Ways To Add Elegance and Luxury to Your Home

Instead of remodeling and rebuilding an entire house, there are plenty of ways you can add luxury to your current home. Small details, such as curtains and mirrors, are one of the keys to creating an elegant home. If you want to surround yourself with opulence, then here are the ways to add elegance and luxury to your home.

Add Some Curtains

Curtains add style to any window—the key is to purchase long drapes. Short curtains are not very attractive and can look cheap. To prevent this, use long, flowy curtains that match the rest of the surrounding décor.

Hang Up the Mirrors and Artwork

Mirrors, especially large antique mirrors, are great items to add to a house. They provide a sense of grandeur to the home and can be placed in any bedroom, hallway, living room, bathroom, and more. Also, mirrors make any room look more spacious, so they are great for helping small areas appear larger. Another wonderful addition to your home is artwork. Paintings, fountains, sculptures, drawings, and more are all fantastic and beautiful additions to your home. Instead of hanging many small pieces of art on the wall, try to add only one large statement piece. This creates a simple elegance that is hard to achieve with too many decorations.

Use Neutral Tones

Another one of the ways to add elegance and luxury to your home is to decorate and paint with neutral colors. Bright colors are not the best choices for a luxurious home. Since human moods respond to color, neutral tones are the best options for a relaxing environment. You can use shades like white, grey, cream, and more with small pops of color as accents.

Create Open Spaces

Of course, it is important to furnish your home with the pieces of furniture every home should have, such as couches, tables, desks, and others. However, you want to avoid crowding your living rooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms as much as possible. A cluttered room is not attractive or elegant, so you want to avoid filling your rooms with excess furniture and decorations.

Guest Post - Practical Ways to Organize Your Finances

Dealing with finances may sound like a daunting task, but like anything else, once you get organized, it’s a lot less intimidating. The question is, where do you get started?

Here are some tips to organize your finances and help you feel more comfortable with handling them.

Gather your statements

The first step to creating a budget is to pull together all your financial statements, whether you receive them in hard copy or digital form.

Your list should include:

• Utility bills — Electricity, water, gas, garbage collection, sewage

• Bank statements — Where you’ll find things like grocery receipts and gasoline purchases, along with other retail purchases

• W-2 forms and pay stubs

• Credit card and loan statements

• 1099 forms detailing miscellaneous revenue

It’s a good idea to have both a neatly organized filing cabinet with all your files and duplicates stored digitally on an external hard drive or in the cloud, so they’re protected. If you store your financial data online, be sure to use a secure password to guard against identity theft.

Track your income and expenses

Once you’ve got copies of all your statements, divide them into two categories: income and expenses. 

Add up all your regular income to get a total for the year. Don’t use windfalls like bonuses and tax refunds as a pretext to increase your monthly expenses. Since they’re one-time payments, put them toward one-time expenses or, better yet, toward savings or investments. 

Once you’ve added up your income, make a list of your expenses. If your expenses are more than your income, see what you can cut. Look to discretionary items like streaming services, subscriptions, clothing, evenings out (sporting events, movies, concerts), books, games, and electronics. If you add to your income by getting a raise or side income, you can add some of those items to your budget again.

Once you’ve got your budget in place, You’ll want to include:

• Monthly expenses

  • Necessities like utilities, rent/mortgage, car payment, internet access, and insurance payments

  • Any extras you pay for regularly, such as cable TV, streaming services, subscriptions, and so forth

• Regular but less frequent payments — Include things like property taxes (if you pay them), back-to-school items, regular medical and dental checkups, vehicle maintenance, estimated taxes, birthday presents, and holiday gifts. These would include any payments you make quarterly, semiannually, or annually.

• One-time or occasional expenses — Entertainment like movies, eating out, going to concerts, or weekend trips

• Things to save up for — Vacations, retirement, children’s college expenses, investments

You can use an old-fashioned spreadsheet to organize your finances, or you can find a wealth of digital resources you can download. PC Mag has compiled a list of the best digital options.

Create a regular budget

Once you’ve got everything mapped out, you’re ready to set up a regular budget. You can do this with a spreadsheet program or with the help of a budgeting app. Several are available, depending on your specific situation and needs. 

Among other options, you can choose budget apps that are:

• Free to use

• Designed to help you invest and build wealth

• Meant to guard against overspending

• Intended for couples working together

• Built for small businesses

• Intended to encourage savings

If you prefer to do your budgeting with pen and ink, you can also print out PDF templates. Keep past months’ budgets, your current month’s budget, and blanks for future months in a handy three-ring binder for easy access. 

If you work on commission, and your income varies from month to month or season to season, use times when you’re doing well to set aside a cushion for the lean times and work to balance things out.

Set up automatic payments

In addition to budget apps. look for other electronic methods to simplify the budgeting process. Set up automatic bill pay with your bank for any monthly expenses that cost roughly the same amount from month to month.

Sign up for withdrawal or payment alerts to confirm any debits to your account. This can help you monitor any potential fraud or identity theft before it gets out of hand. If you see any withdrawals or charges you don’t recognize, you can dispute them with your bank right away. 

