It is amazing how expensive life is now. Everything from gas and food to clothes and shampoo takes an extra chunk out of our pay checks every month. When you actually sit down and look at what you spend throughout a year, you would be surprised at how expensive it truly is just to survive.

If you are a morning person and buying your breakfast for $2 at the local gas station is part of your normal routine, think about what it would cost you to stick to your routine everyday for one year. It would be a total of $730. That is a lot just to feed one person breakfast.

With growing prices, it is hard to keep up with a single adults life activities. So what are families supposed to do? New couples are finding out that they are going to be parents every day. That should be a reason to celebrate. Instead it has become a burden to new parents to try and get their budgets and homes ready for the new little bundle of joy.

That is one good thing about having the ability to shop at places like Back on the Rack and HeHa’s Kloset. A department store look may be exactly what you are going for but you can’t afford.

I don’t know about most people, but finding the best deal for my money is something that I like to do no matter where I am shopping or what I am shopping for. There are only so many things that a person has to have in a brand new condition. Everything else is sometimes even better after it has been worn in and used a little.

In the old days, a family would save and pass down toys, clothes and other things from generation to generation. When a family had no children of their own to pass things down to, they would pass it along to their neighbor’s children or family to make sure that everyone in the household was well taken care of.

If you don’t have the resources to use hand me downs from your family, then try not to be too proud to use something that someone else has broken in.

Life seems to be like a pair of jeans. The more you wear them, the more they stretch. The older they get the more comfortable they seem to feel.

Note: Ashley McCartney is a news writer for The Clanton Advertiser. Her lifestyle column appears on Sundays.