While we wanted to save money, we didn’t want to go cheap and get unhealthy foods.

Can Community Supported Agriculture Be Affordable?

There are several different option consumers can choose when it comes to community supported agriculture. We used sites like Local Harvest to see what options we had in the Raleigh area. Many of the programs involved prepaying for a share of a harvest with farmers.

What was a downside for us was the big cost upfront involved. Even though it was a fair deal, we were hesitant. We were new at this and wanted to test the waters first before making a huge financial commitment. 

Weekly CSA Deliveries

We looked and found something that sounded promising to us – The Produce Box, which offered weekly payments for produce deliveries directly to your home. The prices were very reasonable and every week we would be given some option with box selection. We signed up last year and were pleasantly surprised at how well it went. At the time the yearly sign up fee was $18 and we paid $22 for our boxes. We could skip our weekly deliveries, which is handy when you’re on vacation or perhaps still working through last deliveries.

To give you an idea of what we get, one week’s deliveries included:

• Romaine Lettuce
• Kale
• Cucumbers
• Vidalia onions
• Sweet potatoes
• Spinach

This year the enrollment fee with The Produce Box is $18, but it’s also just $18 for our boxes. With just the 2 of us and the baby, the size is right for us and we have less wasted food.

In addition we signed up for another program, Carolina Grown, to fill our menus. Carolina Grown has a point system that they use for orders. You pay weekly, monthly, or yearly and spend them as you see fit. We’ve used them for a variety of items, like beef value boxes (roasts and ground beef), trout fillets, milk, ice cream, and pizza dough. The monthly total costs for the programs? It’s about $175.

We then use the grocery stores for staples like rice, bread, and coffee creamer (yes, that is a staple for us). It’s saved us a significant amount of money with our food budget, saved time as they are delivered to us weekly, and we get a variety of foods.

 CSA and Your Local Options

How many of you participate in Community Supported Agriculture? How did you get involved? Do you think it’s a practical choice for those on a budget?

Good Morning Green Panda Friends. You may not know it, but personal finance is around us all the time.  Almost everything that we do in our lives involves personal finance because almost everything that we do in our lives involves money. When we pay for our bagel or coffee in the morning or when we pay our monthly cell phone bill online we are taking an active part in our personal finances because we are actively managing our money.

Taking an active role in managing our money means something different for everyone. When we actively manage our money and take an interest in our own personal finances it allows us the freedom to pay our bills, save for our individual personal goals, as well as save for the ultimate financial goal of saving for retirement.

What does Personal Finance mean to you?

Does Personal Finance mean earning enough money to pay your bills? For some people personal finance means paying all of our bills on time each month and it ends there.  However actively managing our money is so much more than just paying our monthly bills on time.  Before we can pay our bills each month we have to make a personal budget so that we know how much we can afford to spend on our groceries, cell phone, rent, cable, and other monthly bills.  There is no point in paying our bills on time each month if we use all of our money to pay our bills and then we have no money left over

Does Personal Finance mean saving towards your personal financial goals? For some people actively managing our money means living on less so we can save more each month.  Some of us are saving for a down payment on our first home, some people may be saving for a nice vacation, and some people may be saving to buy or lease our first car.  Regardless of our personal financial goals if we spend less we can save more money. If we live within our means and always spend less than we make then we will always be able to save some money each month.

Does Personal Finance mean saving for the long term to make sure that we can be financially stable in retirement? For some other people personal finance means saving for the ultimate long term personal goal which means that they are saving for retirement.  We may start working when we are younger in order to save for our retirement when we are older. Buying a home, taking vacations, and buying a car may only be small goals in our lives as we continue saving for the ultimate personal financial goal in retirement.  Some of us may wish to retire in a warmer climate, some of us may want to retire early and before the age of 65, and some of us may wish to retire with other people our own age in a retirement home or community.  Regardless of which personal financial goals we have for our retirement, they all require planning and saving.

Photo by shouldbecleaning

1. Do You Care About Job Security? @ TFB.

2. 6 Tips to Landing Your Dream Job @ Budgets Are Sexy.