Low-balance alerts, meanwhile, can let you know if your account is in danger of being overdrawn. But don’t rely on them as a substitute for tracking your expenses. 

Check your account balance daily, and look over your monthly balance report for any trends that show you’re overspending (and on what), or putting more money away than you thought. If these trends persist for more than a month, you can adjust your budget to reflect them.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the old-fashioned method of keeping track of checks with duplicates, receipts, and a ledger. Monthly statements can come to you via mail or electronically too.

Stay on top of your credit

Any credit card purchases should be part of your regular budget, not a way to spend “outside the lines.” That doesn’t mean you should shy away from using credit, however. 

Building good credit can give you a way to qualify for a mortgage, car loan, or home-repair loan down the line, and you can incorporate that into your financial plan then. In the meantime, check your credit report (you can do so for free once a year) and see where you stand.

If your credit is damaged or you need to start from scratch, one option is a secured credit card, which will give you access to a line of credit that’s tied to an initial deposit of a few hundred dollars. You build your credit as you use the card and make on-time, regular monthly payments.

If you use credit, try paying off all your balances at the end of each month to avoid interest charges.

Getting your finances organized isn’t rocket science, but it does require a comprehensive approach that incorporates attention to detail. Once you understand how to balance these approaches, you’ll be one step closer to financial stability and in a position to improve your standing.
By Ann Lloyd, Student Savings Guide

Top Reasons Why You Should Hire A Skip When Moving House

Moving is well-known for being a highly stressful and time-consuming experience. It's also a period when people become aware of how much clutter they have in their homes. Unwanted stuff is sure to gather after you have lived in one place for numerous years — who knows what you'll find when you eventually clean out the entirety of your home.

So, once you start throwing stuff away, you'll quickly realize that the mountains of stuff your home generates won't all fit in the outside bin.

At this point you might be thinking to yourself, "should I hire a skip?". Here are a few reasons why "yes" is the correct answer.

But what exactly are skip bins?

Skip bins, also known as Skips in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia, or Dumpsters in the United States and Canada, are metallic open containers often encountered on building and renovation projects.

They are filled with construction waste, trash and rubbish, and then collected at a certain time and/or date. The skip will be picked once it is full and replaced with an empty one if needed. The filled container is then transported to a disposal facility, where it is separated into recyclable items and properly disposed of materials.

As a result, Skip Bins are essential while working on a construction, cleanup, or remodelling project since they may save time and labor while ensuring appropriate garbage disposal.

Here are a few more reasons why a professional waste removal service might come in handy when moving home:

It Makes It Easier for You To Move

Moving is clearly not a pleasurable experience. You have to remove your belongings from your previous location, transport them to the new site, and then unpack them. That, however, is the simple part of the procedure. Cleaning up the old place is arguably the most challenging task.

You'll need to clear up any rubbish that was under your furniture or pick up discarded appliances that you stashed away in a cupboard. This means that you'll probably gather up a lot of things that belong in the garbage.

By hiring a skip bin or dumpster, you will save a lot of time and effort. Cleaning out your previous place usually takes a long time. The conventional method requires you to transport garbage to the landfill on your own, which is about as awful as cleaning.

Filling many individual garbage bags and throwing them away in your personal garbage can, is the traditional method of cleaning up. This, unfortunately, is a time-consuming and inefficient procedure. Consider how much time you'd save if you just toss your trash in the trash can instead of filling up individual bags!

When you order a skip, professionals will first come to your location and place the skip bin at your desired location and will return to remove the trash you've accumulated. You want to keep your property as clean as possible as you work rather than having a massive mess at the end. Skip bin rental takes care of these issues before they become major headaches.

Moving is difficult enough on its own. It takes a lot of effort to pack up your things from your previous home and unpack them in your new one. By hiring a skip bin, you can make the entire procedure easier for yourself.

It Actually Saves You Money

Moving makes us realise how much useless trash we've amassed over the years. The idea of packing everything up and relocating it somewhere else seems completely futile. If done right, moving is an excellent opportunity to get rid of all the items you don't need.

There's no denying that moving costs a lot of money. The advance payments involved with a move are considerable, whether it's security deposits for rentals or closing costs on a mortgage. There are also the additional fees of transferring your furniture and possessions.

In the end, skip bin rental will save money because you don't have to pay for individual bags or dispose of them.

The natural impulse when people rent a skip bin is to toss away more unwanted items. When you're in the mood to relocate, you can elect to toss something in the trash rather than relocate it. This not only saves you money on relocating goods you don't want, but it also helps you simplify your belongings.

You can save money on your move by getting rid of many of the possessions you no longer need. You'll make fewer trips or be able to rent a smaller vehicle if you transfer your items yourself.

When you hire movers, their fees are calculated based on the number of objects you need to be moved. It's unsurprising that if you bring less stuff, they'll charge you less. For a variety of reasons, using a move to minimize your stuff is a wise idea.

