Thoughts from Elder Quentin L. Cook
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Preparing for a Layoff
According to the experts, many
of us will be laid off more than once. So, it's a good idea to be prepared. It's
is survivable, but still a very stressful time, even if you are one of the
"stars" in your workplace. Stars get laid off, too. Don't expect a layoff to be
rational.
DO NOT look for a new job from your current place of employment! Employers in the U.S. have the right to watch what you are doing with company assets (e.g. your office computer, your office Internet connection, etc. even if you work from home), and they may see that e-mailed resume and/or your many visits to Monster, etc. That can a very quick way to get fired!
You are the most attractive to a potential employer when you are still employed.
Getting Ready to Be Unemployed
If you've done a little ground work and some planning, you'll feel more in control when the proverbial ax falls. Here are some things you can do in advance of being laid off, both at work and at home.
Read more at: http://www.job-hunt.org/layoffs/preparing-for-a-layoff-office.shtml
DO NOT look for a new job from your current place of employment! Employers in the U.S. have the right to watch what you are doing with company assets (e.g. your office computer, your office Internet connection, etc. even if you work from home), and they may see that e-mailed resume and/or your many visits to Monster, etc. That can a very quick way to get fired!
You are the most attractive to a potential employer when you are still employed.
Getting Ready to Be Unemployed
If you've done a little ground work and some planning, you'll feel more in control when the proverbial ax falls. Here are some things you can do in advance of being laid off, both at work and at home.
Read more at: http://www.job-hunt.org/layoffs/preparing-for-a-layoff-office.shtml
Homemade Fruit Leather
3 lbs fresh fruit, washed and hulled/pitted, etc.
1 cup of 100% fruit juice {use 1/3 cup per pound of fruit}
1-2 TSBP sugar, if desired
Wash fruit and remove the hull/ pit, etc. Slice in half and place in a pot on the stove. Add fruit juice and cook fruit until it's soft. Add sugar if you'd like. I've made it with and without- we loved it both ways, so I opt to leave it out. However if your fruit is tart, it might be good to add a tablespoon or two.
The next step is to blend/ puree the fruit until it's super smooth. You can do this in a variety of ways, depending on what kitchen gadgets you have. I love my immersion blender and it works great for this- just stick it in the berries and blend. It took about 10 seconds to make a smooth puree. I blended it for about a minute just to make sure I got all the chunks. You can also transfer the fruit to a blender and puree it that way.
Pour the puree onto 2 jelly roll pans lined with parchment paper. You might want to trim the paper down a bit so that the side doesn't fall down into the puree. Mine did once and that fruit never dried out.
Set the oven to 170 degrees and prop the door open using a wooden spoon. As I said before, I've tried many recipes for fruit leather and I think this is the step that made the most difference! As the fruit is drying, the moisture needs somewhere to escape. Just be sure to keep any toddlers out of the kitchen or block it off with a baby gate.
Dry the fruit in the oven for 6-7 hours. Check it at 6 hours and see if you can peel it from the parchment paper. The fruit will still be slightly sticky. You don't want to make it crispy by cooking it too long! If it all peels up- it's done! If you still have portions that aren't cooked, put it back in the oven for another hour.
Once it's all done, before removing it from the parchment paper, cut it into strips. Then peel the paper off. There's no need to take time to roll with plastic wrap or wax paper or anything- just stick all the strips in a ziplock bag. Stick it in kid's lunches, serve as a snack, etc.
Dry the fruit in the oven for 6-7 hours. Check it at 6 hours and see if you can peel it from the parchment paper. The fruit will still be slightly sticky. You don't want to make it crispy by cooking it too long! If it all peels up- it's done! If you still have portions that aren't cooked, put it back in the oven for another hour.
Once it's all done, before removing it from the parchment paper, cut it into strips. Then peel the paper off. There's no need to take time to roll with plastic wrap or wax paper or anything- just stick all the strips in a ziplock bag. Stick it in kid's lunches, serve as a snack, etc.
