Sorry about your DH. BTDT and it sucks. I hope he is able to find something quickly. As far as phones go, I've used several different kinds of prepaid and all have always been cheaper than going with the big name brand companies. For us we really had to study out the coverage maps. When we are in and around cities it didn't matter so much but there are many rural areas we travel through for various things that we still wanted coverage. Anything thing that came up for us was when DH worked in a manufacturer building that do to it's construction materials blocked cell phone service, so we had to make sure we picked one that switched back and forth between cell service and wi-fi service (I think this is more common now but just something to be aware of). Anyways, Dh is currently on Republic Wireless and there are 6 of us using Tello (run on the T-mobile network). It takes a bit of legwork to find the best match for coverage and usage to match your individual needs but the cost savings has definitely been worth it for us.

Did you look at an online scheduling program or did you call? I've found that the online schedule regularly looks full but when I call, they are able to squeeze me in.

I've had it but I don't remember either the hard boiled eggs or the tomatoes. I like all the ingredients but I never liked the dressing it was served with.

I'm much further north so a greenhouse is too expensive for us to heat in the winter but I do have an indoor garden. I'm growing lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, kale arugula and radishes for our winter salads (I have other things growing just for fun to see what I can grow indoors). A few weeks ago we got hit with a major snowstorm. I had no desire to fight the crowds prestorm to grocery shop so we just made due with what we had. We had some frozen veggies but not enough to last the duration so we hit the salad garden pretty hard. They were an amazing addition to the stored food and I was so glad that I didn't have to deal with the crowds or storm to get enough veggies on hand. But I will warn you there is a pretty big learning curve with indoor gardening. It's very different than outdoor gardening. Just some of the things I've had to deal with: adapting the city water for plant use (we have extremely high PH), bugs (aphids, spider mites, fungus gnats and all very common in indoor settings with no natural predators). Fertilizing (requires way more supplementation and tweaking than outdoors). It's a great hobby and really helps with the winter blues but it is not money saving however the taste is so far above anything you find in the grocery store this time of year that it is absolutely worth it to me. Canning, it's not hard but it is very particular. While there are "rebel" canners who can and will can everything, it is highly recommended that you follow safe canning practices. Ball is a great source for tested recipes. Water bath canning is "easier" for me just because that is what I did with my mom growing up however it really limits what you can do. It's mostly fruits, tomatoes, pickles, jams etc. Nice to have but not really the things that I would want to rely on for emergencies. For anything with meat you will need a pressure canner. If you ever take this step, I would highly recommend getting the Presto digital canner, it's so much less fussing that stove top canners especially for someone new to it. I love having canned meat (specifically beef and pork chunks), I use them regularly on nights I don't feel like cooking. Meat can be turned into stroganoff, tacos, shredded meat sandwiches, a base for shepherd's pie etc. Having the meat precooked just makes supper so much faster. I also like to take a jar of beef and a jar of french onion soup and add a few veggies for a supper quick beef soup. So both of those are good ideas for having things in an emergency, they do require a fair bit of labor and unless they are activities you enjoy for themselves might be too labor and time intensive to be practical sources of emergency prep.

I know MANY families mine own included who don't hand out cell phones until much older so that could be part of why other families are still organizing things. 2nd point, But how does child know when you are available to give rides? I have plenty of my own things on the calendar and then add in things for other people, it would be a serious pain in the butt to have my kids start scheduling things that required me to give rides without me being able to give input into my availability. Obviously it works for you to have your kids arranging things at their ages and that's great but I can also see for a lot of families where it would be a disaster for the kids to do the arranging especially when it involves parent chauffeurs.

There must be different tine designs, my Bosch has straight tines. Yes I have Fiestaware and Bosch. I'm not sure what model mine is, I've had it for 5-6 years now. It has the third rack. I don't love the third rack. I find it a pain to load silverware in, however it does work well for putting plastic lids on since they don't have space to bounce around. Fiesta plates are easy peasy in the dishwasher. Bowls required a bit of playing around to find a configuration that work. They nested a little too tightly so the water couldn't get in and clean them so my solution was to do a bigger bowl with a smaller bowl in front and the skip one set and then repeat. Yes there is a little bit of wasted space that way but I find it doable. I put bowls on the left side of the middle rack as well as in the left side of the lower rack. I was actually far more worried about getting my pots and pans in the dishwasher than then dishes so those are the items I took to the store to make sure they fit.

