About the author

Photo courtesy of: Artistic Soup (Angela Lamb)

My name is Rachael Kornblum and I am mom in St. Louis, MO. I have been married 22 years and have four children: a 17-year-old boy and 13-year-old triplet boys. I am 45 and an Orthodox Jew. I have a B.A. degree in journalism and mass communications, a B.S. degree in early childhood education, and a M.Ed. in elementary education. I currently teach pre-kindergarten and first grade, run a Hebrew school program, and do freelance curriculum writing. I have 13+ years of teaching experience. My interests include singing, writing, scrapbooking, crafts, and learning. My passions are using environmentally safe health and cleaning products, protecting our environment, and saving money.

I started this blog because I had been doing research on ways to save money. I seemed to always run into the same tips, many of which I had already tried. When our family grew from one child to four children so quickly we were faced with many more expenses. I felt like many of the tips out there were either common sense or applied more to people who needed to cut back for the first time. For example: don’t eat out as often, limit trips to the coffee shop, plan less dates with your spouse, buy store brands, use coupons, etc. These were no-brainers.

I wanted to find tips that really could help me save more money and would work for families who already knew how to cut back and scale down. Also, I found that so many recipes that said they were low-cost were not kosher. Sure you can get cheap non-kosher meat and cheese, but when you need kosher, both can be expensive. We eat vegetarian a lot, but cheese and soy can add up, too.

I had been keeping careful documentation of all the ways we were spending less and realized that I should put those records to a good use by sharing them with others.

I hope that you will find the tips I include to be helpful to you. They are things that we have done and saved a lot from and new ideas that I plan to use. The posts are not limited to one time or another. They can be helpful to you at any time, so check out my older posts! Please send me your feedback. I don’t want this to be another cookie-cutter budgeting or saving money site!