The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel.  This is the final video of a three part series on Budgeting Basics.  The first one was on the what, why, and how of budgeting, the second was an overview of all of the different budgeting systems, and this one is a quick video on how to get started. There are a ton of budgeting videos on YouTube -- many of them are really inspiring.  Folks who pulled themselves out of really tough financial situations by making a budget and sticking with it.  In the end, budgeting is really just a way to create behavior change.  Financial behavior change.  And because of this, following a budget has the same steps of all successful behavior change systems: Determine your current behavior Set a plan for new behavior Track your actual behavior Make adjustments if needed These are the same steps used for keeping new years resolutions, staying on a diet, quitting bad habits, and formin...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll talk about a bunch of different kinds of budgeting systems.  This is the second in a three part series. The first video in this series covers the basics of budgeting — what is it, why would you do, it and how does it work.  For many people, budgeting is about as appealing as dieting.  Which is to say — not very.  In fact — they ARE very similar processes — in both you are required to follow a set of rules that change your behavior in order to achieve a goal — either to lose weight in the case of dieting or to save money, in the case of budgeting.  As you know, there are a BILLION different diets out there - Atkins, South Beach, Weight Watchers, Keto, etc.  Believe it or not — there are practically as many ways to budget as well.  In the same way that not all diets work for everyone — not all budgeting systems work for everyone either.  In this ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll go through the basics of budgeting -- what is a budget, why do you need one, and how does it work?  This is the first of a three part series on budgeting. I have been keeping a budget since I was in my early 20s.  I grew up in a frugal family and I like numbers, so it was a natural fit for me.  A couple of years ago, I started volunteering as a financial mentor.  What I realized is that not everyone has a good sense of what a budget is, why it is important, and how it works.  This video is my attempt to break it all down. What is a budget? People absolutely hate the notion of a budget -- it make them feel very constrained.  But a budget is really just a plan.  It is a plan detailing how you want to use your income.  It can certainly feel constraining, but it is really just an agreement that you are making with your future self about your finan...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share how I organize my refrigerator by function -- so that I can find things easily and food doesn’t go bad. My refrigerator is always completely stuffed.  This is apparently hereditary -- there is never any space in my mom's refrigerator either -- even when she was single!  Now granted, some of her stuff expired, like 6 years ago -- my husband would never let that happen in our fridge.  But here is the biggest problem with having a completely stuffed refrigerator -- I can't find things and I don’t remember what is in there.  And that means that food goes bad.  So, I needed a better system. I went looking for ideas on how to organize my fridge.  I found plenty, but all of the organization systems seemed to be geared towards preventing food from going bad -- certain things shouldn’t be stored in the door, put eggs up high, meat down low, etc.  I rea...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you my quick shortcut in adding a contact to Google Contacts using my iPhone.  I use Google Contacts as my main contacts database.  It is not very glitzy.  Google doesn’t spend much time updating it or making it pretty, but it  meets all of my criteria: It has all of the fields I need. I can access if from any internet connected device. It obviously works well with the Google products that I use like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Maps. And since I have it set as my default contact database in my iPhone and iPad, it integrates seamlessly with my iOS apps like Mail. I love what you can do with databases, but I HATE having to put data in them.  My memory is terrible, but it is particularly bad with remembering numbers.  So, I find myself flipping back and forth between screens multiple times to populate each piece of the address, city/st...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today’s video, I’ll share a bunch of the ways that I use Google Photos.  I used to have this relatively elaborate process of organizing my photos every three months which I documented in a FOUR part video series.  Well, a couple of months ago, my computer gave up the ghost and I lost ALL of the data on it. I wasn’t too heartbroken since all of my photos were already backed up on Google Photos, but it DID make me rethink why I needed them backed up on my computer at all.  So, now all of my photos just live up in the cloud — period. This has massively streamlined my process. I just did a video on using Google Photos to free up space on your iPhone, but in this video, I thought I’d share my much quicker monthly process and all the ways that I currently use Google Photos.  Monthly Clean up So, at the beginning of every month, I make sure all of my photos are backed up to Google Photos, i...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today's video, I'll show you how to use Google Photos to offload your photos from your iPhone so that you can free up space and still have access to all of your photos in the cloud.  And don't worry -- you won't lose your photos! Do you ever get an error message on your iPhone that you are running out of storage space?  You might get a message that looks like this?  And you know that you have a bunch of photos stored on your phone that you would be happy to offload somewhere else, but you are not quite sure how to do this?  You also might have a vague recollection that you've been warned that you don't have enough iCloud space either and your phone really wants you to upgrade to larger storage? Okay -- in this video, I'm going to make the case that you should offload your photos to Google Photos, I'll tell you how the Google Photos app works vis a vis your Camera Roll, and I...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll urge you to take just 10 minutes a day for a regular mindfulness practice. Meditation and mindfulness used to be thought of as a a little "woo woo" since they were well outside of mainstream practices.  In recent years of course, studies have found overwhelming evidence that mindfulness (generally) and meditation (specifically) can be beneficial to almost every part of our lives from our mental health, to our physical health, to our relationships.    If you are interested in more information about the benefits of meditation, I would recommend Dan Harris's book "10% Happier."  Dan Harris is an news anchor with ABC and had a well documented panic attack on national television, which led to his own enlightenment.  His book is half memoir and half investigative journalism into the benefits of meditation.  The title refers to his view that regular medi...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll give you my one big recommendation after being a mom for 16 years -- take notes! If there is a running theme throughout my YouTube channel, it's that I have a world-class terrible memory and most of my systems are built to help me remember things or prevent my life from dissolving into entropic chaos.  Because I know this about myself, I take notes.  I take notes about processes I've figured out, events I've hosted, and articles I've read.  Chances are, I'm not going to remember these things later, so I am constantly reaching back to my notes to prevent myself from making the same mistakes over again or to remember things that might be important.  This note taking process falls into the latter category -- remembering things that might be important. As moms, we are all really good at taking notes about our first born babies.  We all were gifted a baby boo...