I think what is a good deal for you will depend on what other options you have nearby. I see so many people say cheese is a great deal but for me it's insanely expensive at Trader Joes. Why? because I live in the dairy state and my local grocery chain easily has 50+ feet (with 6 shelves) of just cheese. Imported, local, cheap big batch etc. They have so many choices. And if that's not enough local farmer's markets abound with many small batch award winner farms selling their cheese directly to consumers. There are also several cheese only shops in the general area of our TJ's. But I understand not everyone is blessed with such great cheese choices and TJ's might really be the best option available to them. I buy their fine sea salt and their low sodium soy sauce. My kids adore the swedish sour gummies. I will agree with everyone else that their dark chocolate PB cups are amazing. I like their frozen prepared foods. I do think the prices are a bit high for what you get but they have things that I just can't find elsewhere so as a splurge we always pick up a couple of frozen items. I am quite fond of their chile relenos but they haven't had them the last few times i have been there. The garlic naan is another hit here.

He has to file his taxes if he works but you can still claim him as a dependent. However, if you do claim him, when he files, he has to mark that his a dependent on someone else's taxes. I don't think he is eligible for standard deduction then since you claimed that when you filed your taxes.

I was 24, married and our first child was 2 months old when we signed the paperwork. I was not working at the time. It was a custom build so we had to wait till eldest was 8 months old to move in. It was a split level so we only finished the upper level. Shortly after signing the paperwork, I was able to get work part time from home. I saved everything I made for the next 2 years and we paid cash to finish the lower level. We are still in the same house 25+ years later.

I absolutely LOVE the thing. And just an FYI to tuck in the back of your mind, the best prices you are most likely to find are from a business called Fleet Farm during November/December time (exact time changes each year). This year they sold them for $199 each, everywhere else it seems their "best" price was closer to $250+. Anyways I can completely vouch for Fleet Farm in case it's a store you have never heard of.

Unfortunately most stovetop canners don't work on induction. For years I had a small one (4 quart) and it was the only one I could find that worked on induction. Since then Presto has come out with a new one that works on induction but they also developed an electric pressure canner. I got the electric one and have never looked back. It's so much easier than the stovetop version.

The first planting of cucumbers pretty much died and so I pulled them out and put in peas. They are just starting to sprout. The second planting of cucumbers is looking quite nice. I'm hopeful now that I am correcting the PH of my city water to something more reasonable for plants that they would perform better than those of the past (and really I didn't have any complaints about those other than they died back too fast). I also have buckets of snow I can bring in and defrost for water but it's been so insanely cold, I have had no desire to dig them out. First round of carrots is ready and DS is eating a couple a day. There is going to be a gap before round two is ready. Once I corrected the PH, my tomatoes came back from the brink of death. I had already planned on losing them so I had started a second planting so now I have a really good supply of fresh cherry tomatoes (almost too much at times). Lettuce, purple kale and arugula are all doing great so we have a nice supply of fresh greens. For some reason the spinach is not happy with the indoor garden setup. Not sure why it's being so fussy. This round of radishes is less happy than previous rounds. Not sure what I did differently but will have to toss some more seeds in again. The purple cauliflower looks great. Recently started basil and cilantro and they are each about 2 inches tall. My last two buckets of potatoes are almost ready to harvest. When they are done, I will plant two more purple cauliflower is those buckets. And after being bug free for the last 4 months or so I now have aphids again. I have no idea where they came from as no new plants have been added only seeds. So I bought some lacewing eggs and they have started hatching. Hopefully they will get the aphids under control soon. I also spotted a lone ladybug/asian beetle (I can't tell them apart) not sure where it's been all winter but I relocated it to some of the aphidy plants and between it and the lacewings hopefully they all get a good meal.

For me it's the drawers that always break but I feel your pain. I also find they never have as many door bins as I would prefer. My only solution is to keep the non-broken pieces from previous fridges and wedge them into the new one as best as possible. It does give us a bit more life out of things that way. Of course that only works if you are in the process of getting a new fridge. One of my fridges, I duck taped all the areas that we are prone to breaking as soon as the new fridge arrived. That did seem to extend the life of those pieces. Another possible suggestion is to try posting on Facebook or other neighborhood groups if anyone is getting rid of a fridge similar to yours and see if they have bins that you could get for cheap.

