I know times are tough for a lot of people, so I thought I’d share my method of saving about 40-60% on my grocery bill every week. I’m not profiting from any link or piece of information in this post; I just know that a lot of people are facing job loss and other loss of income and I thought this might be helpful to people in hard situations (or anyone else, really).

First, since most people are lured by the shiny and the pretty, this is a scan of my grocery bill this week. Note that it came out to $125 total. Note that I saved around $88.

Besides milk and fresh veggies, which I buy fresh once a week, I might either shop for 1 or 2 weeks at a time. This week I shopped for 2 weeks, hence the larger bill. On average, I’m spending about $50-75/week for a family of two. Please take into account the following:

• We’re vegetarian health nuts and we like to eat organic /whole wheat/ all-natural aka $$$$$.
• We mostly DON’T buy generic things – almost all of the stuff I bought this trip were brand name things. With this method, generic stuff actually comes out more expensive than brand names.
• My son, because of his autism and sensory integration issues, does not eat the cheap staples like beans and rice.
• I live in hurricane country, so I like to “stock up” on staples – I’ve found they come in handy every year.
• I like the good stuff whenever possible – good olive oil, good spices, good brands. Again, $$$$.
• We don’t often eat that much prepackaged food, like sugary snacks or cereals or stuff in boxes that you usually think of when you think of clipping coupons.
• I live in the heart of Miami, FL, where food is VERY expensive relative to other places in the country.
• This includes food AND non-food items, like cleaning and paper products – and again, I bought nothing but the brand names.

And even still, taking all of that into account, I saved $88. I estimate that using this method, I regularly save between $250-$400 per month in groceries. That’s up to $3000-4800/year. That’s a BIG chunk of change for me (probably for you too!).

When I start to tell people about this, they marvel I must put a lot of work into it. (Okay, LOL, sometimes they kind of imply I must have no life and spend all my time obsessing over saving money on groceries.) But the truth is, it takes about an hour of my time each week. That may seem significant unless you consider that I’m making, according to my savings, $88/hour for that hour My job pays pretty well, but it doesn’t pay $88/hour! And this is just for my lousy itty bitty family of two – I know bigger families could save a lot more.

How do I do this, exactly? It’s very simple, very painless and very free.

CLICK TO THE REST.

About once or twice a week I get an email from a single or working parent who wants to homeschool their child(ren), but they don’t think it’s possible, because they have to work. Whether they’re single, or their spouse is unable to work for whatever reason, or has faced job loss, or they have determined they cannot live without two incomes, or whatever. The point is – “But I have to work…” is one of the biggest roadblocks many, many families see as insurmountable to homeschooling their children.

It’s hardly an insurmountable one, however; many people homeschool and work full time.  I am cutting and pasting a response from a Yahoo! group. It was to a lady whose husband has been laid off, and the husband is demanding that she get a job outside the home and put the children back in public school. This is hardly the only alternative; it’s just the only alternative when you don’t think outside the box.

What most people don’t realize is that homeschooling is a lifestyle choice, just as putting your child in public school is a lifestyle choice for your family.  The means and methods by which you educate your children dictate the way your family lives, either way.  When you make the lifestyle choice of homeschooling, you’ve already decided your family’s time will not be spent the way most people choose to live. This almost certainly includes finances, and if you have to work and homeschool, it’s just time to accept that your lifestyle will be unorthodox, and work from there.

The point is: there are many alternatives to just sending your kids back to public school if the mother must work.

One or both of you could get jobs from home.
I have a links directory with a work-from-home section of over 100 legitimate work-from-home companies. I’m not affiliated with or paid by any of these companies so I’m just listing the ones I have either worked for in the past or know they have a good reputation. There are many excellent work at home forums that help you vet legitimate WAH jobs and offer resources and support, my two favorites are WorkPlaceLikeHome and WorkAtHomeMoms (not just for moms), and RatRaceRebellion has new pre-screened WAH job listings daily.  It takes time and persistence to find a work-at-home-situation that works for you, but it’s worthwhile if your goal is to spend more time with your family while being able to meet your family’s financial needs and goals. I have a few tips and starting off points here for people who want to explore this possibility more.

