The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you about my big review of all of my regular monthly expenses.   I think I established in a couple of my other videos that I am a bit of a budget nerd.  I like setting up a budget, tracking expenses, and maintaining the system.  But, as with any project, I’m always most excited about the setting up part.  The problem is that, as you live your life, you add new things to your monthly expenses and expand your budget to accommodate them, but if you are like me, you rarely take a good, hard look at everything to determine if you REALLY need to spend that money, or if you might be paying too much in each category.  In this video, I am advocating doing this process once a year.   Now, this can be a pretty big project depending on how trim your budget is or how good you are about researching things before you sign up for them.  For me, it had been a while since I had taken a hard look a

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share my rule of thumb for deciding whether I needed smartphone insurance and for how long.   I’ve been going though this process of examining each of our monthly payments and to determine whether I’m paying too much and whether they are still worth the price.  One of the areas I looked at was our smartphone insurance.   Smartphones are expensive, easy to break, and easy to lose.  The fact that we have them with us at every moment makes the risk of loss or damage even higher.  Someone recognized all of this and is making big money off of smartphone insurance.  We are good candidates for insurance.  Both of my kids have ADHD which makes loss or damage almost unavoidable and, although their phones are not top of the line, they are definitely not cheap.  Not all insurance is created equal — some only cover manufacturer defects, others cover your phone even if it is lost or stolen.  So, ho

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll give you a top-level overview of the Enneagram Personality Type system and I’ll tell you why I think it can help you be a better person.  I love personality tests. When I was in high school, I did a whole science project on whether the Myers Briggs Type indicator predicted employment plans — it sort of did.  I have forced many people to test their introversion levels with this test that i keep on my phone. And I like to categorize people into foxes and hedgehogs based on my family’s unique take on those economic metaphors.  I know these tests aren’t usually data driven.  In other words, there isn’t much evidence to support that people who are, for example, classified as ENFJs behave similarly in a given situation. The one personality description that IS based on statistical factor analysis is the Big 5 Personality Traits. Those are just 5 dimensional traits that are statistically pred

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today's video, I'll share some tips on how to organize your Gmail folders on a browser or iOS device. If you are like me, you spend a bunch of time during the day going through emails.  I try to get to Inbox Zero once a day, so this means that I'm making decisions for each email -- Delete, File, or Act on.  I have lots of videos about managing email if you are interested in this topic.  This video specifically covers those emails that you have decided to Save or File.  I've talked to a bunch of people who are fine to either delete emails or act on them, but really don't save many.  There are a bunch of reasons for this reluctance, but let's start by explaining how to  Add Folders This is pretty easy on both a browser or iOS device, but let's walk through it quickly.  On a browser, hit the More arrow below all of the existing folders, scroll down, and select Create New Label.