TwentyFrugal

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!

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 ...

You just graduated college and you're trying to decide whether to buy a house or rent an apartment... There are many different factors that go into this decision. Do you have student loans? Do you have a giant car payment or credit card debt? How long will you live in that location? The list gets overwhelming. I am going to break down several factors in the simplest way possible to show you the options using estimated numbers. Let's say you have a monthly income of $2500 and you are fresh out of college with $65,000 in student loan debt with a 7% interest rate. You are trying to decide on buying a house or renting an apartment in the new city you are living in. The house you want to buy is $150,000 and a fixed mortgage rate of 3.33% with a 15 year mortgage. The alternative is renting an apartment in town for $650/month. Here is the breakdown: Option 1: Buy the house The monthly payment on the house:  $1060  for 15 years to pay off the grand total o...