The last few weeks have been crazy. I took a personal day this week to try to get caught up on several things, plus I had a flash of inspiration on Monday that I’m hoping to translate into a viable side hustle… we’ll see how that goes, and I’ll blog about my progress along the way! In the mean time, here is what I’ve been reading this week, including the post that gave me my flash of inspiration.

Chris Guillebeau wrote a piece on the Six Steps to Establishing a New Income. That piece was great, but inside it was a link to an older post written by Chris on Convergence, which is where my flash of inspiration came from. I’m not sure how I missed the post on Convergence when it was first published, but this week it was just what I needed.

Over at You Have More Than You Think (which always reminds me of a Canadian banking commercial – all my fellow Canadians will know which one I mean!), Shawanda wrote a great post about reaching for the clouds. Why do so many of us fail? Because we get discouraged and never start to begin with. So similar to finding inspiration from Chris above, I’me taking the advice here and putting it to work!

I love Daisy’s blog, plus she was one of the very first people to leave me a comment over here, so I love her even more for that! This week she wrote a post about tricking yourself to save – funny, but I have a post in draft format about a very similar topic; she may have inspired me to finish it off and get it posted! I know I need to figure out new tricks to reduce spending and increase savings.

Savvy Scot had some suggestions to fund a last minute holiday, including selling items online and signing up to be a movie extra. I’ll admit, I’ve thought about signing up to be an extra but never done it. I really should, we film a lot of movies here – Rob Lowe was in town recently filming one, and generated quite a little controversy with one of his Tweets!

Erin at the Dog Ate My Wallet wrote a great post a couple of weeks ago about not letting money be the reason you don’t do things. I agree with this – within reason. Incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt might not be the best idea, but letting money stop you from a life changing experience is sad.

I’m linking to this one because I’m a little envious – I’m both looking for some part time income, and I’d love to work at a fun job like a bowling alley! (OK, Starbucks or Dairy Queen would be the best. but this would still be cool!). Hope Mr. BFS enjoys his new side gig!

Kathleen is working on wiping out her student loan debt, and is using small bits of found money to nickel and dime the balances. I’m going to have to adopt a similar strategy to kill our credit card debts too. I like it!

Jessica posted about a subject near to my heart this week, the Cost of Obesity. I’ve blogged about debt and weight loss before, and I have a whole other blog on healthy living, because I used to be obese, and I’m passionate now about staying healthy. Jessica looks at the medical costs of obesity, but there are a ton of other lifestyle costs too.

I’m so close to caught up – on Wednesday I had less than 100 posts in my Google reader! This is down from almost 900 at the worst point… hope you all have a lovely weekend.