TwentyFrugal

 So my newest side hustle endeavors pushed me towards something I really enjoy: Woodworking. My wife's grandfather clear cut an acre or two of his land and harvested a bunch of black walnut trees. When I was over there, I asked what he was going to do with the wood. He told me he would use some here and there but I was welcome to as much of it as I wanted. I used some of it to make Christmas presents over the holidays. One of my favorite gifts was a charcuterie board that I gave my mom. I did a quick google search and discovered that Black Walnut charcuterie boards were going for a whole lot more than I realized. I decided to make a few different ones and list them on Etsy. I have never used Etsy, but they make it quick and easy to set up a shop. They also are very clear about their fees and costs of selling. Here is a link to the fees that they charge for selling on the platform. https://www.etsy.com/legal/fees/ I also used to have some luck on eBay so I went ahead and posted them...

My wife and I moved into our first house in May and immediately started doing our own updates. Because we spent most of our savings buying the house, we wanted to keep the updates as affordable as possible. The kitchen was fairly builder-grade with the classic metal sink and all white appliances. Here is what it looked like before we started.  We took down all of the cabinet doors and painted them glossy white. We ordered some really affordable pulls from Amazon. They were $30 for 25 pulls!  We ordered some Feather Finish concrete and watched a ton of YouTube videos to learn how to concrete our countertops. While we were going, I made the call to go ahead and concrete our metal sink too. I hadn’t seen anyone do it but I thought it was worth a shot.  By the end of the project, we ended up only spending about $200 on pulls, concrete, polyurethane to seal the concrete, a $70 sink from Amazon, and a nifty new soap dispenser. Here our our final results!

My wife and I are in the process of purchasing our first rental property! Here is how we have done it step by step, and what we are going to do next! Step 1: Identifying our mark et The first thing we wanted to do was identify a market that we believe is emerging as opposed to emerged. We were looking at properties in our town and noticing they were priced higher and higher than we believed they were worth, then selling over asking price in a matter of days. Since we are going for a buy and hold investment strategy, we did not care for these high demand quick selling houses. Instead, we wanted to find a market that needed more rentals and had markets that typically foster tenants instead of homeowners. In a neighboring town, we found an area with a great downtown with shops and restaurants, an undergraduate university with a developing graduate program, a hospital, multiple large churches, and plenty of businesses.  Step 2: Secure Private Lending We reached out to family that has d...

Start investing with Acorns today! Get $5 when you use my invite link: https://acorns.com/invite/K5QSRE About two years ago, I was in the process of moving to Chicago to complete a Master’s degree. I was going from a steady paycheck back to being an unemployed student living in an expensive city.  The first thing I did was hit up the local goodwills and salvation army’s. They had things that my local thrift stores could only dream of. With Chicago being a huge sports city, I started buying up jerseys and selling them on eBay, Facebook, OfferUp, and LetGo. I made enough to make it a few months. I landed a remote job working for the company that I worked for before moving to Chicago. I was still only making around minimum wage. I was frustrated because I was basically putting my long term wealth on hold while living there. I found an app called Acorns that really made a huge difference for me. Acorns rounds up your purchases and invests the roundups in ETFs that you select based on r...

One of the most difficult things about getting in shape and staying in shape is accountability and consistency. This especially applies if you are trying to do it all yourself. I struggle with this personally. My wife and I have done this and absolutely loved using this tool to hold ourselves accountable. Here's how to use it! 1. Print out this chart and post it somewhere in your house that you have to pass every single day. Make sure you have three different colored markers or pens and a black pen sitting next to the location. (We posted it above our scale in our closet) 2. Pick 3 "completion goals" such as:  - Drink 1 gallon of water  - Work out once for the day  - Eat only whole foods today, etc. 3. Write these goals somewhere on the tracker and choose a color for each goal. 4. Each day, mark using the assigned color, which goals you completed the day of, or the day before (depending on when you fill it out). 5. Every other day, write down your weight for the day. (Thi...

The Cost of a Gym Membership in 2019 The average cost of a gym membership in the United States is as much as $600 a year. This is for your run of the mill average gym. Then if you get into the specialty gyms like CrossFit or PureBarre that you need a coach and classes for, your annual cost goes even higher. If you are a member of one of these gyms, I challenge you to make a working list of the equipment that you use at your gym and, in a separate column, whether that equipment is critical to your routine or if you could do without it.  Building a Home Gym After you have made this list of what is critical to you and what isn’t, you can start looking at the cost of this equipment. I recommend looking for secondhand equipment on resale sites like Facebook Marketplace, EBay, Craigslist, etc. I personally built my last home gym for only $250 solely on Facebook Marketplace. This was my breakdown: Bench press/leg press with about 300lbs of free weights: $100 Power Tower ...