As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s getting to be the time of year where I need to review this year’s budget and start getting ready for next year’s. I personally believe that budgets should be fluid things. Each year, my goal is to take the things that worked and continue them while getting rid of the things that didn’t work. One of the main places I make changes is in my budget categories, orread more…
The Happy Homeowner posts about her spending every week and lists her No Spend Days. A couple months ago, Money Beagle questioned whether tracking No Spend Days really helped anyone save money. Since I’ve been tracking No Spend and Controlled Spend days for over a year and a half now, I thought I’d talk about my experience, and why I think its valuable, even if it doesn’t save me significant amounts of money. Let’s start withread more…
Quick Yakezie Challenge Update: My Alexa ranking is below 1 million. Yay! The guest post I wrote for Daily Money Shot was about making choices, about understanding the trade-offs between what you want, whant you can afford, and what you’re willing to give up. For a very long time, we have had HD cable with an HD DVR. Even when the husband was laid off and we were in our crash budget phase, we kept theread more…
We have a not so firm plan to adopt a child. It’s been the plan for a while, but adoption is expensive and other things have kept coming up. Right now, the not so firm plan is to wait for the husband to finish school (in one to two years) and then save up the money for adoption fees. There’s a local agency that does a sliding scale fee, so we’re looking at around $14,000 forread more…
Our Comcast bill has never been cheap. But 2 years ago when the hubby lost his job, we were paying $150/month. We called them and switched to a smaller package, reducing our monthly cost about around $30- not a whole lot, I know, but it gave us some breathing room. Except that, it was only down by $30 for about 3 months. Then it started climbing back up again. By 9 months after we’d lowered ourread more…
You’ve been tracking your spending now for over a month. Have you recorded all of it? Even the credit card spending? Yes, you need to pay attention to that too. After all, you’re still paying for it. In fact, if you’re carrying a balance on your card, your paying more for it that you otherwise would. Still, you’re not ready for a budget yet. Now, you need to know your goals- and not just your moneyread more…
Lets start with the very basics. Everyone always says you need a budget, and you need to stick to it. Which isn’t bad advice, but not if you don’t have the tools to create a realistic budget. Without the right information, people end up creating budgets that won’t get them where they want to go or they can’t stick to. And that’s if they even create a budget in the first place. So what do youread more…
