Monday, January 17, 2011

Forgetting the Jones Challenge 2011! Day 6 and 7

Day 6: Calculating our cost of Living with Mommysavers

This year's spending freeze isn't going as good as we hoped. I found myself buying a couple extra things here and there that we didn't need at this time. Jaxon got a new puzzle and some new BOY books since all we have in the house is girly ones....but they were from Goodwill so it was really really crazy cheap and I got a shelf organizer and a new coffee mug. Yes these were things that I wanted to get and have wanted to for a while and got for less than a dollar a piece BUT being on the spending freeze I should have passed....or I could justify it that I spent Christmas money on it....either way.....How is YOUR spending freeze going?

Today we are working on calculating our cost of living. We did it last year and our bank actually keeps it going for us. They have this nifty little tool that does the budget, lets me know if we are under or over and seperates every one of our transactions into a category that I pre assigned! How nifty is that. It makes it so much easier on us to know where that $20 went. Plus we only use our Debit card so it's always accurate. If we have cash we deposit it or keep a tally of where it went so we know.

 Day 7: Planning ahead with Mommysavers

 Planning ahead really does help! I keep a calendar/planner handy almost all the time so I can write everything down!  I try and write down all the free stuff that's going on or the super cheap ahead of time so that when it gets to that weekend and we are all "what should we do." I know of some stuff we can and that's super affordable. How do you keep up with what's going on? Same with free classes, I sign the kids up for the free trials so that I know what they are into before spending all the money on classes that they don't even like...ya know maybe I should see if they have stuff like that for me :) I know there are some classes I would love to take!

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