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People tend to like January. We make resolutions and follow them with great passion. We get excited about the Super Bowl and pack our kids off to school after a long break at home, and we pack up the holiday decorations for another year. We’re happy and motivated to accomplish new things.

And then the credit card bill arrives. That’s when you start wondering what Aunt Mary did to deserve that $100 sweater you gave her for Christmas, and you try to remember who on earth you spent three hundred bucks on at the Apple store. Your palms sweat, and you can literally feel your belt tightening around your waist.

It’s tough to save money after the holidays, but xtra xtra is always here to help. With more and more sites turning to paid accounts to view news and milestones, it’s tough to stay connected, but xtra xtra’s local milestones are always free and always easy to access.

Here are some other tips and pointers for the post-holiday blues (or, in some cases, red)…

1. Visit some savings-savvy bloggers: Wicked Cool Deals and Deal Seeking Mom are both great destinations for deals, online coupons, and best-kept savings secrets. Use these sites and add them to your RSS feed to stay on top of what you can get for only a few bucks.
2. Print online coupons: Take a look at coupons.com and couponmom.com for deals you can print and put to use.
3. Learn good habits: Jodi Grundig, one of xtra xtra’s favorite mom-bloggers, has started a family finance blog called The Full Piggy for good habits and skills. Take a look at her tips and share them with your family—especially if you have kids. There’s no better way to save than to start early and make it a habit!
4. Get Online: As noted above, there are lots of great tips for saving money online, and you can also use xtra xtra next time you have something exciting to say but don’t want to pay for fancy stationary. Use our site to post and share news about a new baby, a big sports event, a family reunion, or anything else worthy of recognition.

Good luck with your savings. Feel free to leave a comment with some other great tips, sites, or suggestions for saving money, too!

Till next time,

CH

Mark Cuban is the owner of a decent basketball team and an awesome cable company, and he has an interesting perspective on business. “Business,” Cuban says, “is always business. It’s always personal. All good businesses are personal. The best businesses are very personal.”

We really like that idea here at xtra xtra because our business is extremely personal. Users come to xtra xtra to read, create, and share milestones that are focused on the most intimate moments life can offer. Similar to an online version of your hometown newspaper, you can find posts about births, weddings, deaths, personal achievements, anniversaries, and more on our site. These categories allow people to honor something special and singular that’s worth remembering.

Paul Rooney started xtra xtra with the hope of making it easier than ever to find and share local news and milestones. Raised in the tight-knit community of South Boston, Paul was troubled by hard was to keep in touch with the neighborhood when he moved to Milton, a suburb of Boston. We live in a world filled with “social” media, but still it’s hard to see what’s happening with past acquaintances and families of childhood friends and classmates. xtra xtra links you to your favorite towns and schools—both past and present—and provides stories you care about from familiar friends and faces. We hope to add more and more user-generated content to our site, so we invite you to visit and share a milestone of your own!

One of our primary goals was to keep things simple. The site caters to both the people who are happy with email and just want the latest milestones and the tech-savvy users, who can share posts on social media sites and upload A/V files for an extra kick. You don’t have to “friend” anyone, and you don’t even have to register to view content on the site. It’s never been easier to find all of your news for all of your communities in one place.

If xtra xtra is here to link you to your community, this blog is here to link you to xtra xtra. We’ll use this space to share updates on the site, alert you about new contests and giveaways, and provide perspective on social media and online tools. We’ll take you into the trenches of a startup while also giving you the chance to let us know what you think, so we hope you’ll continue to visit the blog and drop us a few comments, too!

Till next time,

Cooley