden lettuce?

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Roofing day is almost here. As we make our final preparations - meals, materials, tools, work assignments - I have to give a bit of pause. As I put my girls to bed tonight, we went through the usual routine including our bedtime prayer. During the prayer, I asked God to help us remember to count our many blessings. Sometimes, despite our failings, we forget how truly blessed we are.

As we approach this project, I see that our cup runneth over, in more ways than one.

1. Finances - You may have noticed that our 'Full Disclosure' progress bar for the roof fund has burst through the levees. Not only did we hit our goal, but we kept going. we knew that some materials would need to be purchased once we were through the tear-off. Fearing an under estimation, we kept going.
   
2. Skills - While I am far from an experienced roofer, we have a family friend who is. We've enlisted his help for the long weekend. While I'm leery of leaning on him too heavily, I've been told that once he starts shingling, to just stay out of his way - he is that fast.
3. Helping Hands - When planning meals, we realized what an out-pouring of support we had. 10-14 just doing the actual labor. We have others watching the kids, others preparing meals, other still offering to help as they hear about the project.
4. Time off - We scheduled these vacation days some time ago, hedging our bets that it would be a 'good time' for it. I always say, in terns of work, there's never a 'good time' to take vacation - there is always something going on. You just have to take it and not look back. This actually looks to be a 'good time', with a slight lul in projects and other efforts winding down, it's a great time when compared to the past two months of crazy work schedules.
5. Weather - I'm not going to worry about the weather. I'm not going to worry about the weather. I'm not going to worry about the weather. Seriously, Lord, it's in your hands.
   

Try this little exercise sometime. Tomorrow, next week... they don't have to be big things, in fact it's the little things sometimes that matter most.

Right now - count three blessings. What are they?

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"....Keeping the American dream from becoming a nightmare".

Now, Dave is all about you paying off your debt. He can't wait for you to be investing. But if you really want to see him get fired up, then watch this lesson on real estate. He's been in this business nearly all of his life. As you might expect, he has a lot to say in this lesson and way more than I could review here - How to sell, How to buy, What to buy, What not to buy, financing....

What I will do is focus on Baby Step 6 and why this is an awesome thing to do.

Baby Step 6 is: Pay off your home early.

If you are on this step, then congratulations - you've come a long way. I never imagined that this step would be or could be challenged. I mean really, why would you want a house payment???


But alas, there's always a few "sophisticates" out there with some fuzzy math.

Bogus excuse 1. With a low interest rate on my mortgage, I can invest that money instead of paying down my house and get better returns. Well not really. A good rate on a mortgage today is ~5%. Let's say you went nuts and invested those extra principal payments in good mutual funds and got something crazy like 12% returns. With the cost of your money at 5%, taxes and inflation clipping you at another 4-6%, that gives you weak at best returns of 3%. I'd rather continue to invest into my retirement as in Baby Step 4, pay off the house early, and then invest without the 5% handicap.

Bogus excuse 2. Paying off your house early means losing a big tax deduction. That's not a bad thing. Deductions are for money spent. Child care, charitable giving, mortgage interest all qualify for deductions on your taxable income. If you made $70,000 last year and payed $10,000 in mortgage interest, then the deduction means that you now pay taxes on $60k rather than $70k because of that $10k that you sent to the bank. That income would put you in the 25% tax bracket (assuming Married, filing jointly in 2009). The difference in taxes for having a mortgage vs. not is the difference between $70k of taxable income vs. $60k. 25% of the $10k difference is $2500. Meaning that you think it's better to pay $10,000 to a bank to keep from pay $2500 to the government. And people say Dave Ramsey can't do math!

Imagine you've gone through the Baby Steps - emergency funds, paid off all debt, invested for retirement and college, and now paid off the house. Wow. Imagine not owing anything to anyone. Imagine what you could do once your monthly expenses were little more than food, utilities and .... whatever.

What would you do?

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We have been making a lot of head way on our garden remodeling project and the planted beds are looking and tasting great! There was a lot on my dream plan and not a lot in my not so dreamy budget. Come take a look at the progress.

• A cute fence around the garden
  
• Deer proof flower/ herb border on the outside of the fence
• Raised beds w/ mulched walking paths
• Adding 4 chickens
• A half shed/ half chicken coop
• Chicken pen for the new hens
• A chicken moat around the garden just inside the cute fence

That was my final "dream" plan as of the beginning of April. It's now July and the paper plans are coming to life.


Project Updates:

• The raised beds with mulched walking paths was the first thing we did. We built 8 of the nine beds so far. The last one will be completed in the fall after the crops are harvested out of that area. The beds are 4 ft x 18 ft x 8 inches deep. We were able to fill the beds with open bag specials at local stores. Most bags didn't have anything missing out of them and we spent $1.50 per bag. Not a bad deal, but it does add up when you consider the shear amount that we needed.
• As you know, we do have the four chickens. We all love the hens and are enjoying them in the backyard at the moment. The coop is completed, but we have not built the pens in the garden area yet. Once we do that we will move them to the garden until then they will be enjoying free range of the backyard and the ravine.
  
