Joni Smith

Joni Smith

Joni is a 40-year-old wife and mother in Kansas City, MO. She started budgeting in 2013 and was able to quit her job as a computer programmer in 2017. Her family now has financial freedom, living comfortably on only her husband's teaching salary. (This includes 3 humans and 3 cats living under one roof.) These days, Joni enjoys finding simple ways to live the good life while saving money and the planet at the same time. Her hobbies include DIY projects, gardening, quilting, making self-improvement goals, and brainstorming ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle.
Get Max Dollar for Your Totaled Car

Get Max Dollar for Your Totaled Car

When my husband’s car was totaled only two weeks after I quit my job, we both panicked. He was rear ended at a stop light and, luckily, everyone was okay–thank God! Just not his car. That was totaled. The timing of our totaled car could not be worse. We were on a tighter budget than ever! And now we had to hurry and get another car for the hubs. I started googling ways to get money for a totaled car.…

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Old bread for the birds

We try not to let any food go to waste, but it happens anyway sometimes. When it’s stale bread, I like to provide a treat for the birds. Though I’m not sure if they’re the only ones who enjoy it. ? I recently gave the kiddo a few stale slices of bread and she put them all over our bird feeders. The next day, the bread was completely gone and the bird feeders looked like this: Maybe I need to…

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What The Total Money Makeover Did For Me

What The Total Money Makeover Did For Me

This book, The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey, changed my life and the financial trajectory of my family. I first read it back in September 2013 when I knew something needed to change for me because I was so unhappy at work. At that time, I couldn’t just quit because I had a family with financial obligations, and I wanted to retire someday, preferably earlier than the norm! For any chance of that, I felt we needed both mine…

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Find the cheapest price for items on Amazon

Find the cheapest price for items on Amazon

I don’t want to overspend on an item because who really does? It’s a waste of hard-earned money. So, in the past, I’ve spent hours and hours searching Amazon.com for a particular product, trying to find the cheapest version, the best deals. Sometimes, I’d find a cheaper version and sometimes (truthfully most of the time), it was a big waste of time. And time is money too. So how do you find the cheapest price for any particular item on…

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Whisper Walk 5k 2017

The Whisper Walk is for ovarian cancer awareness. Every year, our family walks in memory of Justin’s grandmother, Mary Katherine Quanty. Ovarian cancer is said to “whisper” because the four main early symptoms are very subtle and can easily be missed if you don’t know what they are: bloating difficulty eating or feeling full quickly urinary changes pelvic or abdominal pain Learn more Go Team Proud Mary! “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” -Shakespeare

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International coastal cleanup

Every year, I help pick up trash for the International Coastal Cleanup sponsored by Ocean Conservancy. It’s all about cleaning up on beaches and around waterways that eventually lead to the ocean. And this year, I brought my kiddo with me! She was a great helper, making sure we marked down every piece of trash we found. That’s my favorite thing about this particular trash pick up event-everyone tracks their findings and Ocean Conservancy compiles the data and provides the…

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Sidewalk Trimming Therapy

You can get a nice crisp look to your yard even if the grass isn’t perfect by regularly trimming the cement edges in your yard (i.e. sidewalks and driveway). We don’t treat out grass with anything so we gave a lot of clover and weeds that I’ll pull by hand. Even with those “imperfections,” I think the yard looks great when the edges are sharp along the sidewalks and driveway. All it takes to get this clean look is a…

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Homemade Shower scum cleaner

This recipe has been great for getting my shower clean and, most importantly, keeping it that way! I found this idea on Pinterest and it really works as a soap scum buster. I still had a store bought bottle of soap scum remover so I used that up first and reused the spray bottle (waste not, want not!) to hold the new chemical-free mixture. It’s only two ingredients that I already had in my house-equal parts vinegar and dish soap.…

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Keep your floors clean without vacuuming

Keep Your Floors Clean Without Vacuuming

Do you spend a lot of time vacuuming your home? Or do you put it off until you see large dust bunnies in the corners or step on something unidentifiable? That pretty much describes how I used to vacuum. I might vacuum consistently for a couple of weeks and then I would put off vacuuming the floors for as long as possible- going weeks without vacuuming the floors. And it showed. But I did not want to spend my time…

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