If people want advice or starting points, please feel free to contact me and I’ll be happy to help. I work as a web designer during the day and transcriptionist at night so I won’t be making any profit off helping anyone, I just have a passion for helping working and single parents homeschool.

Homeschool at unorthodox times.
If working from home isn’t going to make ends meet or it’s not for you for whatever reason, you can work full time and homeschool in the evenings and weekends. Remember that homeschooling takes a lot less time than traditional schooling, because there’s not nearly as much crowd-control and busy work going on. Getting an education doesn’t need to be limited to traditional school hours. Learning can take place at any time.  You can fit your children’s academic needs around your job schedule instead of the other way around.

Share the homeschooling duties.
If you’re a married couple that needs a full-time income, this doesn’t mean that this income needs to be earned by one person or bust. You could both get part-time jobs with rotating schedules and split the homeschooling duties if you are a two-parent household. If you’re a single parent household, perhaps there is a relative – or better yet, a grandparent or two – who would be willing to read, help with math, assist with science experiments, or just drive the child to a weekly co-op or something. You do not have to do everything yourself!

Teach your kids to be self-directed, independent learners.
If your children are reading independently, they are ready to take on increasing responsibility for their own schoolwork, with the goal being that eventually they are doing most of their own academics themselves, with you acting as a facilitator. Isn’t that our overall goal anyway?  To teach children how to learn and how to be active participants in their own education is a worthy goal, and easily accomplished over time in manageable increments.

Initially, they can be left with a sitter during the time you work, with a checklist of stuff to read and do themselves. This checklist should have only one or two things on them at first, then slowly added to, so that eventually the child is doing the majority of his or her own reading and schoolwork. My son has a checklist of things he must do weekly. He has the choice of spreading them out over time so that he only does a little every day for 5 days, or reading them in 3 or 4 days’ time, or reading all the assignments for one book in a single day, etc. In this way he learns to manage his own time – an essential life-skill for success in both post-secondary education and the workplace.

Once you get home from work, the children can narrate/ tell back to you what they read that day over dinner, and you can read a few texts at night like a bedtime story.  This is essentially what my son and I do with Ambleside Online – he has a daily checklist of things to read himself while I work in the same room with him in case he has any questions or needs help. Around 6 o’clock we do a brief math lesson, handwriting/grammar, art/poetry/Shakespeare/composer study (we do one of these each day of the week), and read the Bible together before dinner – about an hour or so. Then we talk about what he read that day over dinner, and read Age of Fable, a brief history reading and perhaps a literature selection before bed. We do our nature studies/ walks on Saturdays. I spend less than 2 hours a day homeschooling him directly and he spends perhaps another 1 or 2 hours doing his own independent work.

If your children are very young and aren’t reading independently, this is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they don’t need as much formal academics as older kids do, so it’s even easier to fit their academic needs around a busy work schedule.  On the other hand, they need more attention and supervision than older children do and academic struggles present themselves at a larger scale in younger years. Either way, it is possible to find a solution that fits your family.

Ask for help.
You could rally your homeschooling community for support. One family won’t want to take on your children 5 days a week, but perhaps 5 or 6 families might each be willing to help you, especially if your family is in financial dire straits, by each taking your kids 1 day a week apiece (have an extra family on hand in case of an emergency). Then the kids could be in a homeschooling family setting while not being too much of a burden on any one particular family. I’m sure many families would be willing to help; many may have a homeschooled teenager who is willing to babysit and maybe even tutor for relatively low cost compared to daycares.

You can do it!
Your homeschool does not have to look like anyone else’s; it just has to work for YOU.  Where there’s a will, there is a way. I’ve been working from home and homeschooling my son for 6 years, so I know it can be done, but I also know the stress of financial worries, and the stress of managing a family’s finances AND homeschooling at the same time.  But this is not an obstacle to homeschooling – it’s just one more way in which we have to rearrange our lives to make this lifestyle choice fit. It’s not easy (when is anything with kids easy?) but it can be done.

