Story Comments

I have been using Desktop Budget from [Spryka.com] to manage my personal finances for a few months now. Its the easiest to use free, offline personal finance software I have seen so far.

@mac-phisto: no that website pretty much had trash picking.

In eating for free: "Forage. Look for wild growing foods." A local preserve (Wildlife Prairie State Park, [wildlifeprairiestatepark.org] , it's awesome, you should go, there are buffalo. Roaming ones, even.) hosts an event where you go for like a one or two hour hike, foraging for native plants along the trails, and then you go back to their gourmet kitchen and learn to prepare a meal consisting primarily (but not exclusively) of the foraged foods. It's so popular it took me three tries to enroll fast enough that my husband could take it. (No hour-long hikes for me!) And, of course, remember it's not legal to forage everywhere or for every kind of plant.

@Veeber: I thought the same thing, LOL!

That cat is a dead ringer for my kitty. Unless she's got a second life that I don't know about.

I've got 5 cats, so I guess I don't have to worry about that worthless 401(k) after all.

It also sheds canadian dollars.

@ElizabethD: i'm surprised this is the first time you've heard of the term. i draw the line at eating food from a dumpster, but i have no problem "repurposing" other people's trash. when i was in college, you could get some premo furniture on student move-out day by "dumpster diving" (although most students were too lazy to actually put the furniture in the dumpster - it was often just curbside). in fact, one guy in town made a pretty lucrative business by collecting up the furniture & selling it back to students 2 weeks later (on student move-in day) from his used furniture storefront. they caught him stealing furniture from behind goodwill one nite though. sleazeball.

@ElizabethD: There IS a difference. I used to work for a supermarket, and in produce, as an example, we had two modes of throwing things out. Trash went into gray cans w/bags, which got thrown in the compactor. Food stuffs, though, went into blue bins, which were then put out as soon as they were filled/every night(whichever came first). These only had food and were picked up by pig farmers/other processors to be sorted and fed to animals. So there was only food in there, and we had to powerwash them all the time when they were empty, so they didn't smell. So the food in there was actually almost no different than when it arrived in a box/sat on a shelf, at least for a few hours. In the sun outside, you would have to get it quick, if it wasn't an item w/a "shell", like citrus.

@ElizabethD: I thought the same thing and when I went to the website it was all about "treading lightly on the earth" and "anti consumerism" Hippie communes.

In the "how to eat for free" item, I'm assuming "Freeganism" is prettier term for "dumpster diving." bleah

@Veeber: Sadly, that isn't real money. They're vouchers for cheezburgers.

Someone let me know when the cat starts spitting out $20's. Maybe THEN I'll clean the box.

Is that kitty pooping money? I'll deal with the allergies if I can get a cat that poops money.