Time for our monthly financial check-up. This month was good and bad for our family. We spent way too much on convenience items but I also had several opportunities to talk about frugal living which inspired me to get back on track with our spending and saving for the month of March.
One way I hope to stay on track this month is with Pear Budget. I read about this on Meredith’s site and was eager to check it out. I like that I can do it all online and create a budget that is customized to our family’s expenses. You can try it for free for 30 days and after that it costs three dollars a month.
My husband will be promoting in two months and with the promotion comes a hefty raise. When we crunched the numbers on paper we realized that we have a few options.
Drastic frugality- I am not sure what this all would entail but some ideas discussed were dh biking to work, making even more items from scratch to cut grocery costs, cloth diapers, vehicle changes, growing our own food, switch to a pay as you go cell phone, cut out paper plates, napkins, paper towels, disposable wipes in addition to the things we already do.
Moderate Frugality- Basically continue on the current path with slight modifications. We are planning a Square Foot Garden
this year and I hope to increase our from scratch cooking since it is something I enjoy doing already.
Frugal living for Wimps- This is how I feel about how we are living now. We made some pretty significant changes a few years back, but have stalled a bit in our progress. Even if we continued on the exact same course we could still save money, but not enough to purchase a house for cash in the next few years.
This year our financial goals are pretty simple:
- Purchase 15 passenger van (cash) by April 2009 We bought the van WITH CASH on Wednesday! This is the first time we have purchased a late model vehicle for cash, and it felt a little strange. We have purchased a few $1000 cars for cash in the past, but we never a nearly new one.
- Fund IRA – as I watch our IRAs continue to drop in value I am hesitant to add any more money until I research some better funds. Currently the money is sitting in a high interest savings account
- Braces for child #3 half-way funded by end of the year (saved $1300 so far)
- Cut grocery budget by $50 a month – This is my first month experimenting with bulk shopping. I think it will help cut grocery costs but I won’t know until the end of the month. This month’s budget is set at $600 for all food, toiletries, diapers, cleaning supplies, and paper products.
- Live on half our income/ save or invest other half (need to cut budget slightly to make this happen) We ran the numbers yesterday and this is doable if we are willing to implement many of the drastic frugality ideas.
- Save for short term goals: vacations, homeschool materials, gifts (These areas have been funded for 2009, thanks to a surplus in 2008. I would like to see if we could cut back on the amount needed to fund these categories.)
- Start commission system for the kids (I haven’t started this mainly out of laziness. I need to make a chart and just do it!)
- All extra money goes into house fund There hasn’t been a lot of extra money yet because right now all the extra money went towards our van purchase. Now we can direct most of the extra money towards a house fund.
For more financial updates visit Money Saving Mom.
What do you mean by a commission system for your kids?
one of the best things we ever did was go to a pay as you go cell phone. we had 2 cell phones and a family plan that was costing us over $75/month. last summer i started looking into dumping it. it took us a few months to get out of our contract, but by novemeber we were free!!! yippee. so come january we bought a single phone for around $25 that had 3 mo worth of minutes, 300 minutes to be precise. we havne’t had to add minutes to it yet, so for 3 mo of talking it has only cost us $10/mo compared to $75/mo. i don’t think we will ever go back to a contract cell phone. this is just too sweet.
Yeah for the new van!!!!
I feel we are wimpy frugality-wise
But that may be because we are only frugal out of necessity. We barely make it on our entire income. But we always manage to buy things that aren’t necessities along with all our needs 
We actually do use a lot of what you label as drastic, however.
GO for the cloth diapers!
I LOVE them, and have not spent money on diapers (except for Christmas gifts for my at the time 2 month old (ok, for me!) since before he was born! I LOVE them, can you tell! And if you plan on having more….I’d buy a lot of One Size Fits all diapers. My BG 3.0, Happy Heinys and Mommy’s Touch fit both my 16 pound 4 month old and my 36 pound 2.5 year old (that wears them at night.
I share your hesitancy to fund an IRA right now. I have watched mine dip below what the initial deposit was when I opened my IRA 6 years ago (I opened it to rollover a 401(k). It is frustrating.
And speaking of square foot gardens, we have drawn up our plans and we are going to work on building ours this weekend so we can start treating the soil. Woo hoo!
My husband wants to have a raised garden, but we’ll see if that happens this year. Plus, we do not have a very good yard (full sun) for gardening.
