Tasty Corn - A - Poppin'

Sometimes I just really want some popcorn. But the past few years I had given up on it. I felt like it was too expensive at the movie theater both in calories/general health costs and pocket money {... does anyone say pocket money anymore?} And microwave bagged popcorn is super bad for you. Popcorn isn't my husband's favorite thing and since my cravings for it are so rare I just let it go.


But then... I wanted popcorn so badly. I talked about it for about two weeks. Finally I decided to try the "popcorn trick".


I wanted to use quality {local, if possible} popcorn kernels, coconut oil, and my stove top.

After some research {+ trials} I can honestly say that this is my favorite way to pop popcorn at home {on the stove}:

A Real Food Lover's Coconut Oil Popcorn



Oh and if you are into popping in the microwave instead of on the stove:

100 Days of Real Food Popcorn Trick


Happy poppin'!

Frugal Living & Eliminating Debt {Final Update for 2013}

With yesterday starting off the final month of 2013 my husband and I had a "budget + finances" talk over coffee. We typically drink something warm when discussing finances in order to pretend like we're enjoying the conversation. 

We were so excited to find that we paid off many more debts than we expected to this year... and saved quite a bit of money too {paying off over ten thousand dollars of debt that was not already part of our monthly payments and saving over ten thousand dollars for a rainy day!} 

I suppose there are better ways to do it, but our simple plan of paying off our highest interest rate bills first seemed to work for us. Which means that I'm calling this goal completed... and a total success!

As for the savings, one thing we did about half way through the year was make a savings goal and act on it. We thought about what we could realistically save each month... taking into account what we might spend on monthly bills, but also what we'd have to work hard {or spend less} in order to save. Then we put away that money before we could even spend it. In fact we treated it as a bill that we had to pay to our savings account.

This worked really well for us and we will most likely keep this same plan for next year too.