… when I start pouring over curriculum catalogues and figuring out what we’re doing for next year. Sixth grade! I can hardly believe my baby is officially a junior high student as of this September, but as the song goes, the wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’.

There are things we’re keeping from this year, things we’re trying that are new, things we’re throwing out altogether.  The reality is that I’ve spent too much money on books these last couple of years and I can’t afford to do that again. Also, I’m going to try to design a homeschool for us that focuses more on nature study, art and music appreciation, and low-cost or free resources. WinterPromise is a wonderful curriculum and we may still be using their booklists for free reading since Shorty blazes through books (a habit I’m trying to discourage – a subject for another post though) and we’re going to rely on the excellent Miami-Dade Public library system more than ever. I’m attempting to focus our time and energy less on textbooks and more on real books and real-life  hands-on experiences right now, and hope to expand that in the future. So without further ado, here are our curriculum choices as of right now for next fall.

Main Spine: AmblesideOnline.org – Year 5, since we are finishing up the third term of Y4 this year. It’s not really “fifth grade” – many sixth through eighth graders are using it.  We’ll be using this as a guide for Bible, history, art, music, Shakespeare, nature study, composer study, poetry, literature and language arts.  It’s free, and relies heavily on public domain or easily obtainable texts.

So far I am really appreciating the schedule for Ambleside, which doesn’t have a day-to-day checklist (though parents have created many for your use each year on the various Yahoo! groups).  Each week I give Shorty a list of things to do that week. He can break it up into daily readings or read one book per day or however he chooses to do it. This is how real life works too; when I have a deadline, I can choose to cram it all into the last minute of things or do it little by little over time.  We are really enjoying the readings so far. There have been some growing pains about self-directed learning (no, you may not do the next month’s worth of reading in one day…) but I think we’re making really good progress and he really adores the books so far.

Caveat: The one major criticism I would have about Ambleside is its lack of cultural diversity. There is very little in the way of studying art, music and literature from anything that isn’t American or British.   Of course, this is based on a British woman’s pedagogy, which should not be undermined because her ideas were spectacularly ahead of her time, but there’s no reason why a little Cuban-American child in Miami needs to be memorizing that much about British history.  No Our Island Story for us.

Other modifications I’m making to the curriculum in order to broaden its access to cultural diversity:

• In addition to composer studies, I’m going to add in modern music studies in between. Do 3 weeks of classics, 3 weeks of jazz and contemporary music.  I’ll be posting my schedule soon.
• Their reading list is great, but since I’m assuming Shorty will get through it rathe quickly, and since Y5 includes books he won’t touch with a 10 foot pole (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm AND Little House on the Prairie for an 11yo boy? Please.)  I’m going to compile my own reading list of living books, with an eye toward books about people of various races, cultures and countries.  This, too, I will be posting.
• Likewise their poetry reading and biographies. Shorty happens to love biographies and we intend to read one per month, not three the entire year. So I’m going to add in people like Jose Marti, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Simón Bolivar, Clara Barton and Milton Hershey. (We’ll probably do a fun project/ lapbook on chocolate for that one. LOL).  I’m going to swap out one of their poets for Jose Marti too. It fits the time period, and why not? His poetry was at least as beautiful as Wordsworth.
• I notice there is not one Latino, Native American or Asian artist, and only one or two African-American artists, in the art rotation schedule for the next few years.  I’ll swap a few of those out, too.
• We are not touching Plutarch for now. There are only so many hours in the day, people.

Logic
I’m keeping our formal study of logic, because as a philosophy major and highly logical person, it’s important to me. Using The Well Trained Mind’s recommendations of the Mind Benders and Case of the Red Herrings books for now. They are each about $9 on Amazon.

