Money Matters

In December I finished reading Alan Greenspan's book "The Age of Turbulance: Adventures in a New World". I would recommend this book to anyone. I found it very interesting and insightful as an economic history of the United States and commentary on government's role in the economy. I also enjoyed the last couple of chapters that expressed Greenspan's opinion on the economics of social issues in the United States and abroad.

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading "The Fair Tax Book: Saying Goodbye to the Income Tax and the IRS" by Neal Boortz and John Linder. I need to do some more research on the fair tax before deciding where I stand on the issue, but I am thinking more about the US economy because of it. I would also recommend this book to anyone.

So, if you are beginning to think I am a bit of a nerd, you are right. I have my undergraduate degree in finance which translates into having taken several economic classes. I really enjoyed the economic classes I took and have found the information I learned in them to be very useful for our personal financial decisions as well as understanding the world around me.

All this intro on economics was to come to this...I'm a little nervous with the economic happenings of the last couple of days (the plunge of the DOW, the emergency slashing of the federal fund and discount rates by 3/4 of a point, the state of a large percentage of American's personal finances).

With that nervousness however, I can say I am very grateful for the state we are in with our personal finances. I'm so grateful we bought a smaller home with a small mortgage. I'm so grateful we have been so frugal in our spending. I'm so grateful for Excel and Quicken that help us manages our money. I'm especially grateful for the years supply of food we have sitting around our house. It really does bring a sense of stability even though the markets are jumping all around.

Today as I was getting ready for the day, I thought about our year's supply of food and how daunting of a task it seemed to be to acquire it. Thankfully my grandma is a food storage guru and she helped me every step of the way. I would love to help anyone out there who is trying to put theirs together. If you have any questions, email me (I think most of our audience is young families like ourselves who are at a point where they are starting to get food together...that is if we even have an audience...we try and lure you in with cute pictures of Daniel).

So I thought I would include a couple of boring pictures of some food storage ideas we've had that may help.

Don't stack your buckets this high. I think they recommend stacking them 3 high. It takes up a lot of room. We still have about 8 other buckets throughout the house, but this is how we decided to store a year's supply of the basics (wheat, oats, beans, rice, etc.)

Besides a years supply of the basics, we have 3 months worth of canned goods for more variety. For a space saver, we put this makeshift pantry in front of our stack of buckets. The white board on the right is where we track what he have eaten so we know what we need to replace.

If you don't live in UT or ID, I think it is near impossible to find a drum to store water in. So we just bought the water and the containers from the local water distribution company. This was Christian's idea and I thought it was great!

I'll step off my food storage soap box now! And no, I'm not currently reading another nerdy economics book.