Skip to main content

Nothing Like a Good Read

I'm proud of my husband. We both really enjoy reading, and we love bookstores. For probably the first six years or so that we were married, we spent a lot of money at bookstores. A lot of money that we could've been putting toward bills. But now, we don't. For me, I don't take the time to read that I used to, so I haven't been in the market for a new book recently.

However, my husband still reads -- not as much as he used to because finding time when you have a 5-month-old is tough. When he came across a book he wanted to read recently, he wrote down the title, author and ISBN number for a book he wants and took the info to our local library and requested it through interlibrary loan, a program through which libraries loan books to each other for patron use. Hundreds of libraries participate, and for most, it doesn't cost anything.

I think most people are not aware libraries will do this. I didn't know until I worked in one. Odd, isn't it, that it never occurred to me to get my books that way when I was spending so much money on them?


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trimming the Grocery List

This week is another grocery shopping week, and I'm dreading it. I had at one point managed to get my grocery spending under $175 every two weeks, the last few trips have not gone that well. They've all totaled more than $200, not including any supplementary trips I needed to make later. I'm not really sure what I can do to cut it more at this point beyond rethink what we've been eating. Over the past few months, the price of ground beef has gone up quite a bit, and much of what we eat has ground beef in it. I had been buying the leanest beef available, but on my last grocery trip, I bought 90/10 meat. Perhaps we'll need to eat more chicken.
Post a Comment
Read more

Finding a use for gifts you don't use

( Stuart Miles / FreeRangeStock.com ) Question: Someone gives you a present. You open it, give the gifter a sincere smile, and say, "Thank you," but you know that gift is something you'll never use. Not once. What do you do with it later? Me? I keep them. I just can't shake the feeling of guilt that goes along with regifting or selling them. As a result, my family and I have lots of items we either haven't used in years or have never used at all: An electric knife, electric griddle, a big mixer, something called Yonanas. The list goes on and on. But the bottom line is, Yonanas and electric knives don't fit my family's lifestyle. They never have, and I doubt they ever will. So I think I might need to get over feeling like it would be ungrateful to get rid of them and post them in places like Craigslist or some of those online sales sites on Facebook for sale. That way, at least we can have the cash to pay toward part of our debt. Wouldn't...
Post a Comment
Read more

Making Money

Last year, I participated in a local consignment sale that sells all kids items . I made $37 for the work I put into it, which is more than I could've hoped for given how little I had to start off with. A few weeks ago, I signed up to participate again. I have a few weeks to go through everything, get it all tagged and ready to go. I can also take some items that got left behind last time. Hopefully, I do at least as well as last time. Speaking of Consignments ... Our local newspaper ran an article a couple of months ago about local consignment stores I found really interesting. One of the store owners featured in the story said she had a consigner who shops local garage sales for cheap finds, then sells the items at the consignment store, receiving a check from the consignment store that averages about $800 a month. Of course, that doesn't account for the money she spends at the garage sales buying the items to begin with, but even a net income of $400 a month on consignm...
Post a Comment
Read more