Foreign Languages
I’m going to try to have Shorty do a formal Spanish class through the Florida Virtual School; barring that, I’ll do the Teach Them Spanish! workbooks with him. Kinda iffy on whether we’ll be doing Latin. I know Charlotte Mason recommends starting in the fourth grade, but yeah, as I said, there are only so many hours in the day. A lady on a mailing list recommended a fairly self-directed curriculum that is inexpensive; I may check that out, called Getting Started with Latin. I do think it’s important for many reasons, including the study of science, music, and etymology, but I remember last year I bought the Prima Latina set, which is intended for the K-3 set, and found it so dry , lofty, overwhelming and irrelevant to the average 5-year-old that I felt actual pity for any kindergartener upon whom this was foisted. Your mileage may vary. Shorty thinks etymology is fun, though, so if I find a short, gentle curriculum that he can largely do on his own, I may give it a try.

Science:
We’ll be trying Jeannie Fulbright’s economical Exploring Creation with Astronomy next year. It’s intended to be done fairly independently, though I have heard that it is a little thin for a sixth grader, but then, my sixth grader likes “a little thin.” He’s not very science-oriented. I think this’ll be extra cool just because we are planning on going to Homeschool Day at the Kennedy Space Center in 2010. We’ll also be getting a telescope to look at things from our backyard. Good times! We’ll also be doing the weather/ sky/ rocks/ etc. portions of The Handbook of Nature Study (free to read online) to tie it all in together. Over the summer we’ll be studying the bird section of that.  We have the Audubon Florida guide, some binoculars and some nature journals we bought at Michael’s Arts and Crafts for $1 apiece, so we’re good to go. Also, I am considering checking out the eco-science/nature class at the Deering Estate next fall. There’s an orientation on Tuesday that we’re going to; more on this later.

Math:
Ummm. As of right now, we’ll be continuing with MEP math. This may change. We like the format, but the reality is, he hasn’t learned his math facts after working on them for 3 straight years. I’ve tried everything. Manipulatives, flash cards, board games, drills, worksheets, spiral, mastery, whatever, I’ve tried it. And he still pauses when asked what 5+3 is. Frustrating, to say the least.

Over the summer I’m going to concentrate on lots of living math, we’re learning blackjack, dominos (an important cultural skill anyway – Cubans loooove them some dominos!) playing Yahtzee, stuff like that, plus doing a lot of the things from Math Wizardry for Kids and The I Hate Mathematics Book, and for now we’ll continue doing MEP math lessons for 20-30 minutes at a time. This means we take up to 4 days to do a single lesson, but it beats sitting there for 2 hours trying to do one per day. I guess we’ll just keep plugging away at his pace.

Electives
Shorty will be studying a musical instrument. We’ve decided on an electric piano, since he already likes his little electric keyboard, and unlike a real piano, it will fit in his room and he can practice with headphones. It’s a big investment, probably the most expensive thing I’ll buy all year.   Later this summer I will be looking into piano teachers to visit our home once a week.

He’ll be learning how to type over the summer informally, and perhaps taking a semester course on typing through the FLVS. There is also a semester course on drawing, which we may check out.

We will continue to do the Home Depot Kids Workshop all through next year, as it’s the last year he’ eligible to participate, and are considering rejoining the Boy Scouts, or possibly the Society for Creative Anachronisms, depending on what my schedule looks like. And depending on finances, we might start taking a kids-and-moms judo class at a nearby studio – only $40/month apiece.

A Special Note About Language Arts
I was considering buying the language arts program from Queen Homeschool, but now I’m not sure, and am instead considering just committing to the Charlotte Mason approach of narration (he still needs work with oral narration so we may stick to that for atleast another year), copywork and dictation, as well as poetry, Shakespeare and lots of great books with spelling and vocabulary lists taken from those books. I’ve disliked every single vocabulary, spelling and grammar text I’ve ever seen, because it treats language as an intellectual exercise rather than something that can be put to great and immediate, relevant use. He’s a great speller anyway, and likes to learn new words, and I think he’d enjoy it if I made vocabulary lists from his readings and maybe did a “find the word in the chapter!” kind of thing out of it. Still, Sandi Queen’s products are all so straightforward and simple and inexpensive that I may check out the program anyway. Lord knows I’ve spent a whole lot more than $20 on books I never used!