Save on Prescription Drugs
The cost of prescription drugs can be an enormous drain on the budget.
Enjoy this great article which gives some excellent suggestions on how to treat
the high cost of prescription drugs.
http://www.walletpop.com/2011/02/15/savings-experiment-treating-the-high-cost-of-prescription-drugs/?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-n%7Cdl9%7Csec1_lnk3%7C201866
http://www.walletpop.com/2011/02/15/savings-experiment-treating-the-high-cost-of-prescription-drugs/?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-n%7Cdl9%7Csec1_lnk3%7C201866
How to De-Crapify Your Home: A Start-to-Finish Guide
While it's no epidemic, it's hard to argue that most of us have a little "too much stuff". Whether you've got a little or a lot more clutter than you'd like in your home, here's a start-to-finish look at how to streamline your Spring cleaning.
Getting rid of your stuff can be difficult. Things have value to you, whether you've formed a personal attachment to your stuff or you believe you'll have a practical use for it... someday. Most of the time, "personal value" means guilt and "someday" never comes.
We're not talking about going ultra-minimalist here, but rather making a concentrated effort to only keep the things in your life that you use and actually matter to you. To do this, we're first going to take a look at identifying the crap in your home, then how to get rid of it so you're not always just throwing it away, and finally discuss some methods for actually maintaining your crap-free lifestyle. Let's get to it.
Continue reading at: http://lifehacker.com/5804927/how-to-de+crapify-your-home
Friday, August 10, 2012
What Is Food Storage?
The Utah State Extension Service defines food storage this way “Proper food and water storage can assist families in case of a disaster. When a disaster strikes it may be impossible to obtain food and water, even at the supermarket. Therefore it is important to have adequate food storage and water available in case of a disaster. The Civil Defense recommends storing food and water adequate for each family member for two weeks.” In a nutshell food storage is food that you store for a time of need. In today’s world we see many needs for food storage either with a natural disaster or a disaster of an economy lurking all around us
The $5 Savings Plan
A new tip that I had read on several blogs, of removing and saving $5 bills
whenever one lands in my wallet. You may not accumulate a large amount, but a small amount may grow into a significant amount with persistence. You may even find yourself paying closer attention to the money in your wallet.
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Tracking Spending and Expenses
To build a realistic financial budget, start by figuring out where your money
goes now. There are three steps to creating a budget:
1) Identify how your money is currently being spent.
2) Evaluate that spending to see if it meets the financial priorities you specified in Lesson 1.
3) Track your ongoing spending to make sure it stays within those guidelines (or to understand how your budget needs to be revised).
If you happen to use Quicken, Microsoft Money or other such software, you're in luck. These programs generally make it easy to draw up a budget.
In Quicken, for example, every time you make a deposit, write a check, pay a credit card bill or dispatch an electronic payment you are asked to assign it to a particular category, such as "salary," "clothing," "groceries," "child care" or "health insurance."
You can also create subcategories, dividing "auto" expenses into "fuel," "insurance" and "service." The program comes with a set of categories that handle most of the basics. You can edit the list to create categories that make better sense for your particular household.
The drawback, of course, is that entering and categorizing all of your income and outflow is a tedious chore.
You can reduce the tedium by judiciously selecting categories. Let's say you are only worried about tracking your spending for recreation and leisure pursuits. You could create categories that cover those types of expenses, and let everything else accumulate under "miscellaneous revenue" or "miscellaneous expense."
The problem with that approach is that you forgo the opportunity to spot problems in other spending areas that you may not even be aware of.
A better solution is to track expenses using electronic banking. That way, you can download your payments and deposits directly from the bank, rather than having to enter them by hand.
The downloaded banking transactions generally show up without any categorization - meaning you'll have to add the categories by hand. But if you use a credit card that is issued by a bank that permits electronic access, then the downloaded charges from your card sometimes do come with categories attached (they aren't always right, so check them).
Either way, once you've got your spending tracked by category, drawing up a report requires only a few clicks of the mouse. Even better, such programs often have an automatic budget-creation feature that scans your spending in the past in order to estimate how much you'll spend going forward.
