Finances
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Colorado House Renovation Before and After, Part 2
This is part two of my blog post about how we flipped our own house, doing a renovation and updating in 6 weeks, prior to listing it for sale. In Part One, I showed you the major changes upstairs when we took a wall between the dining, living room, and kitchen down to a half…
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Designed to Sell: Flipping Our House, Part 1
It’s officially been a year since I arrived in Texas. When we decided to list our house for sale during our spontaneous cross-country move, I somehow managed to talk Chris into taking a gamble on a full renovation and trying to “flip” our house. For a while now, the Fort Collins real estate market has…
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Debt Free
It is officially summer in Colorado. We have a mini garden started with some veggies and berries, we’ve taken our first trip to buy delicious things from the farmer’s market, and this afternoon Chris and I rode bikes (together!) to pick the girls up from their summer program. After a gray Seattle-like May, we are reveling in…
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End of the SNAP Challenge
I’m catching up with my end of the year work and realized I never wrote a final post for our Food Stamps Challenge. It also just so happens that today we were in the newspaper; the Gillette News Record ran a story about our challenge, along with some pictures of Chris cooking (taken by Daniel Brenner). …
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Eating Local in Wyoming
One of the first things I looked up about our new community prior to leaving Nantucket was information on the food scene. Eating sustainable foods, gown locally and in season are very important to us because we believe that is on of the best ways we can remain healthy, minimize our impact on the planet,…
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The Cost of Paradise
Note: Normally, today would be a Film Friday post, but tomorrow is town meeting and I didn’t have a chance to get this post finished up last night, so I’m sharing it tonight before tomorrow’s big vote. Film Friday will resume next week. Every spring, in old-fashioned small-town New England style, the entire town packs…
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The Cost of Raising a Child
This week the USDA published its annual report on Expenditures on Children by Families [PDF] and the numbers are shocking – to me at least. It costs an average middle-income American family $222,360 to raise a child from birth to 18. Depending on age of the child, annual expenses ranged from $8,330 to $9,450 for…