What are you using for next year, if you homeschool? Like most moms, I’m a curriculum junkie and enjoy reading about what other families use and why it works for them!

Borders does consider homeschoolers to be educators. You have to request an educator’s discount card at the check-out counter if you don’t already have one. Typically this entails presenting them with some proof that you are a homeschooler – your local support group membership card, or letter from the county accepting your homeschooling program, or just bring in your portfolio – ask your local store what their policy is. You’re able to use the discount year round on educational materials at a 20% discount, but this is 25% off EVERYTHING. Huzzah! I got this email this morning:

February 27, 2009

Dear Friend,
Every day in the classroom, at home and within school libraries around the country, the commitment of the professional educator shines. Borders has long supported the cause of literacy and learning and strives to recognize each person who works in the education field, teacher, homeschooler, fitness/dance instructor, business trainer, professor, PTA member, religious educator, and school librarian’s efforts to share the love of books and knowledge with their students through our Educator Appreciation Week event. We honor your hard and rewarding work with an “apple” of our own by welcoming current and retired teachers Thursday, March 19 – Wednesday, March 25. If you are not a fellow educator, I hope you will share this with those in your community that are!

You’ll enjoy a 25% savings on personal and classroom purchases of books, CDs, DVDs, cafe items, gifts & stationery and more* when you bring in your current Classroom or Educator Discount Card, educator ID or pay stub. For more information, please visit http://www.borders.com/educators.

Don’t miss our Special Reception, Friday, March 20 from 4:00 – 8:00 PM at Borders stores nationwide.

Thank you for the great work you do! Please share this event information with the educators in your life. We look forward to welcoming you to our stores March 19 – March 25.

Best Regards,
Misty Coltune
Corporate & Educational Services
Borders Books & Music #0083
19925 Biscayne Blvd
Aventura, FL 33180
305-935-5237 (direct line)
305-935-6728 (fax)
mcoltune@bordersgroupinc.com

These are the things that I’m currently working on in order to make a living.  My criteria for jobs are pretty narrow, but I’ve had pretty good luck with finding things I can do on my own time that are still decently profitable. Set schedules and my lifestyle just don’t mix, and I also won’t do anything where I have to pay anyone anything, or that rely primarily on my persuading other people to join or sign up to make money (I am hardcore anti-MLM or whatever. I don’t think anyone really makes a living at that, except the people who came up with it.  Your mileage may vary!)

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far that is really working for me. I’d like to thank Tracey at MomTidings for her help in compiling these over at the WorkPlaceLikeHome forums.