If your finances aren't wired, you can still get a good handle on your spending the old-fashioned way. Start by getting all your records together from the past 12 months, including pay stubs, loan proceeds, withdrawal slips, canceled checks and itemized credit-card statements. Then go through them and compile totals for your income and expenses in a set of categories that makes sense for you.
At the end of this exercise, you may still have a sizable lump of spending that's undocumented - typically, the money you withdraw in cash and then spend on day-to-day needs. If this portion of your budget seems to be getting out of hand, keep a journal for the next four weeks in which you record every nickel you spend. You can use those results to extrapolate how your cash is being spent throughout the year.
Now that you've got a good picture of where your money is going, you can proceed to evaluate which parts of that spending should be raised or lowered.
Another installment form Money Magazine.
1) Identify how your money is currently being spent.
2) Evaluate that spending to see if it meets the financial priorities you specified in Lesson 1.
3) Track your ongoing spending to make sure it stays within those guidelines (or to understand how your budget needs to be revised).
If you happen to use Quicken, Microsoft Money or other such software, you're in luck. These programs generally make it easy to draw up a budget.
In Quicken, for example, every time you make a deposit, write a check, pay a credit card bill or dispatch an electronic payment you are asked to assign it to a particular category, such as "salary," "clothing," "groceries," "child care" or "health insurance."
You can also create subcategories, dividing "auto" expenses into "fuel," "insurance" and "service." The program comes with a set of categories that handle most of the basics. You can edit the list to create categories that make better sense for your particular household.
The drawback, of course, is that entering and categorizing all of your income and outflow is a tedious chore.
You can reduce the tedium by judiciously selecting categories. Let's say you are only worried about tracking your spending for recreation and leisure pursuits. You could create categories that cover those types of expenses, and let everything else accumulate under "miscellaneous revenue" or "miscellaneous expense."
The problem with that approach is that you forgo the opportunity to spot problems in other spending areas that you may not even be aware of.
A better solution is to track expenses using electronic banking. That way, you can download your payments and deposits directly from the bank, rather than having to enter them by hand.
The downloaded banking transactions generally show up without any categorization - meaning you'll have to add the categories by hand. But if you use a credit card that is issued by a bank that permits electronic access, then the downloaded charges from your card sometimes do come with categories attached (they aren't always right, so check them).
Either way, once you've got your spending tracked by category, drawing up a report requires only a few clicks of the mouse. Even better, such programs often have an automatic budget-creation feature that scans your spending in the past in order to estimate how much you'll spend going forward.
If your finances aren't wired, you can still get a good handle on your spending the old-fashioned way. Start by getting all your records together from the past 12 months, including pay stubs, loan proceeds, withdrawal slips, canceled checks and itemized credit-card statements. Then go through them and compile totals for your income and expenses in a set of categories that makes sense for you.
At the end of this exercise, you may still have a sizable lump of spending that's undocumented - typically, the money you withdraw in cash and then spend on day-to-day needs. If this portion of your budget seems to be getting out of hand, keep a journal for the next four weeks in which you record every nickel you spend. You can use those results to extrapolate how your cash is being spent throughout the year.
Now that you've got a good picture of where your money is going, you can proceed to evaluate which parts of that spending should be raised or lowered.
Another installment form Money Magazine.
Wheat Waffles
Makes 8 waffles
2 cups flour (1 cup white and 1 cup wheat)
4 tsp. baking powder 1/2 tsp. salt
2 tbsp. honey or sugar 1 3/4 cup milk
6 tbsp. salad oil 2 eggs
Mix dry ingredients together, including nonfat dry milk. Stir in remaining ingredients. For lighter waffles, separate eggs. Beat egg whites and carefully fold in.
Live on $14,000 a Year
Ready or not, let's get started.
Go to her blog at http://www.blissfulanddomestic.com/2012/06/how-does-she-live-on-budget.html Lots of great ideas.
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