Goodbye April. I think I may miss you, sorta. Not a huge fan of all the rain and all that jazz, but all in all you were pretty good to me.

It’s time for another update on my 2009 Goals. Again, if you haven’t made goals yet, it’s never too late. I encourage you to set a couple for yourself and be sure to come back and share with us. Consistently looking at my list has definitely kept me on track this year, and I’m loving it. Just because I’ve been staying on track, though, doesn’t me that I’ve been necessarilly succeeding in all areas.

As will everything in this Earthly life, nothing is for certain. I set out with big intentions for 2009, and I hope to make it my best year yet. Frankly, that is all that I can do.

With that being said, I’ve encountered some bumps in my plan, mostly in terms of my financial goals. I do not like bumps, generally, but I’m taking these bumps as they come. Thank God for that. Goes to show that all the prayers I’ve put in for help with my patience and my issues with perfectionism and control have not gone unanswered. I must continue to remind myself that although I’ve set these goals, everything happens in God’s time–not my own.

Let’s take a look back at April:

• Financially:
  • We were able to pay extra onto our debt this month, which I am ever so grateful for. $250 extra to be exact!! This brings our total debt down to just over $16000, with $3592 being paid this year alone. Wow, oh Wow! This puts us right at 21% of my goal for this year.
• I do not have an exact total for my grocery spending, but I do know that I did not go over my $300 mark. Yippee! I’ve been buying tons of fresh fruit and veggies and am at the point of making all of our bread products. What a great feeling this is!
• With our busy season approaching, I do feel as if we are being too careless in some areas of our spending, in addition to some unexpected costs that we have encountered with the garden and some outside projects. I hoping that we can gain our control back now, before we are knee deep in busy-ness, because then it will be too hard. If you are in the same boat–be sure to check out the upcoming FFF topics. I can’t wait to see what you all have to offer!
• Home/Gardening:
• First and Foremost (since this could knock out a lot of my goals)–Willie and I have some major, major decisions to make in the next few months. When we moved here, I was not the biggest fan of our home. The main reason we bought it was because the 50 acres that it sat on was absolutely beautiful and the house had lots of potential. We knew we would have to build on, and we were okay with that. After starting FPU and reading through The Total Money Makeover, we knew that it was essential for us to get rid of our consumer debt before we went any further with our addition. Knowing this has really helped feed the fire under me to get our debt gone! But…..with the current state of the economy and the interest rates being so low, we would be able to build onto our home (almost doubling it) without increasing our monthly payment. That is huge!! We had originally planned on our payment jumping quite a bit. So, our big issue is do we wait and risk the interest rates jumping back up, or do we go ahead and jump in and get it over with now? I’ve been praying…..
• The garden is doing amazing! I hope to do an update post later today with all the happenings.
• I have actually stuck to my day to day duties for awhile now. What a relief this has been to actually be on top of things instead of feeling behind and out of whack everyday. Just in time for summer..!!
• Personal Goals:
• I have yet to buy a scale, but I know that I’ve lost weight. Which is huge to me. I’m thinking of cashing in some of my Swagbucks to get Jillian’s 30 Day Shred video. I know a handful of people that just rage and rage about it, (A Cowboy’s Wife and MommySnacks to name a few) and I’m wanting to amp things up a bit.

So, how are you doing on your 2009 Goals? If you haven’t made your goals yet–hop in now and let us know what you are striving for.

*Don’t forget to check out the rules to linking up, you can find them on this post.

Be sure to check out other goal updates over at Money Saving Mom.

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Finding Freedom Friday: 2009 Goal Update is a post from: Getting Freedom From Debt

Alright, so I already covered how we went about cutting down our bills so that we could pay down our debt here. Although it did add us a little bit more wiggle room in our budget, it didn’t provide a whole lot.

This one is simple….CASH…atleast for the most part.

When we laid out all of our expeses on the piece of paper, I went back and looked at 2 things (in this area). The first one was how much money were we spending on groceries. The collective term groceries is used to describe basically anything for the house. Food, toiletries, dog food, cleaners, etc. Then, I looked at what we were putting on the credit card. When our journey began, we relied heavily on the credit card for day to day expenses, mostly gas.

At the time, we were driving like crazy people. Our hometown is approximately 2 hours from our current home. My husbands family, my mother, and some of our friends still reside there. We were driving “home” just about every weekend. This was in addition to all the “running” that we did during the week. Side trip here, side trip there. Now granted, my father passed away in 2003, and my mother was left widowed. All of my mom and dad’s family are in another state and we took it upon ourselves to do everything we could for my mom, and I wouldn’t change a thing about it. But, when I journey began in 2007, we were still driving “home” and doing this and that, and it was adding up FAST!

We cut a lot of our driving down. For two reasons.