• MTurk – a service of Amazon.com that matches independent contractors, mostly for data entry, to do small jobs for employers, such as upload a picture, type a description, or write short things.   You get paid right away either in Amazon.com gift certificates or via Direct Deposit. There are literally tens of thousands of little jobs to do every day, but the trick is to filter the jobs that pay 25 cents or more (or however your minimum is).  This is for whenever I have a few moments to spare somewhere that has Internet connection that is too slow for ChaCha or the environment is too noisy to blog or write (i.e., Shorty’s judo class). There are people who do this full time, but I’ll admit the work is kind of tedious sometimes. But it all adds up.
• CashCrate – I normally haaaaaaaaaaate those “Get Paid to Read Emails/ Do Surveys/ Complete Offers” kinds of sites. The surveys they ask you to take are mind-numbingly tedious, and it takes FOREVER to make the amount needed to cash out, and you can only really make any money if other people join up under you, and then you can never be sure you’ll actually get paid.  CashCrate is the polar opposite of that in every respect. They have cool surveys (I just did one about my favorite TV show, Heroes)  and their payout is once a month if you reach $20, which anyone can do regardless of whether or not you get anyone to sign up under you (though their affiliate program is very good, too). They have two daily surveys for $0.80 each, which I do over my morning coffee every day. That’s $50 a month or so – gas money for 5 minutes over morning coffee.  And they’ve paid me like clockwork. I love CashCrate and I’ll be writing up a post about how to make the most of a membership there. Seriously, join CashCrate. It’s awesome.
• ChaCha.com – ChaCha is a human powered text search engine.  I work there as a Guide, meaning that I get people’s questions that are sent in via text messages, such as stock quotes, or requests for the weather, or movie times or phone number look ups, then I use my Mad Google Skillz and look stuff up for them.  They only pay you $0.10 per query while you train for your first 1000 queries (I did that in a few days) and after that, if your accuracy is more than 95%, you get $0.20 per query. I take between 30 and 50 seconds to answer queries and it’s always back-to-back no matter what time of day or night it is, so it pays quite well.  You can work 5 minutes or 5 hours – they totally don’t care, and it’s 24/7, so this fits me very well. They can either pay you right away (they send you a debit card) or they pay you in one big chunk once a month.  If you’re interested in becoming a Guide, check out their Become a Guide page, and please do put down info(at)alrpros.com (with the @ where the (at) is) as a referral – I do get a little bonus for referrals. I’ll be writing up more about this, too.
• FastSnap – This is a service primarily for insurance agents and landscapers. They pay you to go out in your area and photograph building exteriors.  You can specify what zip codes you’re willing to work and set your own rates, but they only take 10 people per zip code, and it’s not available everywhere. I got a half dozen jobs from these guys this month; I’ve been meaning to get into stock photography more, so it’s good practice and really fun and it pays pretty well considering I usually do this while I’m out running errands and it takes me 3 minutes to do it.  It’s a growing company, so I really like working for them.
• TicketPuller.com – This is a company that purchases the best tickets to events for individuals at a small surcharge to the client.  You reserve (but do not pay for) the tickets for the client at face value, i.e., this is not scalping or anything shady – it just helps people get the best tickets available without having to go through the confusing morass of TicketMaster themselves.  I just signed up with these guys and I get a few sessions every week and they pay up to $50 per successful booking and each session only takes half an hour or so. It’s different! I have a session tomorrow.
• West At Home – I don’t work for them very much, but when I do, I take orders for the Home Shopping Network. The pay is average to great, depending on how busy it is, but the work is fun and the hours are pretty flexible. I prefer ChaCha, though – I keep this job just as a back-up; I only work a few hours a week on this, but since I work from home and homeschool, it can be pretty isolating, so sometimes it’s nice to have a job with real human contact.

In future posts, I’ll be writing in greater detail about each of these.

I also do a fair bit of freelance writing and blogging jobs for various clients.  And yes, I do realize I’m starting to sound like “Hey Mon,” the Jamaican family skit from In Living Color where everyone had 47 jobs, but it adds up to about a full-time work schedule, I never get bored, I can spend all the time I want with the kiddo, and all my bills are paid. What more could I ask for?

On my new blog about frugality and the quality of life, I’ve written a post explaining The Grocery Game, a web site that organizes a weekly list of all the coupons and sales in your area so that you get the best possible prices on the best possible products. I’ve even gotten tons of stuff free with their combination coupon-and-sale strategy. Their web site and the post explain a lot more; hopefully this can be helpful to some people.

My son has severe sensory integration issues with food and won’t eat many staples like rice, beans, soup, anything mashed, or foods with mixed sauces like lasagna, tuna salad and chili; I also try to eat whole grains, organic veggies and dairy products, and fresh foods, so my food bill was astronomical before the Grocery Game came along. I can honestly say it’s saved me hundreds of dollars in the last 2 months alone. Check it out – it’s only $1 to try it for a month. If you’d like to see how it works or what it’s about, check out my post.