Could you use strips of bread ties to make the blinds? I think that would be a thinner appearance. I tied to find a picute but all I'm coming up with are ones that are preseperated. I know I've gotten ones where the are all stuck together so you could accordian fold them for blinds but I just can't find a picture of that kind right now. This is an image of the preseparated kind in case my description wasn't good enough.

It would make sense to me but I would guess the weather delay is due to the trucks not getting to the Amazon warehouses to restock Amazon so they really are temporarily out of stock. Amazon wouldn't need/have a different message for all the reasons why they don't currently have the product. If they actually have the product and it's slow shipping, I often see a message saying it's delayed for weather (although admittedly now that I think about it I can't say for sure if the weather delay message is in Amazon itself or on the tracking page from the shipper since I monitor both)

This isn't a large job/expense but something I wish I had known about. We have a split level so nearly the whole basement is finished. Most is carpet but their is some vinyl as well. But the floor was so cold to walk on. When our sump pump died and flooded the basement, we redid the floors. I put a product called Dry Barrier (I think that is what it is called) but basically they were plastic pieces with feet that snapped together and created an air gap between the poured concrete floor and the flooring we installed. It is SO MUCH nicer downstairs and the floor doesn't feel cold. Bonus is if the sump pump ever dies again, there is a gap so the carpet isn't likely to get soaked again. SO when considering flooring, think about creating an airgap between the concrete and your flooring for a nicer experience walking/living in the basement area.

I would have to disagree with this. I have convection broil but the air fryer is still light years ahead of the oven for both crispiness and speed. We vastly prefer anything made in the airfryer over the convection oven. For the longest time I thought that airfryers were over hyped and really since I had the convection oven what was the point of getting an airfryer. But I got one so the kids could prepare quick snacks. And now people will wait for me to make batches of food in the airfryer because they don't want it made in the oven anymore.

11 would have been early 80's for me. Breakfast if we ate it was cold cereal. My mom was not a morning person so we were on our own which really was just fine since the kids weren't morning people either so breakfast just wasn't a common thing at our house. Milk was an option but we got milk from my grandparents cow and it was not homogenized. The cream was lumpy because it was cold and no amount of shaking would mix it in. I ate dry cereal as I couldn't stand the milk. Lunch at school was usually things like this weird rectangular pizza slice, homemade mac and cheese (that was probably one of the most disgusting foods I've even been forced to eat in my life), other weirdly processed foods. By that point they had done away with the creamed corn that the lunch lady would walk around with a pot of it in her hand and put a scoop on everyone's plate whether they wanted it or not. On the non creamed corn day is was some other equally repulsive canned veggie. I grew up with frozen veggies and have never been able to stomach any kind of canned veggie. Supper at least 3-4 days a week we had roasted chicken (my dad raised poultry so there was never any shortage). Naked potatoes (my name for the peeled boiled chunks of russets potatoes we were served nearly every day of our childhood. No butter (as we didn't have that) and no salt because 9 times out of 10 my mom forgot to add it. I loved baked potatoes and especially the peel but my dad didn't like baked or the peel so we never got to eat them any other way than boiled. For veggies it was either fresh veggies from the garden or frozen veggies that we had put away. We had a huge asparagus patch so ate a lot of that. My dad was also friends with local farmers so when they would harvest peas for example, he'd go over with 4 or 5 5 gallon buckets and they would fill them up. He'd bring them home and everyone worked to clean them up and get them in the freezer, corn also arrived whenever they were harvesting. We grew tomatoes, cucumbers, pepper onions and beans that were all put away for winter. We would have pot roast once a month or so. How much beef we had depended on when my grandparents had a cow butchered. But my dad also raised rabbits, turkey, geese, ducks and when I was really little pigeons so those other proteins were rotated around the chicken that we mostly ate. Milk was also offered but I avoided it whenever possible as it was just as bad to drink as it was to put on cereal.

I'm not willing to do that either but here's a couple of easier options. 1) save the peels from the tomatoes you can, dry them, grind to powder and use that to thicken instead of paste. 1) if you are lazy like I am when I can and don't bother to remove the peels, take dried tomato slices (dried to crunchy state not chewy) and powder them and use them to thicken instead of paste. But paste is cheap so maybe you don't mind buying it, I always have more tomatoes than I can possibly use, so drying them for paste is helpful since it gives me another way to use up my surplus.

cereal instant oatmeal pasta (plain or with sauce mixes) instant potatoes (mashed, au gratin, scallop, they have many kinds in box mixes) ramen either than packages or the "cup of soup" kind.