We realized what we were doing…and we cut our budget to only allow $150/2 weeks of gas. Still yet, that number is higher than I would like for it to be, but we live in a rural area. (With the gas prices the way they have been, we had to raise that number to $200/2 weeks) Just to give you an idea, we live dead center of 2 hole in the wall towns. One contains no stoplights. The other one, while it has 2 stoplights, still just has a Wal-Mart..and a tiny one at that. No, not a Super Wal-Mart, we’re talking the original Wal-Mart! Didn’t know they still existed, did ya?!

Then, I attacked the grocery spending. I took a rough tally of what we were spending on groceries. It was a rough tally because we never catogorized our spending before this point. When I came to the consesus that, over the past 3 months (June, July, August 07), it was $600-$650 I was floored. We are only a family of 5!

The first thing we did..menu planning. I used to do a menu plan back when I was working, but somehow fell out of it, and could never get myself back into it. I find it very important to atleast plan your dinners. Otherwise you will buy random ingredients, and you will have the 4pm scramble. You’ve been there, haven’t you? 4pm hits, and you have no earthly idea what you are going to have for dinner. When you finally figure it out, you realize that you don’t have one essential ingredient and your husband will be home in no time, and the kids are starving! It stinks…and it is incredibly stressful! Avoid it. A couple ways this is beneficial…you know exactly what you need for groceries. This helps with avoiding extra trips to town (saving gas money and on impulse buys) and it also helps with not having a crazy overstock mess of ingredients in your cabinet. Unless you are like me and you get a thrill out of seeing crazily overstocked cabinets! This way, everyone, including you, knows what is for dinner. Avoiding the 4pm scramble and the stress.

Then, in true Dave Ramsey and FPU fashion, we went on the envelope system. It was very scary at first, but we got used to it. We’ve tweaked it a bit since the beginning, but it is now our norm.

We set up only 3 envelope categories, one for groceries, gas, and “blow”. The “blow” is basically mine and my husbands allowance. We each get one. This in and of itself saved us who knows how much money. Our amounts are very minimal at this point, because we are on a gazelle intense mission to get this debt out of the way. Currently we each get $25 for a 2 week period. If we choose to go out to eat, buy a soda from the gas station, or buy ourselves something from the store…it comes from our individual “blow” categories. This really makes us think about what we are spending our money on, both of us have re-evaluated our once thought to be necesseties.

Our grocery envelope contained $200 for a 2 week period. I’ll tell you what, when you are used to going to the grocery store with a check book or credit card, and you switch to cash…it will completely change how you shop! I’ve always considered myself to be somewhat of a decent shopper. I’ve always compared prices and such, but cash makes you look at an item completely differently. It hurts to hand over a $100 bill at check out and see it gone. That is not the case when you sign your name to that check, or sign your debit card receipt. You can read more about my grocery list/shopping process here.

To make our $200/2 weeks stretch I started going to Aldi a lot more (amazing the savings here in dairy products alone), and we started our very first garden. While I know that it isn’t possible for everyone to have a garden, I do recommend that you try either a small container garden on your patio, or buying from your local farmers market. We had fresh produce flowing from our garden, and now we have a lot of it nicely canned up in my pantry. The Lord really blessed us this year, and I am ever so grateful for that.

Our grocery budget has since been changed to $150 for a 2 week period for a few reasons. I started making simplier meals, yet incredibly delicious and nutritious, I use coupons extensively, and I make almost everything from scratch. This may sound like a daunting task, but I notice no major difference from before other than that our food tastes a lot better than before. Seriously. And..I know exactly what is in my food, because I made it, or I grew it!

So, in examing our expenses and switching to cash we were able to save an additional $200-$250 on groceries and an unimaginable amount on frivolousness and gas. Now keep in mind that although we “saved” that money, that doesn’t exactly mean we had that to put at debt. We were relying heavily on the credit card for our gas and some groceries. Basically, we cut all the credit card spending out, with about $200 to throw at the debt, in addition to what we gained from cutting back on our bills.

This is when we started the debt snowball, which I will address in Part 3.

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Our Journey Part 2 is a post from: Getting Freedom From Debt

Well, it’s check-up time. I’m still floored that October is nearly over. Although it has been a bit chilly here, we started to warm up a bit this week…..and it just doesn’t seem right that November is just a few days away, and October will be nothing more than a memory.



It’ll be January before we know it.



October’s Goals:

• Keep throwing any and all extra money at the truck debt. We paid a little extra on the truck this month. To the tune of $200. Not as much as I would have liked to, but it is better than nothing.
• Keep the grocery budget set at $300. Did so with success. Managed to come in under budget! Yippee.
• And, I really want to get over my fear of selling on Ebay. Uh…Negative. Hi, I’m Phoebe, and I’m a procrastinator.