3. Not Another Frugal Mother’s Day Post @ Studenomics.

4. The Economies of Kitchen Cabinets @ BITFS.

5. Multigenerational Households: Treasure or Torture? @ Yakezie.

6. Should You Donate To The Homeless? @ Canadian Finance Blog.

7. Praying to the business gods @ Experiglot.

8. A Nerd’s Guide to Healthy Drinking @ Nerd Fitness.

9. Pyramid Scheme Questions Cause Herbalife to Lose 3 Billion Dollars @ Lazy Man and Money.

10. Carnival of Personal Finance: The Color Wheel Edition @ Money Talks Coach.

What are some common mistakes that we all make after college?

Feeling entitled to spend money.

We feel that we deserve to spend money now that we’re free. We feel the urge to buy all of the fancy things that we couldn’t get our hands on when we were struggling to survive. This is especially true for those that find a decent paying gig after school. It only seems natural to treat yourself now that you have money coming in.

Why’s this a mistake then? Because chances are that you either have student debt or credit card debt. You also don’t want to fall in further debt just because you want to spend money now that you’re done with school. My simple advice here is to pay yourself first and try to save a little bit of money so that you don’t fall totally behind.

Wasting precious time.

Anyone that can’t find a job or chooses not to look for look can easily become guilty of wasting precious time. Sure there are many benefits to hanging out and finally getting some rest. The problem is that time does fly by pretty quick and it’s easy to waste valuable time. Next thing you know and you’re in your late-20s still not doing anything you want to be.

How can you avoid wasting time? My trick is to keep your eye on the prize. No matter what, you need to have your end goal in mind. You need to have something that you’re chasing after. If you’re just staying afloat, then this could lead to serious problems. You don’t want to feel stuck at 30 without any serious job prospects.

Getting off track.

It’s easy to get off track. You go on a trip, you enjoy your new lifestyle, and you don’t feel like entering this scary thing called the “real world.” A few years go by, you’re soft of working, you have random projects on the go, but you don’t have anything concrete happening.

How can you stay on track? I firmly believe in constantly challenging yourself and setting new goals. Without goals and challenges, you don’t really have anything to look forward to or to keep you going. This is why I set a goal for myself to earn $5,000 more from freelance income this summer. That’s just one way that I try to stay on track.

Are you going to avoid these mistakes? I hope that you get the most out of life in your 20s. I don’t want to see you fall behind.

They’d go to the bank to ask why they’ve over-drafted. They took money out from the ATM and the balance shown lead them to believe that they had plenty of money there. In many cases, it was because they hadn’t remembered or record some auto drafts that they had set up with account. Their car insurance would be taken out, but since they signed up with the insurance company for the draft, it didn’t show up with bank’s system until it came out (and it was too late).

They were hit with overdraft fees. With some banks that can trigger a cascade of fees. By keeping an up to date check register some people can save a ton of money while staying on top of their bills.

How to Use a Check Register

To keep track of your account, you simply need a check register, a pen/pencil, and a calender. The process is simple and it only takes a few minutes at a time.

• Take your calender and write down all your scheduled deposits (like your paycheck) and regular debits (like your car insurance premiums).
• Each time you make a deposit or withdrawal, update your register accordingly. To keep your balance accurate, include your scheduled deposits and withdrawals as they happen.
• Keep track of all your ATM and check card transactions (perhaps review once a week or month).
• Double check for any bank fees and investigate. You may find that your bank or credit union charges too much and it would be better to move your money elsewhere.
• Make sure your balance and the bank’s balance matches up. Investigate if necessary.

Even if you rely on sites and programs like Mint or Quicken, it’s good to run the numbers yourself occasionally to make sure you’re not missing anything. After all no one cares about your money like you do.

Thoughts on Keeping Tabs on Checking Accounts

I’d like to hear from you and how your handle your money. How do you check your bank accounts’ balances? Do you manually keep tabs or do you have another way getting that information? What programs or sites do you recommend?