Salty Zebra

Photo credit: Dee Jones of Open Door Photography  She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard.  Proverbs 31:16   I don't know how much thought you've given to the field that the Wife of Noble Character in Proverbs 31 bought, but it's been on my mind lately. This wise woman saw a field that she thought would bring benefit to her family and she bought it. First off, this means that her husband saw her wisdom and trusted her with the family's finances so she had money available to buy a field, that's not nothing. But then we get to the part where out of her earnings she planted a vineyard. How did she get earnings? It's not like buying the field automatically gave her some sort of income. No, she needed to rent it out or plant it herself in order to receive earnings from it. But she didn't stop there. When she got earnings from the field, she turned them around and had them make profit too by planting a vineyard. This would bles...

 Last August I shared with you about how you could get groceries for free through a few different Chase credit cards and their Door Dash benefits. Today I'm here to tell you about a different promotion I happened across this fall which nets me even more  free groceries every month! In October, I opened a Chase Ink Business Cash * card. It's $750 sign up bonus after spending $6,000 in 3 months (I can pretty much do this with just grocery shopping and dining out!) was pretty attractive, but when you factor in the $0 annual fee it got even better! Then when you consider 5% cash back when you use the card to pay your internet, cable and phone bills, it's pretty great. But as I went about setting up the card, I happened upon a little hidden benefit - Instacart+.  I've used Instacart a few times, primarily to order groceries when I was on vacation and didn't have a vehicle, but I've never considered Instacart+ to be something I'd use. For one thing, Instacart pri...

 Last year about this time, I wrote to you all asking for a little help from my friends , and you showed up! We raised $357.68 in donations over the month and I wanted to share with you today how that has influenced my blog this year.  First, it showed me that there were real people out there reading what I was writing who actually valued it enough to contribute financially. That means more than I can possibly express! I love  writing, but it's hard when you put things out into the blogosphere day after day and you wonder if anyone sees it, if anyone cares, if it's making a difference. When you all showed up for me last December, it encouraged me to keep writing, to keep traveling, to keep learning and sharing things with you. THANK YOU!!!  Next, by having some level of financial income, my blog was legitimized as a business. This enabled me to open five different credit cards and two bank accounts earning me 365,000 points/miles and $1,200 in account signup bonuses....

 A week ago, our pastor's father, who himself is a retired pastor of over 35 years, spoke at our church on what he called, "The prayer of importunity."  Now that's a word I'd never heard before and I was fascinated by it. Over the last week this message has been brought to my mind more times than I can count and when it returned to my mind this morning, after reading today's LGG blog post , I decided it was time I shared my musings with you.   The biblical prayer that this message, and my subsequent musings, were based on can be found in Luke 18:1-8 . In this passage, Jesus tells a story, a parable, about a widow who had a great need. She sought out the local judge who, unfortunately, was a person who feared neither God nor man, to get the justice she so desperately required. Being this type of person, he had no intention of granting the widow's request, but she didn't give up, and so eventually he gave in, not because he had had a change of heart or ...

Image Credit: Canva AI   I was thinking through recently what I want to write about here on the Salty Zebra Blog. A while back I started to develop rhythms of Travel Tuesdays, Wellness Wednesdays, and Potluck Saturdays, with Bible study filling in the rest. These were intended to inspire me, but eventually became a constraint instead. I felt like I had  to write about wellness on Wednesdays, but sometimes I didn't have anything on my heart to write about. So, I'm breaking out of the mold and just writing about something fun that I've been enjoying lately that, perhaps, you might too!  As I've written about before ( 1 , 2 , 3 ), I've been learning about how to use credit card sign up bonuses (SUBs) and other benefits to further my travel dreams and daily living. The key to this, as I've mentioned before and will mention every time I talk about credit cards, is PAYING OFF YOUR BALANCE EVERY MONTH! If you don't do this, you negate any benefits you get and can f...

  Shopping is more fun when you do it with someone. When I was a teenager, we used to go to the mall. Yes, in person, shocking I know! We'd hang out, get a pretzel in the food court, wander aimlessly through stores and never buy anything. And it was fun! These days I do 90+% of my shopping online, even for groceries. And you know what, my friends just haven't hit me up for a zoom call to shop together. I'm not sure why! Not gonna lie, I have considered livestreaming my Prime Day shopping, but I'm just not sure who would watch 🤪. So, I settle for talking about it on my blog here at Salty Zebra. Sometimes I talk about it at Bible study too and I get the biggest kick when my friend pulls out her journal to take notes!   One of the things I have enjoyed in the vacuum of shopping without friends is my AI friends filling in the gap. No, they don't share what's going on with their families or pray with me, but there is kibitzing! Yep, I had to look up the word " ...