Are you making this common budgeting mistake? A budget won’t do you much good if you only look at it once a month Everybody knows you should have a budget. Whether or not you are in the habit of keeping one is a different story. I used to be anti-budget. I felt like a budget…
My husband and I have recently decided our grocery bill is completely out of control. We have so much going on that worrying about the grocery budget has taken a backseat, but then we realized that we had been spending around 150% of our allotted grocery budget for several months. No bueno! Something had to…
The first rule to saving money on anything is to know how much you are spending in the first place. I used to keep all the household goods under the grocery umbrella in our budget. It sort of worked in that we just added whatever we needed each week onto the grocery list and went…
I’ve written before about our budget, but what I did not write about is how we totally and completely fell off of the budgeting bandwagon last year. Life got crazy and stressful, and we slowly stopped entering in our expenditures and balancing the checkbook. We slowly stopped having budget planning meetings. We slowly stopped being…
How do people afford to go to Hawaii? Learn how to save money on a Hawaiian vacation with these easy tips! Our 2014 Christmas gift to the girls was a trip to Hawaii. Lately we have been trying to give experience gifts instead of stuff gifts, and so we didn’t give them very much else….
A great money management activity for kids is to take them back-to-school shopping. Give your kids a budget and let them pick the school clothes they’ll purchase by themselves. It’s a wonderful lesson in sticking to a budget! Back-to-school shopping can be frustrating for me as a parent. The girls bombard me with their needs…
This post is part of a social shopper marketing insight campaign with Pollinate Media Group® and Payoff, but all my opinions are my own. Last year at this time, we were totally on track to pay off a bunch of debt and were getting so much closer to being debt-free. And then, life happened. I…
Tips for finding the latest fashion trends hiding in your wardrobe. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to put together new looks with what’s already in your closet. Summers are always a lot leaner around here financially. It usually works out just fine, but by the end of summer the budget has been stretched…
Sticking to a budget can be difficult, because some things come up so rarely that you forget to budget for them, or you don’t realize how much your are actually spending on what you think should be a non-category. Budgeting can also be difficult because it’s too easy to use a credit or debit card…
Having trouble with budgeting or paying off debt? Here are five essential tools that will help you finally gain the financial peace you’ve been looking for. Since PEACE is the word I have chosen to focus on in my life this year, I have naturally been thinking about how to actually achieve peace in my…
Tomorrow my husband starts getting paychecks again. (Cue the Hallelujah Chorus now!) We’ve managed to scrape by, pay all of our bills and put very little on the credit card. And amazingly enough, we still have money in the bank. An itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow-polka-dotted amount of money, but still, it’s there, and it is actual money….