Environmentally Friendly

These days, everyone strives to be more eco-friendly. The typical approach of discarding stuff whether you put them in garbage bags or take them to the trash, isn't the right way to dispose of unwanted or unusable objects.

With skip hire, you can rest assured that they will know how to dispose of trash properly. This way you won't be worried about what can and can't be thrown out. The containers can be used to place household things, rubbish, furniture, and even construction trash. 

Experts in skip rental know what can and can’t be thrown away and what can be recycled. Simply having a specialist on your side to take care of these details gives you that little bit of extra peace of mind.

Consider relocation as an opportunity for a new beginning and a fresh start. You can, therefore, use this time to assess everything you own. You may discover that many of your possessions are no longer useful. Using skip bins to dispose of them throughout the move might make your new home more comfortable and cleaner.

Checklist For Skip Hire

There are a few other things to think about before you hire your skip:

• It's critical to plan ahead. Although it's tough to predict how much garbage your home will generate, try to make an educated guess and estimate the size of skip you'll need; it's usually best to overestimate and obtain a bigger skip, so you don't have to get another one if it gets too full.

• Choose whether the skip will be placed on your property or a public road. If you choose the latter option, you'll need a permit, which your skip rental company will file for on your behalf.

• Organize yourself. Permit-required skips can only be stationed for a set amount of time, so plan ahead of time how long you'll need them. 

How to Get Your Garden Summer-Ready

Are you ready for your garden to look spectacular this summer? We all dream of having a beautiful garden to entertain in. After colder months, though, your garden probably needs a little love in order to look summer-ready.

To have a lush, awe-inspiring garden during the warm summer months, you’ll need to do a little preparation first. The good news is that it doesn't all have to be done at once.

By planning out what you’ll need to do to get your garden ready, you can break up the tasks and do your gardening whenever you have some spare time.

Read on to learn what you need to do to prepare your garden for summer.

Make Sure Your Tools Are in Good Condition

Most of us don’t use our gardening tools in the colder months. Before you set out to get your garden ready for summer, check that you have all the tools you need and that they’re in working condition.

Make sure any electric tools are working properly and their cables look okay. Clean off and sharpen blades of the tools that need it, too.

Get rid of anything damaged. If it can’t be fixed easily, it’s better to replace old tools than to try to use them if they could pose safety risks. Make a list of anything you need to shop for before you start cleaning up your garden.

Clean Up Your Garden Beds

A great first step is doing a general clean-up of your garden beds. Take some time to pull out any weeds as soon as you see them popping up. It’s always easier to weed before roots grow too long and sturdy. You’ll also want to try to catch them before they start to spread.

Weeds can compete with your other plants for nutrients from your soil. Pulling weeds out as early as possible will let the rest of your plants grow better.

As part of your seasonal clean-up, prune any shrubs that need some neatening up, too. Check if anything was damaged during the winter, and remove dead foliage from last year to make room for new growth this summer. Check any trees in your garden for damage, too.

The last step of garden clean-up is to rake up any dead leaves from your garden beds and edge them, if you’d like to.

Once your garden is cleaned up, you can take a step back and see where you have room to plant new things this season.

Prepare Your Garden for New Growth

Once your gardens are cleaned up, you can get to work on enriching your soil for the best possible growth this summer. Whether you’re growing a vegetable or flower garden, it all starts with great soil.

You can buy soil to refresh your gardens, or you might even want to create your own soil. Creating your own soil will give you a great base for any new raised garden beds you’d like to start, and it’s perfect for seasonal potted plants.

The same goes for fertilizer. While a store-bought option may seem easier, you can also inexpensively make your own fertilizer. Fertilizing your garden will give your plants the extra nutrients they need to really take off. In no time you’ll be surrounded by beautiful flowers or be harvesting tons of fruits and veggies.

If you have pets, you should double-check that any of the products you use in your gardens are pet-friendly, too.

Start Planting

Most people would agree that the best part of preparing a garden for summer is choosing new plants. With so many options, though, how can you decide what to get?

When you look at your garden, do you see a lot of colors? If not, you may want to look for flowers that will add depth and pops of color.

Think about when each plant will bloom throughout the summer months. Getting flowers that bloom at different times will keep your garden colorful all summer long.

You may also want to attract hummingbirds, butterflies, and bumblebees to your garden. Do some research on what plants will attract these creatures. You’ll have to consider how much sun or shade your garden gets, too. Your plants won’t be able to thrive and bring in pretty hummingbirds and butterflies if they aren’t given the right amount of sunlight.

Succulents are a popular choice for sprucing up a summer garden, too. Succulents can be very easy to care for because they don’t need too much upkeep. As long as they’re getting plenty of sun, they’ll add a fun touch to any outdoor garden space.

Growing the Perfect Summer Garden

Having a cleaned-up, fertilized, and well-thought-out garden will ensure you have a great outdoor space to entertain. All that’s left to do is hose off the garden furniture!

Now you can enjoy relaxing with a good book or spending time with family and friends in your colorful, gorgeous summer garden.