Like many people who have been through a divorce, I experienced financial hardship at the time of my separation. I was a very young and unemployed college student with a special needs baby, and without a lot of financial know-how, and as a result, I made a lot of credit mistakes that haunted my credit score for years. This has weighed pretty heavily on me for quite some time, so I spent a year self-educating about personal finances, and for the last six months, I have been in the process of repairing my credit and steadily becoming debt-free.

(Side note: I can’t stress the importance of making sure your credit report is accurate. Prior to this summer, I hadn’t bothered to look at mine in years. When I finally got my free annual credit report, imagine my surprise to find no less than seventeen reporting errors! It goes without saying, I’ve been contacting the credit reporting agencies and having them deleted slowly but surely – the subject for another post, for sure..)

Besides cleaning up my credit report of negative information, I’ve also started wanting to build up my positive credit. I already have one unsecured credit card that I’ve almost completely paid off, but I wanted a second one, too, because there are all those erroneous negatives to stack up against. I don’t want to acquire more debt, so I don’t actually use them for anything – I just pay off the “set-up” fees, and want to have several credit cards in good standing. Unfortunately, unsecured credit cards for people with fair or poor credit tend to carry some set-up fees, but I don’t think they’re terribly exorbitant, especially when you can pay them off in small increments. Of course, I pay as much as I can to get those balances down as quickly as possible, but the minimum balances are doable, too.

Anyway, I had been mailed the offer of my first card, and had no clue where to begin actively looking for a second.

Enter CardHub, a site that allows you to apply for multiple credit cards in one place. I think this is a great site and a great service. Basically, it has a huge list of credit cards for which you can apply based on several criteria that you select. It is a completely free service. You choose your credit history, your desire to view either unsecured or secured cards (or both!) and whether you want a Visa or a Mastercard, or both.

With one click, CardHub shows you all the available credit cards that fit your criteria for which you can apply. Each search result shows you all the information you might want to know, such as set-up fees, annual me Not only that, you can compare all the different cards for which you want to apply side-by-side, so you can make the most informed choices. The site is basically a highly intuitive niche search engine and does not store any personal information about you while performing this service, with which, being concerned with online privacy, I was very pleased.

Much to my pleasant surprise, using CardHub, I had been approved for a new credit card that fit my exact criteria within 5 minutes. A little testimonial blurb on the site had someone declaring it “the Google of credit cards,” and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. This is a great tool for empowering consumers to make informed choices about their credit applications. My needs were fairly simple, but I can imagine that for someone with even more complex needs, such as debt consolidation by moving to a card with lower APR, it would be an even more powerful resource. Even as a research tool, it’s very useful and quick. Very nice!

To date, between Shorty and I, we have checked out over 200 books from the Miami-Dade Public Library system for homeschooling and personal purposes.  However, it took me three years to really start putting my library card to work, and I wish I hadn’t been so overwhelmed by the prospect before, because it has saved me literally hundreds of dollars. It would be possible, if I so chose, to homeschool my son entirely for free using only resources from MDPLS. In fact, using my public library, purchasing a used Instructor’s Guide and taking advantage of Amazon’s 4-for-3 sale that it has a few times a month, I was able to put together WinterPromise’s American Story 1 curriculum for one-third of WinterPromise’s listed purchase price.  I was pretty proud of myself for that.

My public library system is pretty amazing.  It has dozens of branches, many within driving distance of my house.  One branch is technically within walking distance – eight blocks away, though we have walked those blocks in the middle of summer and it’s pretty exhausting to walk that much in unrelenting heat, but when the weather is nice, it’s no problem.  Better still, using the web site and my library card number, I am able to search for books I want using the ENTIRE Miami-Dade public library system – over one million books – and, when I find them, voila! – the books (or DVDs, or whatever) get delivered to the nearest branch within a day or two. This is very convenient and has helped me beef up our curriculum tremendously this year. So we literally have the entire MDPLS catalogue at our fingertips. Considering they allow us to renew online up to six times, and have a one-month limit per renewal, that means that unless someone requests them, we can keep books and other library resources up to six months.