• The cute fence I dream of should become a reality slowly over the next month. We have gathered beautiful cedar boards and treated 4x4's from Craig's List sources. We just need to get the long runners for between the posts and we will have all the material to build a beautiful picket fence.
  
• The chicken moat to go around the garden area was abandoned because of the cost.
  
• The deer proof flower/ herb border for the outside of the fence has not been started because the fence is not in place. I'm still planning on getting the plants for free or bartering for them. For plants that I can not obtain that way I will try to start from seed over this coming winter to help save money that way.

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This summer I feel like I have been neglecting our blog. The Mr. has been picking up the slack while I've been MIA. Thanks honey!

Our youngest daughter is just shy of 1 1/2 years old. When our oldest was this age I traveled for work and the Mr. was a part time stay at home dad while she at day care the other half of the time. Things just sort of flowed and I didn't have to worry about things. This time around I find myself clueless about our toddler's behavior. Her personality is very different from her sisters and it has been 5 years. So while I've been "quiet" online, I've been busy reading book I can get my hands on that deals specifically with this age.

So far the most helpful one is called Me, Myself and I- How Children Build Their Sense of Self by Kyle D. Pruett, M.D.. I'm still reading it but it has given me some great insight as to what is going on in her little brain and how I can change my parenting style so that we can have a peaceful home.

Until I finish my research on parenting a toddler you might notice a little less posting from me. But no fear, I'm still here doing what I've always done, just not blogging about it.

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Of the 13 weeks, this is the only one solely dedicated to your income. This is where we talk about careers, and the dreaded extra jobs. I thought that this would be a very interesting lesson, what with the state of the economy and the number of folks in the class facing a career crisis.


The part of this lesson that I liked best was about job hunting. And while I haven't really had the opportunity to use his method to a T, I have done some of these things pre-Dave, and can certainly vouch for their effectiveness.

I'll break these into 4 key points

1. Identify the target. Everyone should know by now how few job openings actually make it to a typical job posting. The Mrs. and I have had a total of 6 jobs in our professional careers - None of them were posted in the paper, on job hunting websites or otherwise. Stop waiting for a opportuinty to find you. Find careers and industries that interest you. Identify companies you would like to work for. Your new hobby / part-time job is to study them and prepare to bother them.
2. 3-2-1 Contact. Dave recommends approaching this like a new relationship with an individual. This makes a lot of sense as you are not contacting a company so much as you are interfacing with an individual at that company. Dave also suggests that you contact them 3 times in effort to gain their attention. First is an introduction letter, simply stating who you are, what your interest is with them, and to watch for your next correspondence. Second is your resume and cover letter, where you deliver the goods. When you send your credentials, they would ideally be tailored to that specific company and showing the information about you that is actually relevant to that company. Third is the most important - the follow up. That cover letter, btw, should state your specifically when you will be following up with them. The follow up is where most folks fall short and assume that they'll hear back. This is a great way to set yourself appart. That persistance will pay off.
3. Sell the product. Sell? Yes. And the product, btw, is you. Differentiate the product - show them why you are not just like the other 20 engineers they interviewed last month. Show them why you would be more of an asset to their company than all the other applicants. This is how companies sell products and this is how you should sell you. Be prompt, be confident, be respectiful. Read the Go-Getter by Peter B. Kyne. Dave recommends this book all the time and it's fabulous. Again - follow up. Better yet, set up a follow-up appointment - in person, by phone, whaterver. Twitter it for all I care, just make the appointment and then actually do it. Between the interview and the follow-up, send them a note thanking them for taking the time out of their undoubtedly bust schedule to meet with you, and how glad you were to meet them and learn more about their company. Which reminds me - remember when you did all that research into the company and the person you would be meeitng with? That should result in some questions for the interviewer(s).
   
4. For the record. Keep notes, make a spreadsheet, set alerts, whatever. Find 10 companies to contact this way. Find 4. Find 20. The point is, you will likely contact them at different times, send them different materials, and follow up at different times. How will you keep it all straight? As I was approaching graduation, I (the free-spirit) had a large spreadsheet on my wall next to my desk detailing all the pertinanet info for all of the companies I had targeted. Who, what, when, where, why and how. That spreadsheet made the whole thing possibe.
   

I won't pretend - this stuff is not easy to do unless you are naturally out-going. But that also means that most folks won't be doing these things. In today's economy, you've got to attack a job hunt like it is you job. Be great at your job.

What techniques have you successfully used in job hunting?

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