This is how we are. My kids have always known we aren't paying for the wedding. We can't even afford to pay for or contribute to college other than offering free room and board so something optional like a fancy wedding just isn't happening. Ds got married last year. Future in laws offered a certain budget and plans were made to stay within that budget. It was significantly more than DS wanted to spend on a wedding but her family had a specific vision they wanted so he just went along with it since they were paying. Some things changed for them and they were struggling to meet their commitment but by that point it was too late to change anything that would save them money. They asked us to chip in. While I felt bad saying no, at that point we weren't even sure if younger siblings would get to go to the wedding as we weren't sure we could scrape up enough to get them there (it was a significant distance away). Things worked out in the end but yeah we definitely aren't following tradition in this family. When I got married my DH and I were making more than my parents. There was absolutely no reason to expect them to pay for it. And with a large family and a small income, my funds are going to support the people living in the home not those moving out.

I don't use YNAB but all of the budget programs I have looked at were run similarly so unless YNAB is completely different this thought might still help you. Your budget doesn't care what account your money is stored in. If I pull $50 in cash from savings that I will spend on grocery but tag that withdrawal as groceries it will subtract it from my grocery budget. If I write a check for $50 or charge $50 on a credit card. Anything marked as grocery will affect the remaining balance for groceries and the account I used to actually pay for it is irrelevant. I have three accounts I store money in. Checking, savings, and high yield savings. The checking account is just the amount I need to have immediate access to until the next source of income is deposited. The savings account is things I will need soon (next month or so), It earns interest but not much. The rest of the money is in the high yield savings (it takes a few days to move money from here back to checking so I try to keep an amount of need now in the checking but no extra so that I can earn as much interest as I can). When I'm considering spending, the account balances and the budget are actually two different things. The budget tells me how much that I have allocated to something is available. But the accounts tell me where it is. If I decide to buy a $5000 thing, first I check the budget that I have $5000 allocated to that category and then I check the checking account (where all my bills are paid from etc) to see if I have $5000 available. If the budget says I have it, it's just a matter of moving it to the account I use to pay from. So in all essence all my sinkings funds are stored as one big lump sum. The budget just tells me how to break it apart if I choose to spend.

I don't know how they treat their remote workers but I know many people who have worked for them in person and let's just say it is not a company I would recommend working for if you have any hope of a life outside of work.

I understand your frustration with needing to change systems. I was a long time Quicken user, Paid about $30 and I could use the downloads for three years. I was willing to pay a small fee for having those downloads but the $100+ is insanely expensive for my budget (not saying it isn't a good product just way out of my economic reach). Quicken then switched to you have to pay every year and they changed how things work and everything got more complicated for how "I" use it. Went on a hunt, I tried literally every product I could get a free trial on. And what I found: you are going to have a huge learning curve because anything you pick is going to be different than what you are used to however, some will be more intuitive to your type of thinking than others. Out of desperation I even tried YNAB and frankly I'm with you that it was terribly confusing. Yes I watched videos but it just didn't connect with my mental approach and for that price it needed to be "perfect for me" and it definitely was not. So I'm sorry to say, you are not likely to find an easy to use product that is free (or even a paid product), that you are going to be able to quickly transition to in just a few days. I'm not saying that to discourage you but despite what other posters say, I would disagree that setting up a new system is not easy (and this applies to any program). I'm finally ended up sticking with Quicken. I'm not happy with it and I had to change how I prefer to do things to make it work with program but at the end of the day it was the least painful option. I really do hope you can find something that works with your style of thinking about money.

ginger ale is usually my first choice. Lemon lime type sodas (grapefruit soda (aka Squirt) also works). broth (chicken is first choice but have used beef). I keep those insanely salty bouillon cubes on hand and just drop one in a cup of hot water. Better than Bouillon can also be used but it's not as salty and when I'm sick the higher sodium level seems to works better white grape juice (apple may work but I find white grape better) Hot jello - boil water mix in jello package and drink before it sets up. you can eat it cold later but the hot version works so much better when I feel sick In a true pinch, take the seasoning pack from ramen and mix with hot water, sip the broth. Save noodles for something else. Pickle juice just a sip or two. (ETA: dill pickle juice not sure if things like bread and butter will work)