Get organized with checklists!

Printable Checklists has tons of checklists to help us busy working moms get organized! I'm amazed at the number of free checklists available on the site. There is everything from charts to record your child's tooth loss to grocery lists by food type to family expense charts.

When you browse through the site you will most likely find checklists for things you haven't even thought about! It's all free, so what's not to love about that!

www.printablechecklists.com

My favorite Work At Home Mother site, www.mommyjobs.com, has a nice list of checklists as well.

I found the Printable Checklists site through one of our freebie fiends at Mommy Jobs, in fact. Hop on over to our busy message board and check out all the other great free finds and join in our discussions about working from home, parenting, saving money, you name it!

Getting a budget set up

I'm trying to get some good budgeting practices set up, especially since I'm not working as much as I once was and the money is tighter. This article has some good tips for managing the family's finances:

Simple Household Budgeting Tips

By: Stefani Partin

Are you the head of the household of your family and need some tips on making your life a little simpler? Those that work, take care of the kids and pay the bills have a hard time keeping everything organized. Below are some tips to help budget your household and some maybe even have some fun doing it.

Keep your financial records current. Keep a filing system and create folders for items such as receipts, tax returns, billing statements, bank statements, credit reports, etc. Keep everything in one designated place so it is easy to find when you need it. For your mail, have one designated place to put it daily when you receive it. Most all of us have misplaced our mail at one time in our life. Misplaced mail could mean late payments, which means late charges. Set a specific time of the day or week to handle all of your bookkeeping and stick to it. When I speak of bookkeeping, I speak of paying bills, filing bills, going through your mail, etc.

If you have online banking with your bank, set it up. I cannot tell you how easy it is to pay my bills with my online banking. The day I receive a bill in the mail, I will log into my bank account and schedule the payment. The bank then sends the payment by mail or electronically and has it paid on the date that I scheduled it to be paid. This service is even free with my bank. It saves time writing out checks and I also save on the postage.

Get your kids involved in your budgeting. Pay your children an allowance. Have them use the allowance for things they want to buy like candy, movies, toys, games, etc instead of just giving them money when they need it. Having your children pay for their own stuff with their own money will teach them at an early age how to spend wisely.

You can save hundreds of dollars per year shopping at the lower-priced food stores. You might even save thousands depending on how much your family spends and where you shop. Convenience stores will most often charge high prices then compared to a grocery store. Don't go to the store when you are hungry either, this will cause you to buy more goodies then you would normally buy. Be wise and compare price-per-ounce or other unit prices on shelf labels.

When setting your family budget, don't make your budget so tight that it's impossible to keep. Set goals, short term and long term and try your best to achieve them.

Article Source: http://www.mommy-articles.com

© 2006 Stefani Partin, a work at home mom of three from CA who owns a network of sites for moms, blogs, a newsletter and more. Stefani dedicates her time to helping moms find ways to make money at home. Visit Stefani's blog at www.StefaniPartin.com or visit her main site at www.MommyEnterprises.com.

Freelance writing newsletter

The freelance writing newsletter at About.com is amazing. It contains more than enough information about everything under the sun that is related to writing.

Here's the link to the signup page for the freelance writing newsletter:

http://freelancewrite.about.com/gi/pages/mmail.htm

You can also sign up for their other newsletters but you won't want to miss the freelance writing one.

Sources for freelance writing jobs

I just ran into this blog called "Writer's Resources."

http://www.writersresources.blogspot.com

It has listings of current job postings, so it looks like it would be worth checking out.

A blog that has been around for a while and is very well-known for its daily listings of current jobs is www.freelancewritinggigs.com.

I have been checking it out for the past few days and there is a great variety of job listings every day.

Also, Freelance Writing has a weekly newsletter called "Morning Coffee" that is full of current job listings. You can read it online at www.freelancewriting.com or subscribe to the Yahoo group to have it emailed to you.

For more writing jobs, you can go to www.craigslist.org and click on your city or state, and then go down to "writing jobs." I applied to a couple of jobs that I found there and got a response back from one right away. It was from a fellow freelance writer needing help from time to time. I didn't accept the position but was glad to know that there are legitimate writing jobs posted there. Some of the jobs posted at the previously mentioned sites are actually from Craigslist, so you can find those listings at the freelance writing job blogs I mentioned or just go directly to the site and search for positions in your area.

I've been perusing through online job postings for the past few days, but haven't devoted much time and effort to it. I have been much more successful in finding work in the local print market, which is another avenue freelance writers don't want to overlook!

Happy writing!

Freelance writing job listings!

Leave it to me to find the second part of a two-part list first and not even realize it's the second part of a two-part list!

The link in my last post that leads to an About.com list of 10 places to find freelance jobs is that very second part of a two-part list.

Here's the link to the first half of that list.

This list looks to be a good one for finding leads as well. I think I'll check into figuring out the local Craigslist.

Looking for ideas

Though I'm not sure how I'll fit much work in around a bunch of kids this summer, I'm looking for story ideas/work.

In my search this evening, I ran across some interesting places to find jobs.

I opened my freelance writing newsletter from about.com and it has a link to a great list of places to find freelance writing jobs. It looks like a really good list.

Here's the link to the list.


While not helpful with local story ideas this list looks like it would be worth taking some time to check. Since I began freelancing more than four years ago I haven't found one job online but there's always a first time. I actually did put a lot of time into looking online when I first started out but I had no success. All of my jobs came from local publications and have continued to do so. Since I'm looking for more ideas/work I'll take some time with this list, too.

One of the sources in the list, the weekly newsletter "Morning Coffee" from Freelance Writing contains dozens of pretty good job leads. I signed up for the Yahoo group freelancewritingjobs to receive email notification every Tuesday about the new edition, but it looks like the newsletter can be accessed directly on the website.

There are some other really good sources on the list as well.