Not only that, but there are tons of study guides, research manuals, classical music libraries, language resources and even e-books available for use for any cardholder in the Miami-Dade county for free. I have heard of some library systems who have even more available – online courses and access to Rosetta Stone and other educational software as well.

Not all library systems are this good or this robust, but if you homeschool or just love books and want to make them an integral part of your family life, I really recommend checking out what resources are available through your library system. More and more library systems are getting online and expanding their services for their users that way. Just make sure that in all your enthusiasm, you don’t defeat the purpose and rack up a ton of overdue fees. Not that *cough* I speak from experience or anything…

I am in the market for a new laptop. I want something small, simple, and very portable. I am looking to write more for Associated Content - my goal is to be write 5 articles per day, 5 days a week by June 1. At an average of $4 per article, this works out to something like $400 extra per month, which will go toward my nearly-attained goal of becoming debt-free and my other long-term goal of saving up for my new car. In the long run, I am hoping the articles will pay for my car payment and car insurance.

Since I already juggle three full-time jobs – single parenthood, full-time homeschooling and running my various online businesses – I am ever in search of increasing my productivity and time-management efficiency. Thus, I have realized that I spend up to five hours per week sitting at my son’s judo class staring off into space or making filler chit-chat with the other parents, i.e., wasting my time. After having seen another equally bored parent typing away with his ginormous Gateway laptop at the judo class, a lightbulb went off in my head – I needed to bring a laptop with me so that I could write my articles while Shorty is in judo.

Once every two weeks, we have an additional 2-hour Cub Scout meeting which has even fewer parents present and where I have even less to do; I could probably write the whole time there, too. I already have the equipment at home for a wireless network, so if my laptop came with wireless Internet capabilities, I’d just upload my article whenever I got home. Since I can crank out about five articles per hour, that means if I had a small, simple laptop on to which I could write my articles, I could be earning $400-plus more monthly during Shorty’s judo class and Cub Scouts. Amazing how much that $75/month judo class is actually costing me, right?

Now, I have a laptop already, but it’s falling apart. It’s an old, large, heavy Compaq that I got for free off Craigslist about eight months ago. The laptop came with a slightly shorted-out keyboard that I tried to replace myself, keyphrase being TRIED. I ended up ripping something out of the welding. Oops. It has a lot of other little bugs, too, like a nearly dead battery. It would cost over $300, if not more, to fix and replace everything that needs fixing with that thing, and it would still be a falling-apart, old machine.

My financial situation today is much better than it was eight months ago, to say the least, but while I CAN afford to buy a new laptop now, I just don’t want to spend that kind of money. I would rather keep on the path toward my goals. But I still need a way to write portably and could still use a wireless solution for Internet connectivity, so I’ve decided to buy this here Asus Eee 4G laptop from TigerDirect.com.

I buy all my electronics lately from TigerDirect, just because their deals and selection are even better than BestBuy’s. This baby is only $350 with free in-store pick-up, and it comes loaded with wifi internet networking, OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird – all the stuff I already use – and a great Linux installation that looks even prettier than Windows XP. It connects remotely to my new HP scanner/printer and my desktop and while I won’t be able to do any graphics editing for now, I will be able to run an HTML editor and an FTP client, so there is VERY little in terms of productivity that this thing won’t be able to do for me – for under $400!

Best of all, it has the same kind of RAM as my current laptop, meaning I can immediately upgrade it (though all its reviews say it runs blazingly fast!). In the long run, I’ll need to get a memory card if I ever need more storage, or perhaps one of those gadgets that turns my laptop’s internal hard drive into an external one; perhaps an external DVD-ROM drive for loading new programs on it easily, and a nice case. Those are all non-essentials right now, though; if all goes according to plan with my articles, this thing will pay for itself in under a month! I’m psyched; I plan to buy it this weekend, and I’ll definitely post a review of it once I get going with it. Wish me luck!

Do you have a laptop or better recommendations for a portable productivity/ word processing solution? Or better yet- have you had experience with the Asus Eee? I’d be happy to hear from any readers out there with comments or suggestions!