Do you ever question saving money? What if I got hit by a bus tomorrow and I haven’t traveled, haven’t started that new business, or denied myself simple pleasures? During the depths of recession I asked Can You Live on 50% of your Income? For many people, it isn’t a question of CAN you live on [...]

• 4 Comments

Don’t you love stories about children who can face life threatening hardship with bravery, optimism, and cheerfulness? When their young minds comprehend not only the physical challenges facing them, but also the financial challenges, and seek out and find solutions? Let me tell you about Malkolm. I first heard about Malklom a couple of days [...]

• 6 Comments

This is powerful message from a woman facing terminal cancer. She tells us to remember to live right now and stop wasting time.

• 11 Comments

Have you ever heard, “You have to have money to make money?” I suppose it’s true. But you don’t have to have much. We started christinesbooks.net in 2003 with $500.00, haven’t incurred a single dollar of debt since, and grew it organically. How did we do it? Persistence, patience, and a lot of frugality. In [...]

• 14 Comments

Most nights after putting my 7 year old to bed, we have lengthy discussions about life and reality. While he spends most of his day repeating silly nonsense from Sponge Bob, at night, when the lights go out, he changes. He’s a night person, his brain shifts into high gear in the darkness and silence… [...]

• 17 Comments

If your kids are like mine, and don’t care for team sports, MMA is an excellent alternative. My son does MMA training 3 nights a week at the American School of Martial Arts in Savage MN. When he chose to take Karate, we visited several different schools, and he decided on MMA. He liked the [...]

• 13 Comments

Perhaps you’re feeling stuck, or even trapped, in some area of your life. Maybe a job or a hobby which you once loved has turned into a chore – or a relationship has gone sour. The problem is, you can’t quite imagine giving it up. You’re still clinging to the early hopes you had, or [...]

• 10 Comments

In this post, I am going to detail my experiences finding the right place for our business at the right price. We found it, and last week, we signed the lease. We are remodeling and moving in over the next six weeks. We’ve been planning to move christinesbooks.net from our home to a commercial bricks [...]

• 11 Comments

Are you like me? When you decide to do a thing, you want to act immediately. You strive for constant progress toward your goal, then you run into obstacles… things that are out of your control… like other people who have other plans… but you need them to reach your goal. Then you try to [...]

• 16 Comments

Have you heard that 50% of small businesses fail in the first year and 95% fail in the first five years? Let me tell you why. Most small businesses fail becuase they can’t handle debt, get buried by rent, or get pushed into risky decisions by impatient investors. I’ve seen a lot of business fail [...]

• 9 Comments