Saving the Change

Every week we set aside $50 for groceries and $20 for Costco. We save the Costco money for a few months and then go stock up on steak, fresh salmon, frozen fish, and some type of snack like granola bars or nuts. $50 doesn't seem like a lot, but it's just us two and we still go out to eat a lot. We try to eat healthy most of the time and a lot of people have this thought that eating healthy has to cost a lot of money. If you shop the sales and meal plan, it works out pretty well. Every week, I'm going to post what we bought for the week and our meal plan. The easiest way to make this work is also to "shop at home" and make use of what you already have. Total: $49.49 For his lunches, he will be making turkey wraps. For mine, I'm sautéing the tofu in coconut oil and adding this simmer sauce. I'll add frozen peas and serve over quinoa. Mine will only make 4 servings so I'll either go out to eat one day or figure something out. I also have some s

Spending fast. Spending diet. A period of time where you don't spend ANY money except the essentials. My poor spouse still thinks Taco Bell and Arby's are "essentials". I have done a lot of reading about people doing spending fasts and most do it for a month up to a year. We are starting with baby steps. The first week, we had gone grocery shopping that weekend so we had plenty of food at home. We (meaning I) chose to go Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday without spending. He agreed because he knows we need to cut back. On Monday I came home from work and he asked me for about 30 minutes straight if we could go to Arby's. I stuck to my ground because I always bend and said "no". He said he had a bad day, I said I'm sorry but we're sticking to this spending fast. We ended up making breakfast for dinner and it turned out really well. Tuesday, we had to go visit a friend and normally we go out to eat. Once again, we disagreed and then he finally realize

My student loan debts are gone. I make extra payments on my car so that should be paid off a lot sooner than the loan. But, now we get to my husband's debt. When we were young and dumb, young, we didn't think to much of how student loans were going to affect our future. We knew we needed loans to go to college and some to live off of. We made the mistake of my husband not working AT ALL and taking out the max amount of loans so he could focus on school. HUGE MISTAKE!!! Now we're at a point where we can't even make the minimum student loan payment on his loans. He did an income based repayment plan a couple years ago (we weren't married yet so didn't have to include my income). After twelve months of the IBR plan, he OWED more than when he started out one year earlier. So we're at a loss. We learned with my loans, the only way to make a decent dent is to make higher payments than the minimum. That is impossible if you're barely paying the bills. We s

After graduating, the student loan came in. Since I went to a for-profit accelerated nursing program, my loan was $40,000. For some, that's not a lot. For others, it is a substantial amount of student loans. By this time in my life, the credit cards were paid off (minus one in which I have 0% interest for the life of the card). Even though I was more responsible (so I thought), I only paid the minimum for about a year and ignored the private loan portion of the loan which was $10,000. After a few months of no payments to the school, I received a letter stating that if I paid half the amount by a certain day (I think it was about 30 days from the date of the letter), they would forgive the other half! So I pulled out that credit card and put $5,000 on it that very day. $30,000 left. I am a bit of a workaholic, so I worked about 50-80 hours a week, and paid $1,000 a month on my student loan. After almost one year of doing that, I was tired of paying it off so slowly. I pulled what

I have always had an interest in money (who hasn't), whether that's spending or saving. In my early 20s, I had maxed out 11, that's right, ELEVEN credit cards. This eventually lead to me dropping out of nursing school to pursue a second job. Fast forward about three years, I was still tired of always being broke. I hadn't learned my lesson with the cards, I would pay them off, just to build them right back up. There was one time we literally collected change to use the Coinstar to buy groceries. We very carefully selected $25 dollars worth of groceries because we were scared of going over. Get to the checkout line and realized I had lost the Coinstar slip. We had to walk away from our groceries; our meals for the next week. Fortunately I worked at a facility at the time where I could order food against my future paycheck so that's what I did. Fast forward a couple years later, I had gone back to nursing school and graduated with my LPN (Licensed Practical Nurs