A Pen with Flair

Saving Time on a Dime One thing that was a struggle was being able to accomplish so many things at once. I realized I needed to break down big jobs into smaller jobs. This allowed me to meet my family needs for the week. So I have some pretty straight forward ways to save money and time to help you with this journey based on my personal experience. Set Up a Food Schedule You can go to your local grocer and pick up all of your food for the whole week and do a “food prep” for my lunch (and with my husband’s lunch and all three of my kids lunches) while I was working. Leftovers also served as my lunch. I did this every Sunday. Make it a habit. It does not need to be Sunday for you. Use a day that works for you! If you live with another adult that likes to cook, schedule those days in on your family calendar when they can prepare and cook a meal during the week. This saves you time AND money. Going out daily to spend a minimum of 7.00 a day for lunch for a full work week…that is 3...

Time to get Organized with Balancing School and Work This section will be broken up into several categories. For now, this is strictly about how to effectively use a calendar. I found that the more I looked back at my college materials, the more organized I was with setting my eyes on the goal ahead in small steps, which was to finish school. School Supplies I know it sounds a bit silly, but when you were a kid, did you ever get excited about going school shopping? Some kids did not (cause they had to go back to school!) but I LOVED it (I also loved school!) I loved the idea of getting a new backpack, lunchbox, new pencils, pens and erasers because I was the first one to use them! It was special because I was about to create something new. Even as a child, I was doing something I did not realize would be a critical point in my life now. I visualized my success. Well, this is also a mental step you can do. Get new supplies for yourself. New pens (even if it is fancy) and mayb...

Welcome back! We left off with you being accepted into the college of your dreams AND you have gone over major hurdles of researching the right school and you finally found it and you are registered. Okay, here is where many people will stop because…it’s the money.  Yep. We all have different financial situations that cause us to say yes or no to a school because truthfully, it is expensive. But here is the reality. You’ve got to make an investment in yourself. That includes paying for school. Everyone makes sacrifices and sometimes it is simply not easy. In fact, let's be honest, its scary!! Its scary because there is the fear of not being able to afford it. You can do it, if your willing to make the sacrifice. In this post, I will outline main webpage sources for you to become familiar with (along with helpful articles) that will help you survive the financial aid process! Student Loans.gov https://www.studentloans.gov/myDirectLoan/index.action This websi...

Finding the Right School for You I am not going to focus on traditional schools during this guide since this is not something I have experience with, other than attending a community college. I’ll also be referring to  colleges/universities as school during the rest of the posts. When researching any online school, I went to message boards from Facebook, Instagram, the school’s website…whatever gave me access… to see what previous and current students liked and disliked about the school (you would be surprised what you can learn from other students!). You can get an idea if this school would be a good fit for you based on comments left. Part of choosing a school is thinking about what you want to achieve in school and possibly after you graduate (Yes! Remember, this was part of the last post, “ Getting your Mind Right ”. Yep. You’ve just got to make a choice at this point.). Here are some questions you can ask yourself while researching: ·     ...