Oh, Blogging. You're So Complicated.

Hey, everyone! Happy Friday! I just wanted to hop on quickly to let you all know that we love you so much, we sacrificed like CRAZY for you. In fact, I'd describe this week as our best week with comments. EVER. Simply put: We love, love, love reading what you have to say . . . but we've had SO much trouble responding in a good way. Blogger's comments have no tool in place to respond individually, no way to really manage things well (SPAM, which we've been getting like woah this week), etc.

So, at the advice of many other frustrated Blogger bloggers, we switched over to Disqus. Chrissy (The New Me) has been particularly helpful with the implementation, but she warned me that making the switch will likely delete all existing comments.

Yup! That's exactly what happened.

There's an import function . . . and I'll be working tirelessly over the weekend to try and get it working. (So far, no luck!) If it comes to it, I may switch back -- which should restore everything. At least I hope.

In the meantime, please show us some love. We feel . . . lonely now. Test out the new comments function. Please tell us if you like it. And hopefully in no time at all, we'll get your thoughtful words and awesome additions back.

<3

OK. UPDATE: Just as I posted this . . . the import function kicked in! Sooooo. Thanks for sharing in our little freak-out moment. I swear to you, I almost cried. All comments have been restored. We HEART Disqus. We thank Chrissy for her help. And we encourage you to test out the new function. Now we can give back to all of you who give us so many reasons to smile each day!

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Weekend Spending Habits: EATING OUT

We consider (never home)maker a healthy living blog. And financial health is so very important to keeping the mind and body stress free. That's why we've been focusing on things like grocery receipts and other bills. Money's the stuff that keeps us up at night. Today's topic is one we continually struggle with: Weekend Spending.

For us, weekend spending comes in many forms. Eating out. Catching or renting a movie. Hosting parties. Running races (those that have fees associated). Miscellaneous shopping. Seems like everywhere we look, someone's hand is out, just waiting for us to hand over our debit card. Of all these pricey amusements, going out to eat literally eats up the most cash.


Over the next several weeks, I'd like to focus on one of each of these kinds of spending. On Friday, I'll post to get the discussion started. The following week, I'll provide some tips and reader advice. Yes -- you're a big part of this, and we'd love to get your input and words of wisdom! Since we got such great response to our grocery bill post earlier this week, we'll start with EATING OUT.

I'd like to know from you all . . . how often to you eat out? Once a week? Twice? Three times? More? Or perhaps you set a scale for it like we do. For example, we eat out typically three times a week. One of these instances is a take-out night. Something like a $10 pizza. Another night, we actually go to a restaurant, spend maybe $45 to $60, depending. Another night, we go to Wegmans and buy all the fixings for a fabulous dinner in. Maybe more to the tune of $25.

I guess I didn't realize we were spending so much until I just wrote those sentences. But that's over $100 in food on top of our grocery costs each week!


So, please leave a comment or email us at neverhomemaker@gmail.com to weigh in. We'll be sharing some of your responses next week!

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