two interesting links

two things I found online today that really interest me.... tracking sharks and calculating cost of raising children:



http://www.ocearch.org/  :: this is the shark tracking website. i'm totally gearing up for my beach trip in early july and i will definitely be checking back in with this website to make sure that the tagged sharks are out of the area. too bad not every single shark in the ocean is tagged though...


usda cost of raising a child calculator  :: i found this link in a very out of the way manner. i was reading an article about sacrifices you need to make if you want to retire by 40. and i noticed that all the couples they cited were childless (or is it childfree?). and since we're expecting a third boy i thought i would try to find the most recent numbers for cost of raising children which is how i eventually found this calculator. when this baby comes along we can expect to spend over $25k/year on our sweet boys. although that number includes $616 each for the older boys in clothing and $730 in clothing for the baby. i think maybe i've spent $616 on clothing for my oldest boy total for his whole lifetime. there's no way i'll be spending over $700 for a baby. especially not since it's boy #3. i've got so many boxes of clothing and i've even donated/consigned of a lot it because it was just too much.

money money money MONEY

Read the title, is that word insane, or is it just me? Does that happen to anyone else... when you see a word written a lot and it just looks really strange? I start to think, "I know that word is not spelled right." Or, "There's no way that word should be pronounced the way I say it."

Maybe it's just me.

Anyway,  today's post is about my favorite despised topic. I spend a lot of time thinking about money because I'm a stay-at-home mom and my husband is a pastor. We're not making six figures like some one-income-only families. So sometimes money is tight and we have to be careful what we choose to spend it on. Because I'm also obsessed with Pinterest, in particular, people's homes this can sometimes lead to some feelings of envy. And envy is so ugly. UGH!

So I wanted to share some ideas that have helped me stretch our money. These are not going to be budget boosting ideas, but I say every penny counts. For today I'll be focusing on two apps that I downloaded for my smartphone. The first and my personal favorite is Slidejoy. That is a referral link. The second is AppNana. My invitation code for that is a6801287.

Slide joy is awesome because it acts as a lock screen for the smart phone. So each time you swipe left or right, "carats" are added to your account. It doesn't take any extra interaction on your part to earn those carats. 100 Slidejoy carats = $1. You can then use those carats to make a donation or to get yourself a gift card. If you swipe right you get immediate access to your phone. If you swipe to the left you get more information about the advertisement. If you swipe down you get the notifications for the app and if you swipe up, you can see ads/news. It's so easy! I've earned over $30 in about a year of using it. So obviously an extra $30/year is not going to help me buy the house of my dreams. But it is enough to buy a special treat at Target or Amazon for myself or someone in my family.

This is a screenshot of SlideJoy.

Now I've been using AppNana the same amount of time and I have yet to make $10. The deal with them is you download other apps or watch ads and you are rewarded with a predetermined amount of "nanas." The more nanas you earn the more money they are worth. So just for signing up with them you get enough nanas to have $1 for Amazon and one or two other reward choices. I've been saving up my nanas so that I can get $10 credit to Amazon. That is 160,000 nanas. I've got about 20,000 more nanas to go. You can earn 400 nanas daily but you have to maintain a high level of nanas earned per day. I usually stick with watching ads. A 30 second ad gets you 5 nanas. So every so often I will get a message that says I need to earn about 3030 more nanas to earn the 400 daily nanas. So it takes quite awhile to count that down until I can start earning those bonus nanas for signing in every day. I'm going to stick with AppNana until I can get my $10 and then I'm out!

This is a screen shot of AppNana.

Please check back later to learn some other ways that I have managed to save money or get freebies.