With that being said…here is my list for November:

• Continue to throw money at the truck. Every penny counts…so any and all extra income that comes in (if it exists) needs to go here. If there is leftover money from month to month…throw it at the truck! This one is hard for me, because the truck is the only bill I have that cannot be paid online! So, when I get “extra” money, I feel I have to wait to mail it all in at once instead of a random payment here, and there. I’m not patient.
• Continue the grocery budget at $300. Hopefully we can go for lower than that.
• Ahem…try ebay. I had good intentions, but I procrastinate. I continually procrastinated getting the flat rate box, and before I knew it it was the end of the month. Then, I realized I procrastinated making Halloween costumes. Yeah, not a fan of Halloween much….but the kids have a big party at school. I couldn’t let them not dress up. So…here I sit a day before Halloween frantically finishing costumes. Ebay can wait a couple more days.
• Get meaner/tighter on the envelope system. This is one of the things that Dave Ramsey is big on. Envelopes for budget. It worked great for us while we were in FPU, and while we still follow it loosely…I notice areas where we can improve. We’ll see if there is any progress here, because the main culprit, is my husband!

I don’t know about everyone else…but I was so excited the other day when we went to go get gas! $1.99 BABY!!!!!!! I think that it has even went lower than that since. I told my husband we needed to frame the receipt!

So, I was curious what everyone else was thinking here. Since it is costing us considerably less to fill up, are you leaving your budget the same, or are you lowering it? I’m thinking/waiting for it to go right back where it came from, so I am reluctant to lower it.

Also, in these tough times, do you find yourself cutting back in certain areas? Or are you spending the same as you were a few months ago?

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October Check-up & Another Question is a post from: Getting Freedom From Debt

Can you believe that it is September?! Wow. September is a lot of things for me. First, Labor Day. What a nice end to Summer. That and eight years ago on Labor Day, my oldest son was born. *sniff*

Hard to believe.

Also, fall is near. Fall is my favorite season. So cozy. Pumpkins. Apples. Cider. Bonfires. Oh the joy.

This September marks another thing to remember. Just one year ago my church offered the FPU courses by Dave Ramsey. Before these courses I had no earthly idea who that man was. Today, I owe a lot of my sanity to him!! In the last year, my husband and I have paid off over $16,000 worth of debt. Wow. To see that written out is just amazing!! What else is amazing is we have had no change in our income. It is the same today, as it was last year when we were thinking we were flat out broke. All our bills were being paid, we just didn’t have anything extra to play with (so we thought). We’ve even managed to save close to $300o in the process. Amazing. That is what that is. To see how much the Lord is rewarding us for our attempt to be good stewards, just floors me.

The light at the end of the (once) neverending debt tunnel, has never shone brighter. The end is near and I love it!

August was pretty good for us. We could have done better, but my addiction to paying bills sorta got in the way. I had forgotten about some expenses that came up, and used the extra to pay extra on the CC, only to figure out we needed it somewhere else.

OOPS!

However, we are currently only about $350 in CC debt. This compared to the $7000 in January. This would be gone, but we used the CC to buy Willie’s mom her 50th birthday present. She had a ton of old home movies on Beta, but no working Beta machine to play them on. We found one for her on Ebay, and was suppossed to be reimbursed by his siblings, but we never were. So, there we were. Moving on.

Basically the rest of our debt is the lawnmower we just got, and our truck. If we stay on track, which we have been, we should be completly done at the beginning of 2010.

We have had some set backs, but it is nice to know that even with those, we are still on target. My original goal of being CC free by the end of August didn’t happen. This goal however was in place before we bought the lawnmower, so I was thinking it would have to be moved to September anyway. So, September it is.

Then, we are going to snowball this money onto the truck. Originally we were going to put it on the lawnmower (which this would be what Dave Ramsey recommends since it is the smaller debt) but we want the truck debt down and gone.

My main goal for September is to get my grocery budget down. This is a struggle for me for one reason or another. I get good deals and all, but it seems as if I still buy too much food. I probably have enough food for a year, not including my meager stockpile. Okay, maybe just 6 months, but still! Currently we spend about $400/mo in groceries (this however is down from pre-Dave Ramsey. We were spending $600 plus and didn’t even know it or have anything to show for it). Hopefully, in September I can get this down to $300, and then we will go from there. I really want his number to be at the $200 mark.

And really, that is about it. Just a question to throw out there though, how much do you spend on groceries and how many are you buying for?

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Check-up is a post from: Getting Freedom From Debt

RUN to grab your copies!! You will never be the same!

Have you purchased your copy of the Home Management Binder yet? It's not too late!

Thank you for supporting our February Sponsors!

Don't Feel Guilty About Dessert! Eat a Smart Sweet! Check out the 80+page Ebook from Kitchen Stewardship.

{Mountain Rose Herbs}--Organic Spices, Herbs, Teas and Essential Oils {Plus MORE!!}

Visit the Clever Housewife for Saving and Stretching a Buck.
Dave Ramsey Special! is a post from: Getting Freedom From Debt