The Plan!

Hello friends!! So in the last post I  briefly talked about living on just my husband's (Eric) income. I have devised a plan to help us do just that. Let me say this, I do not make a lot of money at my job, I work part time. So it won't be a terrible adjustment, living on half our income (which we have not figured out how to do yet )will be harder. This is just our first baby step in that direction.

We have cut down a couple categories in our budget.

The first one being our pool. We have a 16x48 intex pool that we have used the past couple summers, we love it. It's expensive though.

Xander playing in the pool last year

At the end of last year the liner got a significant un-repairable rip. The new liner would cost us 200 dollars plus shipping. We started saving for it, but quickly realized there just wasn't enough room in the budget to save up for it by summer. We also realized the pool costs us an extra 50 dollars a month in chemicals, water, and electricity. If we didn't replace the liner and didn't put it up this year we could save ourselves about 400 dollars. So although we will be missing our pool very much this year, we will be closer to our goals. We will continue to save a little bit each month towards a new pool but it is probably 2 years away.

We are ditching Amazon Prime. We have loved this service a lot, but it just doesn't make financial sense to pay to have free shipping. I will just wait until my amazon purchase equals 35 and buy it then and get free shipping. I have heard people say they save money using their bulk purchasing options but I myself haven't been able to find anything with significant savings.I know there are other benefits like the prime video but honestly, it's almost exactly the same as Netflix with maybe a few more titles in it's library. I happen to like Netflix's selection a lot better. Then there is the kindle lending library which is great if you have a kindle, but we don't. That's fine by me I have a free lending library (the actual library) a couple blocks away and they have a lot more titles :)

 All in all I don't feel it's worth it to pay 99 dollars a year for prime. We also decided to get rid of Hulu plus. We just don't use it anymore. Together that saves us 17 dollars a month.

We cut our spending money a little. Not a lot. Five dollars each per week. No biggie to us but it adds up to 40 dollars a month.

We cut down the amount in our clothing category. We have 100 dollars in there right now and no one is using it. We are cutting it in half saving us 40 dollars a month.

We turned our date night envelope into a day trip envelope. We just haven't been using our date money. Though we love spending time just the two of us it's very easy to do for free. We have our daughter Hannah who loves her brother and offers to watch him a lot. She is 15 and a very good, sweet, patient sister. Yup, we know how blessed we are :)

So we opt for free date nights so we can put that money in the family fund to do some fun stuff with our kids over the summer. Thus eliminating the camping/day trip fund saving us 20 a month AND we still get to have a good time!

We will be doing a spending freeze in May when it comes to food. We will only be buying fresh produce, dairy and eggs (with the exception of Eric's Veggie sausage for breakfast). This will continue until we have used up all the stuff in our freezer because it is SO FULL. This won't be a reoccurring monthly decrease in spending however, it will give us an extra savings boost for our poor drained emergency fund and save for yet another car repair.

So that's that for now as we do more or think of more I will let you know!! Thanks for reading guys and thanks for being awesome.

Debt Free Journey- Our Debts and Our Hopes

It's been FOREVER since I've had a quiet minute to write something on here. You will have to forgive my absence I have been loving my sweet baby boy all day long :) He's growing so fast I can't even believe it!

                             


But I digress. This post is about debt. I don't think I have ever shared the actual number anywhere so I am going to do it here. 153,525.54. Does that seem crazy to anyone else? It's crazy to us. I would like to point out the majority of that is our house and medical debt. Even so as Mr. Ramsey says debt is debt. While this number seems like a mountain we will never be able to climb sometimes, I KNOW we will get there. All it takes is hard work and determination and we have both of those in spades.

When I am not watching our little dude grow or helping our daughter through the hard times and good times of her teenage years and laughing at her jokes (she is hilarious folks!)  I am working. I have a part-time job I have had for 7 years but now work from home doing the same thing. I do surveys, amazon turk, swagbucks, I am selling stuff left and right. My husband, god bless that man, he's incredible has been working 55-60 hours a week. Though he does not get overtime (he's salary) it was that hard work that earned him a 16,000 raise last year and a promotion. He is my hero.

The other thing we do is save money anywhere we can, and BUDGET, BUDGET, BUDGET. I can't even tell you how important it is to tell your money where to go before it disappears.
Don't forget to budget some fun things in there, without the fun. life while getting out of debt will be miserable. Remember though fun doesn't have to cost a lot. An ice cream cone and a walk in the park is 1.00. Get a new board game at the thrift store for a dollar and have a fun family game night. Check out a movie at the library. I could go on and on but that's for another day.

So we know we will make it we just have to keep the faith and the determination. If you are ever feeling discouraged in your debt free journey watch this Dave Ramsey speech on getting out of debt. It still gives me chills.

OK guys, thanks for listening :)

Our Debt Free Journey So Far

Hello friends! I thought it might be time to check in with you and let you know how our journey is going. The reason I haven't so far is that not much has happened. We have been building our emergency fund just fast enough to have something come up and drain it completely.
Don't get me wrong I am so happy to have had it when we needed it but at the same time I feel like we are spinning our wheels a lot of the time.

Thankfully, god will provide and Eric got a raise! This should mean we can quickly build our emergency fund instead of it taking months and months and we can really start kicking our debt to the curb!

What I want you all to know about this journey is it can be frustrating and you are going to go through tough times and you might even fall of the wagon once in a while, but get back up! It's worth the hardship.It's worth the extra effort and self discipline. Hang in there, God is with you and if you ask for his help, you will get it.

Have a great day lovlies!