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My 5 Guilty Pleasures

September 23, 2011 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 5 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

I have many guilty pleasures, but here are my top 5.

Forever 21, the clothes are cute, but are cheap and don't last long.
And then on the opposite side, JCrew. I'm addicted to their website, and I wish I had enough money to buy everything. I would say this is almost a problem.
Reality TV and gossip magazines
Mexican Food. I could eat it every day and people think I'm crazy. I have ate Mexican food everyday of the week before.
And my last one is reading the news all day long. I read around 5 newspapers and magazines a day, and countless articles online. It's a problem, but I want to know EVERYTHING. I once checked the history on my computer to see how much I read in one day, and I was at 863 articles, in about 8 hours into the day!

What are your guilty pleasures?

Dinner that I made last night

September 23, 2011 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - Leave a Comment

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

This is what I made last night. I swear it looked a lot better in real life, I feel like it looks funny on the plate. I made manicotti, breaded chicken and salad with strawberries, cucumbers, tomatoes, and cheese of course. It tasted really good! I'm very happy with it.

Our eating in plan has been working so far. We've ate in everyday this week (I think). I plan on making chilli tonight so I'll take a picture of that also. As always, leave any recipe ideas that you have!

Also, I just had to buy $200 worth of textbooks because my teacher decided he wanted more books for our class. UGHHHH. This will turn out to be an expensive week, but it's mainly my fault. I'll go into more detail on that, this weekend.

Holiday Shopping

September 23, 2011 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 5 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

I started some of my Christmas shopping the other day. Check out my past blog post about holiday shopping if you haven't done so yet. Managed to get a big stuffed animal and a Fischer Price toy for $0.40 altogether. All the toys at Kohls were 40% off and I also received a giftcard in the mail for $10 from Kohls. I'm very happy with these savings!

And I also have $45 in Swagbucks, so this Christmas for the kids in the extended family should be cheap! I expect that I'll probably have around $70 in Swagbucks by Christmas-time, I've been slacking on Swagbucks lately, so it's been adding up very slowly.

Have you done any of your shopping yet? How much do you usually spend per person?

Getting a Passport

September 22, 2011 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 4 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

LearnVest recently had an article about how to get a passport. I've been traveling a lot lately, but not out of the country because I don't have a passport. The BF doesn't have one either, and we are always talking about getting one, but the costs of obtaining one have been pushing us to push the date of when we get to get them back further and further.

Here are the steps if you're thinking about getting one:

1. Fill Out Form DS-11: Application For A U.S. Passport
2. Submit Completed Form DS-11 In Person
3. Submit Evidence of U.S. Citizenship
4. Present Identification
5. Submit a Photocopy of the Identification Document(s) Presented (Step 4)
6. Pay the Applicable Fee
7. Provide One Passport Photo

Processing Times

Processing times can be found at the link above, but generally it is within 4-6 weeks and 2-3 weeks for expedited service
For expedited service, I know someone who got it within 1 week, so sometimes it CAN be sooner, but not always

Fees can be found here.

Do you have a passport? Do you have any tips for speeding up the process for a person who needs one at the last second?

My Plan to eat In Everyday

September 21, 2011 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 13 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

I've noticed that other bloggers have made a goal to eat in everyday, and I'm going to try the same, except I'm going to modify it a bit. I can't control my BF's Lion's Choice daily habit, so that little bit will be excluded. My goal is to make dinner every day. As some of you know, this is kind of a hard task, as I don't get out of class some nights until 10pm, and don't make it home until around an hour after that. The BF gets off work around the same time though, so it'll be like it's dinner time for the both of us.

But at around 10pm, I'm usually very drained from my 16 hour days. I'll try and share with everyone what I make everyday, including pictures and recipes. Last night I made salad, steak, stuffed green peppers and pineapple upside down cake for dessert. The stuffed green peppers were Stephanie's idea and they turned out great! I wish I would have taken pictures as I am very proud of myself.

The pictures that I take may not be the greatest though. I am not a great cook and have little patience for cooking! If you have any ideas for dinner for us, let me know!

Also, as I said earlier, I'm changing up the background and the layout of the blog today, sorry about that. Let me know what you like and don't like please!

7 Things List

September 21, 2011 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 4 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

I'm doing another 7 Things post, my last one can be found here. Judy did another one, so I thought I should do one too.

What are seven things you have done, still have to do, and hope to do? Here's mine:

7 things we have done:

Finally finished decorating the basement. We now have couches, a desk, a flat screen, coffee table, and so on down there.
Started watching for food spending, and we have saved a lot now!
We started saving a little more, but we want to start aggressively saving soon.
Paid a little more to my school loans every month
Increased our monthly mortgage payment
Cleaned and decorated the guest bedroom
Cleaned the front yard

7 Things we still have to do:

Pay off my school loans
Pay off the car loan
Finish funding my emergency fund
Paint nearly every room in our house
Start aggressively saving
Take my dogs to the vet for shots
Talk with our lending agent about refinancing the house

7 Things we hope to do in 2012:

Pay off the car loan completely
Re-carpet the living room
Install new lighting in the dining room
I don't hope to do this, but the BF does. He wants a new car next summer
Finish my MBA program!
Go to Europe
Start aggressively paying off my school loans (I'm shooting for at least $1,000 a month)

Your turn!

As many of you might notice, I've changed the blog quite a bit today, let me know what you like and don't like!

Money and Friends

September 20, 2011 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 3 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

DailyWorth had another interesting article, Talking about Money with Your Friends.

Do you ever talk about money, income and the like with your friends? I hardly ever do, and I often feel uncomfortable with sharing. Being the first friend out of all of my friends with a career and a steady paycheck, they often ask and I'm usually uncomfortable with answering. Usually I just throw a ballpark number out there.

Even though me and my friends share nearly everything about our lives with each other, money is just a touchy subject with me. My family is so dysfunctional and not normal because of money arguments in the past, so I prefer just to not talk about money at all.

One of my friends has no problem talking about money, even though she always claims that she doesn't like talking about it. For example, she bragged that she received money from her dead grandmother, which I thought was extremely wrong of her to do so. And then she also wanted to talk about my inheritance from my father after he passed, which is extremely uncomfortable no matter what I think. Don't get me wrong, I do love this friend! I believe her and I were just raised completely differently though.

So how do you and your friends handle dishing out financial advice to each other? Do you and your friends ever talk about money?

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