Self-reliance and Homesteading has an article up about ways to reduce your monthly expenses:

The key is to keeping your monthly spending down is to focus on the variable cost items in your budget. If you can’t cut out things like rent or your mortgage, or your cell phone bill if you have to have one, then you need to look for other ways to spend less each month.

At the time of this writing, things are tough. Money is tight, so the budget needs to follow suit. Take a look at your own monthly budget and try to find ways to slim down your variable costs. Here are some areas you can start looking to cut down:

Carolyn Grimsley’s little girls just would not stop doing laundry.

“We’re loving it,” Grimsley said as 7-year-old Katherine and 4-year-old Camille got to work. Dunk the scarves. Scrub them on a washboard. Pin them to the clothesline. Chores that somehow get fascinating when they’re history instead of work.

This is above is a quote from an article in the Longmont Times-Call about the nearby Agricultural Heritage Center. I’m sure kids from the age when that was the normal means of washing clothes would be flabbergasted to hear kids today calling such work “fun”.

And yet, I think kids can learn to find work fun. Last weekend I continued my project of tearing down my deck. My kids are regularly on the prowl for small jobs they can do to earn some money, so I offered my boys a dollar to pick up all the screws and nails laying around. That didn’t last them very long, but later on my middle child came back outside to help. He found he could clear away the smaller scraps of wood I was making. Soon he was telling me how fun it was. I think he caught a bit of the satisfaction that comes from hard work on a project that shows tangible progress.

I have to admit as a kid there were many projects that I began with less than a good attitude because my parents told me to. But before the work was done I often found myself enjoying it at least a little. Work is even more fun if it’s someone else’s work. I remember gladly pitching in to help my friends with their chores, even while avoiding my own.

It’s interesting how work is increasingly undervalued these days, and yet companies like Home Depot make their fortunes off the satisfaction that comes from doing work yourself. As my mother says, “A change is as good as a holiday.” Doing different work from what we normally do is often the only difference we need.