We both have pay as you go cell phones with virgin mobile. It works good for us and costs about $6 per month. We don’t use our phones very often though, although I don’t actively try not to use them either.
I second the cloth diapers. I feel I save quite a bit with them. I have bought a lot of them 2nd hand too on http://www.diaperswappers.com. I love Fuzzi Bunz the best, but Bum Genius are good too, although they were not one size for us…our chunker grew out of it fairly quickly.
As for the the IRAs…we just keep funding it. I figure everything is on sale, so I’m not switching anything up and I just keep our money going in every month like normal. It will go up again and we’ve got time on our side. I just don’t look at the balance!
Congrats on the van…that’s a big accomplishment!
I’d like to hear more about your saving for a house. I sort of equate this to me paying off my mortgage early and I’m torn about this verses putting more money into retirement and college savings.
Congrats on paying cash for the van! We’re putting a hefty amount each month in our “auto fund” – anticipating the day when we will need to purchase a new-to-us vehicle.
Congratulations on the van. That is fantastic!!!
Go for it with the diapers! I used them exclusively with dd, but that was 11 years ago when it was pins and rubber pants, so I’m sure much has changed since then! I’m sure you would adjust easily to that one.
What do you mean when you say ‘commission system”? That really caught my eye.
I have to say, I’m really impressed with your diligence and your goals. We are only starting to get our act together.
Blessings!
I think we’re maybe somewhere between moderate and drastic. Truth be told, it’s out of necessity. So, maybe I’m thankful for the necessity that’s teaching me to live this way! Because if we had more, I’d be lazier, I’m pretty sure.
Way to go on a goal of living on half your income! We’re in a place where I’m trying to increase our income since we’ve really decreased as much as we can at this point. We’d like to have a greater margin to save, invest, etc.
congrats on the van purchase!
One suggestion I make on the buying in bulk issue. Is trasition over into it slowly. Do what you can and keep switching over over time goes by. That way it doesn’t blow your budget out of proportion.
When my boys were small we used cloth diapers and baby washclothes for wipes. It works GREAT. Once you get into the mindset it is no big deal.
I CAN’T wait to see your squarefoot garden ! I REALLY like how he goes into growing food vertically. And so means you can grow more food in the same amount of land. COOL
Blessings and ((HUGS)) my SSiC
In Him<
-Mary
I was just doing my taxes and realized I spent VERY little on long distance last year and thought I’d share. I cancelled the long distance on our home phone, which eliminated the PICC charge (the stupid charge of $3-$5 monthly for choosing to even have a long distance option on your phone) plus saving the associated stupid tax of about $2-$3 for that…And, that’s before any actual calls. I got a prepaid calling card from the internet so all of my calls were about 2 cents a minute and international to London and UK were about 4 cents…my total long distance for the entire year was about $40.
I am even scared to put it into a savings account or money market. They want to tax us on everything.
Your suggestions for living more frugally are great. There are a few things we will need to do in our family.
We have been cloth diapering since day one (its now month 15) and we really like it. Sure sometimes its nasty, like the first time we tried grapes {PEEL them}, but as far as we are concerned at this point we are diapering her for free. I don’t know the exact details but I have seen breakdowns where once you hit 8-9 months you break even.
About the bulk buying, it will seem like you are spending a TON the first few weeks, but once you are just replacing things the savings will become noticeable.
About the IRA, I agree with you. Its hard to know. I am pretty young (late 20s) so we think its best to fund like crazy. I figure in 40 years when we can actually retire the gain will outweigh any losses I see in the next couple of years. If I were in my 50s or so I might just invest in bonds. They aren’t a get rich quick thing, but it will continue to gain for up to 30 years.
Alright on the van, I’m glad you were able to purchase one!
http://adlynmorrison.blogspot.com/
We moved my husband’s IRA into a retirement plan based on the Equity Index and we didn’t lose anything when the market dropped! And when the market goes back up, we get that increase! INCREASE without the DECREASE! Can’t beat that!
http://www.ffg2.com/
What about cutting the paper products out, or at least down? That could help a lot.
I love bulk shopping; it is such a blessing with a large family.
I have some other ideas for living on less on my website. You may know all of them already, but feel free to check them out!
You all already do so well. I agree with the cloth diapers. Great job on paying cash for the vehicle!!! We just recently started a commission system for our son and I LOVE IT – well I love how he helps clean the house.