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Frugal Living, Saving Money & Life Hacks

Frugal Living, Saving Money & Life Hacks
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What Happens if You Miss the Tax Return Deadline?

This post is part of the TaxACT #BeatTheDeadline blog tour which shares tips on how to make tax time a smooth and easy process before the April 15 deadline. TaxACT provides the tools and guidance to help you confidently file taxes easy and fast. Do your own taxes today at TaxACT. You got this. The tax return deadline is quickly approaching, so if you haven’t filed your taxes yet, you still have a bit of time (but not much!). I’m basically reminding myself of this because I still haven’t filed my taxes yet. Gasp! I know right?! The main reason I haven’t filed yet isn’t for a lack of trying, but because I found an error with two 1099s that clients sent me. So

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Frugal Living, Saving Money & Life Hacks
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Quarterly Income Report: How I Made $17,655 From Blogging (Q1)

At the beginning of 2015 I made a decision to focus less on client work and more on turning my blog into a sustainable business. After months of dealing with inconsistent income and taking on a bit of business debt, I decided I needed to take back control of my income by leveraging this blog. Mind you that I didn’t say “pimp out this blog” which is what a lot of freelancers do in order to make a living online. I’ve carefully crafted this platform over the past 3.5 years until it’s turned into an awesome place of resources, solopreneur stories, and for the community to connect with each other. There’s no way I’m going to jeopardize that, but I do plan to make

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Frugal Living, Saving Money & Life Hacks
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Make Tax Season Less Painful: 5 Things to Reduce Stress

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of E*TRADE for IZEA. As always opinions are 100{7dabfd103aa443fce219eea47f0f346a11a54ce587a1a0cbb74f06b9f7a304ca} mine and never influenced by any brand. Tax season is a topic we love to hate. Nothing feels worse than working hard all year long only to end up with several hours of tax prep, followed by a large tax bill. As business owners our taxes aren’t quite as simple as they used to be when we were employees with a W-2 from our jobs. Our business and knowledge of success continues to grow and because of this we’ve become investors too (even if we’re in the beginning stages). We see the importance of investing in our future. As you prepare for the tax filing deadline, here are 5

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Frugal Living, Saving Money & Life Hacks
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Is A Zero Based Budget Right For You?

One of the budgeting techniques that has gained some popularity in recent years is the zero based budget. In this budget, you make sure that every dollar is accounted for at the beginning of the month. You look at what you expect to get in terms of a paycheck, and then use every penny to pay bills, or accomplish your goals. As part of your budget, you decide what will go to debt reduction, or to building an emergency fund, or to your retirement account. You can also put money toward a vacation or some other goal, on top of making sure your groceries, gas, insurance premiums and other expenses are covered.  Every dollar of income is assigned to a spending, saving or giving category. No dollar

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Frugal Living, Saving Money & Life Hacks
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How To Recover After Bankruptcy

For the most part, bankruptcy should be the action of last resort when it comes to your money issues. However, there are times when bankruptcy really is the last option you have left. If you have experienced a long-term employment problem, or if you have had a medical problem that causes you financial distress, bankruptcy might be your last option. Once you have filed for bankruptcy, however, it doesn’t mean that it’s the end of your financial life. You can rebuild after bankruptcy, but it takes effort. As you work to overcome bankruptcy, and avoid financial setbacks in the future, here are some things to keep in mind: Make Sure All the Qualified Debts are Included in the Bankruptcy The first step to rebuilding

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Frugal Living, Saving Money & Life Hacks
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Ways To Pay For College Without Breaking The Bank

Going to college can be stressful in so many ways. If you are just getting out of high school, you are being pushed into the real world on your own. Your responsibilities just increased ten-fold. You now have to get yourself to class everyday, do your homework, study for tests, and maybe even work. As if that is not enough, you also have to worry about how you are going to pay for college. If you don’t have money saved up to pay for tuition, you are basically on your own trying to find out how to pay for it. Luckily, you have quite a few options. College is far from cheap, but if you are wise you can pay for it without totally breaking

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Frugal Living, Saving Money & Life Hacks
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Do You Believe in Psychics?: My Experience with Psychic Source

My first experience with a psychic was getting my palm read at a local fair. Everything the fortune teller told me was spot on, and I left thinking “she knew me so well!” The next year, I went to the same fortune teller and heard the exact same spiel. To say I was disappointed is an understatement. I kind of gave up beliefs on psychics after that but would occasionally get sucked back in by shows like “Long Island Medium” and through co-workers who were into tarot card reading. When I was contacted by Psychic Source about doing a free reading, I was definitely interested. I set up my appointment, called in, and waiting for my reading to begin. Deanna described herself as a Tarot

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Frugal Living, Saving Money & Life Hacks
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Get Off the 50 Shades-Bashing Wagon

Let me start by saying that I never finished the book, even though it was a book club selection, because I just couldn’t get through it, I found the writing that bad. And I read the whole Twilight series so my expectations of decent reading material are pretty low. Also? The main character really annoyed me. I consider myself a pretty strong assertive female, and the mouse-y type anti-heroine just wasn’t doing it for me. That aside—I have been really bothered by the backlash on 50 Shades and I couldn’t quite place my finger on it until I came across this post on Facebook (because few things anger me more than a status update that I disagree with, amirite?)   My response is the last one,

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Frugal Living, Saving Money & Life Hacks
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How To Avoid Falling Into A Bad Credit Score

Building good credit is a years-long process, while destroying credit only takes a few bad decisions. With this in mind, it’s important for new credit users to avoid the many mistakes which lead to bad credit scores. Too often it seems inexperienced credit cardholders underestimate the ease through which bad credit can be acquired. For these folks – the young ones especially – we thought it necessary to highlight the five best ways to avoid a bad credit score: Maintain A Healthy Debt-To-Income Ratio Credit score criteria includes something called the debt-to-income ratio. Basically it’s all your monthly debt payments added up and compared to your gross monthly income. If the former makes up more than 25{7dabfd103aa443fce219eea47f0f346a11a54ce587a1a0cbb74f06b9f7a304ca} of the latter, then credit

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Frugal Living, Saving Money & Life Hacks
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How We Saved More Than $1,000 on Vacation with Credit Card Rewards

Eric and I went on a Mexican getaway to the Riviera Maya earlier this month, staying at Tulum and Playa del Carmen for a few days each, and happily we were able to use credit card rewards to pay for vacation (or at least a large chunk of it!). We had a wonderful time and it was so great to celebrate Eric finishing his year of work probation, which means no more studying, test-taking, or being the rookie firefighter anymore, he is officially official! It was also wonderful to get away from the stress of new home ownership. While it has definitely been a dream of ours, I also have to admit that we can get overwhelmed by the amount of projects we want to

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Frugal Living, Saving Money & Life Hacks
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How I Started Getting More Freelance Jobs

I recently learned that I may be losing a major freelancing client of mine, through no fault of my own. For the past two years, I’ve had to really limit my freelancing. Between working full-time and going to school full-time for my MPA, I just didn’t have much spare time to devote to my side hustle business. So I kept the work that I had and took leads that came to me, but when it came to actually going out there and pursuing business? I pretty much took a break from that. And still, I managed to earn $20K a year from my side hustle income for the past two years in a row.  I consider that a success. Now that my master’s program

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