This coming Wednesday is my birthday and in honor of my day of birth, I wanted to give away a little present to my readers!

This giveaway is for a $50 gift card to NOVICA: an online retailer that has teamed up with National Geographic to provide unique gifts and products from all corners of the world.  NOVICA provides an outlet for talented artists and artisans from all over the world to showcase their products.

“We want to give artists and artisans around the world a global platform to express their true artistic talents and to spur their creativity. And, we want to provide you with access to unique, hard-to-find items at great values that only the Internet infrastructure can allow.”

I’ve already been perusing the website and everything looks beautiful!  Check out the women’s accessories front page:

And I absolutely love these pieces of jewelry:

 

 

 

 

 

 

One lucky winner will win a $50 gift card to purchase anything they like from the NOVICA website!

Here’s How To Enter:

+1 Leave a comment on this post.  Any comment will work.

+1 Follow @AmberBalanced on twitter and tweet this message (only one tweet allowed and your message MUST include the hashtag to be eligible): “I want to win a $50 gift card from @AmberBalanced  See http://tinyurl.com/3wwrq29 to enter! #bbNOVICA” 

+1 sign up for Blonde & Balanced’s RSS feed or email updates (linked) and let me know in the comments. If you are already a subscriber, just let me know in the comments and you will be counted.

+3 Like Blonde & Balanced on Facebook.  Click here or click the like button in the box in the right sidebar. —->

+5 blog about this giveaway, include these two links in your post: http://www.blondeandbalanced.com/novica-giveaway/ and http://novica.com/

**If you’ve done any of the above, please leave a comment and let me know how you have entered so I can count your entries.

I will draw the winner on Friday, September 2nd. You will have until 11/30/11 to redeem your gift card. Good luck!

Thank you for entering and thanks to NOVICA.com for making the giveaway possible!

———————————-

Psssst.  Sick of Passion Parties and Arbonne Parties?  Consider becoming a NOVICA Live home party hostess!  Check out the details HERE.

Also, check out Life And My Finances who is giving away an iPad 2 in honor of his blog-iversary!  I really really wanna win. 

Happy Friday morning!  I wanted to let everyone know that I have a guest post up at Give Me Back My Five Bucks: my confessions about combining finances with my husband.

Please head over and check it out and let me know what you think!

Link

——-

Also…don’t forget to follow MoneyUnder30.com, too, since I’m writing, tweeting and facebooking over there as well!  We have some good posts in store for you in the coming weeks…

This spring, I blogged about how I hated cooking.  I talked about how I hated spending my evenings in the kitchen instead of doing things I wanted to do.

But, over the last several months, I’ve started to grow fonder of cooking (especially since we returned from our honeymoon).  I’m not sure what happened – maybe that post forced me to look for the good in cooking.  And there is definitely plenty of good in cooking – it’s healthier and it’s cheaper and, as I’m finding, it can be fun and enjoyable if you let it.

Here are some things I’ve been doing to make cooking more enjoyable:

1. Get more night-time tasks done during the day.

For me, this is blog and freelance work (even though I’m writing this blog post in the evening).  Today, I finished about 90% of a freelance post over lunch, so I don’t have to worry as much about that tonight.  Other things include running errands or making calls – both of which I do over lunch quite a bit.

2. Have at least one glass of wine while cooking.

This makes cooking much more enjoyable. That’s my crappy apartment oven (I can’t wait to have a nice oven in our new house) and one of our stemless wine glasses that we received as a wedding present (LOVE!).  And that stemless wine glass is filled with Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s.  Thank you for coming to KC, Trader Joe’s.

3. Make things that you want to make.

I don’t want to make linguini in clam sauce or whatever The Pioneer Woman made for Marlboro Man for their first at-home dinner (totally reading that book right now).  I want to make simple, healthy dishes.  So, I do.  Making things you want to make does make cooking much more enjoyable.

 chicken parmesan, twice-baked goat cheese sweet potatoes, & roasted Brussels sprouts (I’m obsessed with these)

4. Have your husband clean after you cook (or clean as you go).

My husband is gracious enough to clean up if I cook.  It’s a good system, but I still try to clean as much as I can as I go.  It’s a huge help after dinner and really doesn’t take much time.  It makes post-feasting clean-up less dreadful.

5. Appreciate the physical movement – especially if you’re a desk-dweller.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because sitting at a desk all day kinda freaks me out.  The habits I listed in this link do help if you sit at your desk all day, but being active after work is important, too.  And since I’ve been working out in the morning, my after work activity is mostly cooking and cleaning up.

6. Make it a group affair.

Sometimes, instead of splitting duties between cooking (me) and cleaning (him), we’ll do everything together.  It’s totally like a date and so cute and romantic.   Plus, G is a good cook – but he didn’t get that way by just cleaning the dishes.  He became a good cook by participating in the action.

7. Turn on music.

Make it a party!  This probably makes cooking most enjoyable for me (well, music and wine, anyway).  I love, love, love music so I just set up my iPod on my dock and I’m all set.  It really doesn’t make it feel like a Friday night dance party.  Well, a Friday night dance party with grilled chicken and asparagus….

8. Act like you like it.

Maybe I just finished reading The Happiness Project, but the author is so right on when she says to “act the way you want to feel”.  If you dread cooking and complain to yourself every minute of chopping, cleaning, and sautéing, then you WILL hate cooking.  Act like you like cooking and be careful to take note of the times that you’re actually enjoying yourself and, before you know it, you might actually start to enjoy cooking. 

Do you like to cook?  What are you best tips to enjoy cooking?

This is a guest post by Jack Anderton.

Purchasing your first home is an incredibly important financial decision. It is an exciting time because you are picking the place that you will live for at least the next few years. However, before making a home purchase you want to be sure that you do not overextend yourself financially. Lots of people overspend on their home and find themselves unable to keep up with the payments. You can keep yourself out of this predicament by using these two useful ratios to keep you from breaking your budget.

Debt to income ratio

One of the mistakes that people made over the past decade was buying more home than they could afford. This is at the core of causes that led to the subprime crisis in United States. The incomes that they earned were not enough to comfortably make the payments on their loan. You can avoid making this mistake by evaluating the debt to income ratio. The debt to income ratio measures the amount of money that you earn on a monthly basis and divides it by the amount of money that you owe monthly.

If your mortgage payment is $2,500 a month and your monthly income is $5,000 then your debt to income ratio would be 50%.

A 50% debt to income ratio is too high. A borrower would have trouble trying to make the monthly mortgage payments or trying to refinance the loan. As an approximate rule of thumb, a single person should have a debt to income ratio no greater than 30%. A married couple should have a debt to income ratio below 35%.

Loan to value ratio

Another useful metric to use when doing home loan comparison is the loan to value ratio, also known as LVR. The loan to value ratio will keep you from paying too much for your home. Loan to value measures the risk of a loan by looking at the mortgage amount of a property and divides it by the appraised value of the home.

If you own a home and your mortgaged owed is $100,000 and the appraised value of the home is $200,000 then your loan to value ratio would be 50%.

A 50% loan to value ratio is outstanding. A loan to value ratio that is at 75% or below makes you a good risk for a lender to give a home loan to. This ratio is very useful to borrowers that are seeking to refinance a home. In certain countries such as Australia, you will be required to take on Lenders’ Mortgage Insurance if your LVR is higher than 80% because you are deemed to carry greater risk than a borrower who has an LVR of lower than 80%. This is an insurance that protects the lenders in the event of borrower default.

Calculating these two ratios when loan shopping will keep you from buying a home that is too expensive for your bank account.

This is a guest post by Jack Anderton.