The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share the surprising results of our marinara sauce cookoff competition. We eat a lot of pasta with red sauce in our house.  It's one of my daughter's staples, so we go through a couple of jars of marinara sauce a week.  Our favorite jarred sauce BY FAR is this Giant brand sauce.  Granted, it's their high end white label brand called "Taste of Inspirations", but it is the BEST thing going and in my area, it only costs $4 a jar.  Now that IS more expensive than Prego or Ragu, but the other front runners in our taste test were Rao's and Victoria's and they are both like $8 a jar, which at the rate we eat marinara sauce, would destroy our grocery budget.  So, after some taste tests, we have come to believe that the Giant brand is probably produced by the same people who make Rao's.  It tastes pretty similar.  Are you wondering how it is different from Prego o

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I will give a summary and my takeaways from the seminal book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel Van der Kolk. The scope of this book is so huge and so impactful that I'm really going to struggle to do a single video on it.  Based on the enormous impact of trauma, particularly childhood trauma, on our society and our communities -- this book really needs to be required reading for everyone -- whether you have personal experience with it or not.  Bessel Van der Kolk, along with Judith Herman, are pioneers in the field of trauma research.  Both of them have specific experience with victims of childhood incest and have advocated for a new diagnostic category called complex trauma, which looks slightly different from, and can be harder to recover from, than standard Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD.  This book is chock full of information and it's presented in a way that is ac

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share how I track money that I've invested throughout the year in YNAB without making it look like an expense. I really like YNAB for budgeting and have been using it for a couple of years.  However, I don't entirely fit the profile of YNAB budgeter, since we generally have money left over at the end of most months and we aren't paying down debt.  Because of this and the fact that I come from a more traditional budgeting mindset, I've had to gerry-rig YNAB a bit to get it to produce the information that I'm looking for.  I have a video on how I get YNAB to give me essentially a rolling income statement on how much we've saved for the current year.  But one area that I struggled a bit is with investments.  We've set up automatic transfers to some of our mutual funds and college savings that happen monthly.  These come out of our checking account, but I don't

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share how I keep track of how much we've saved this year in YNAB. YNAB is a great budgeting platform -- I've been using it for about 2 years now.  It is particularly well suited to a particular kind of budgeter -- someone who is trying to escape living paycheck to paycheck and is paying down debt.  I am not this kind of budgeter, but I really appreciate many of the features of YNAB.  Because I don't fit the profile well and because I have a more traditional budgeting mindset, I've developed some hacks to get YNAB to give me the information that I am interested in.  One piece of information I like to know is how much we have saved this year. We're not paying down debt and we live within our means, so that we generally have money left over at the end of the month.  I do a report at the end of each year showing how much we have saved, but I like to have a ongoing sense of

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share the chores that I do in YNAB at the end of every month. I've been using YNAB for about 2 years now.  Since I come from a more traditional budgeting mindset, I set up my YNAB a little differently than most, which I have a video on, if you are interested.  One of the peculiarities of my setup is that I have all of our monthly expenses under one category group.  I do this because I like knowing how much we regularly spend each month and category groups give you totals up in the heading for your Budgeted, Activity, and Available.  However, I also want to separate out the budget categories that go to zero at the end of each month and those that accumulate funds from month to month.  So -- I separate them with this fake budget name and put all of my Sinking Funds underneathe this "heading".    I tell you this only because it effects one of the chores that I do at the end of