Month: May 2019

How I Pack My Carry-On for a Week

We’ve just gotten back from a week-long trip to the beach, and I’ve also just had an extended girls’ weekend. I’ve packed a lot of carry-ons in the last month.

I love reading posts about what people pack in their carry-ons, but I don’t see very good ones all that often, so I thought I’d write my own. To me, what makes a good carry-on post is pictures. Lots of pictures and specificity.

Perhaps I’m a little too nosy; I don’t know. I do love to look in people’s pantries when I go over to their homes and see what food they buy. Same thing for their carry-ons.

So here are all the details of what I brought to the beach and how I get everything to fit into my carry-on.

I’ve been a semi-minimalist for a while, and only have a small amount of clothing (compared to other people in this country, anyway). If I’m packing a carry-on only so I don’t have to check a bag (or to take up less space in the car), I need to be as efficient as possible with my limited wardrobe.

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A Year of Good Money: Decrease Food Waste

Another month is here, and with it, another opportunity to get better at money stuff! (No, it really never ends–I’m always trying to work on spending a little more wisely, despite how long I’ve been paying attention to our spending!).

Last month I took on the huge challenge of a digital fast. There were so many takeaways that I’m dedicating a whole post to it.

For this month, I’ve been reading a lot about global warming, in honor of Earth Day, and I actually read some really useful information about how we, as a family, could do a better job of reversing global warming.

I read that the third top way to mitigate global warming, according to Project Drawdown, is to reduce food waste (if you’re interested, refrigerant/AC coolant management and creating more onshore wind power are #1 and #2).

As a huge composter, I was shocked to hear that reducing food waste was much more impactful to the planet than composting (composting is still a good method–coming in at #60 of 100).

Want to know what #4 is? A plant rich diet.

Okay, as someone who pays a moderate amount of attention to helping Mother Earth, the fact that there are two relatively easy ways for me and my household to impact climate change is kind of amazing.

Reduce the amount of food we waste.

Eat more plants and less meat.

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April Net Worth Update

May is here! Flowers are blooming like crazy at our house, and temps are slowly creeping up into the uncomfortably warm. Which I’ll take! I feel like I spent eight years never getting quite warm enough in New Hampshire. Now, I’m spending my afternoons playing tennis in the sunshine. Life is good (yes, I’m going back to work at some point!).

As I’ve looked back over pictures that I wanted to add to this post, I was amazed at how much went on this month. Mr. ThreeYear went to visit his family in Chile, my niece was born!!, we spent a week at the beach with friends, and we had so many other fun adventures. April has definitely been chock full of fun. And our spending has matched!

Our Progress

This was a great month for net worth, because it’s the month Mr. ThreeYear’s stock “gift” comes in. We call it a “gift” but it’s really part of his overall compensation package. It varies pretty significantly from year to year, but this year it was pretty good (and the second largest ever). He works for an ESOP company, meaning the company is owned 100% by its employees, and so they receive a chunk of stock each year, commensurate with a predetermined percentage of their salaries.

Each year, in December, an independent company comes in, audits the stock, and sets the price for the year. So the stock price, and therefore the entire value of Mr. ThreeYear’s stock portfolio, is dependent on the auditors. They base the price on the market, competitors’ stock prices, debt held by the company (which is not much), and more. The stock price has been growing steadily over the years, but that doesn’t mean it always will. Nevertheless, it’s now become a significant chunk of our net worth. We won’t be able to access it until Mr. ThreeYear leaves the company or retires, and even then it’s distributed over five years. So even though it’s a big part of our net worth, we have to be careful not to rely on it too much since we’ll be limited in the way we access it in retirement.

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5 Ways to Decrease Food Waste

Last week, I read not one, but two articles on the top ways we, as ordinary people, could help decrease global warming.

Boy, was I surprised to learn that the NUMBER THREE thing we could do was decrease our food waste. I’m a big fan of composting, but according to Project Drawdown, an organization that ranked the top ways we can mitigate the effects of global warming, composting is only the 60th best method for solving the problem.

It turns out that paying attention to how much food we waste is a much better way of helping the planet, as composting can give you a false sense of doing good while still letting you chuck a good bit of food waste into the bin.

I’ve followed YouTuber Debt Kickin’ Mom for awhile, and I’m always inspired by her videos of her ZeroWaste food plan for her family of six. Basically, she buys just enough to last her family for the week, with only a few leftovers. She even tries to eat up everything in her freezer in a week or two, which apparently is a really smart strategy, as people throw a ton of frozen-over freezer goods out after they’ve been sitting in the back of the freezer for six months (guilty on that front! So guilty!).

I’m going to be completing a challenge to drastically decrease our food waste this month, so in the spirit of getting ready for that, here are some ways that I’ve researched and implemented in the past to decrease our food waste.

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