Free Household Products!

Lately I have been working on a project to earn free household products! I no longer have to pay for laundry detergent, body wash, deodorant, dish soap, face wash ect. ect. I know I have posted in the past about where to buy these items cheaper, but free is much cheaper! It has done wonders for our budget! I also found out my hero Dave Ramsey does the same thing! If you would like to know more about the program, email me at renaehall675@gmail.com

Budgeting for Gas

It is always hard to know how much to budget for gas. Then, whenever my husband gets a new job or a new school schedule and consequently changes his route, we are forced to change our gas budget allowance. We love using the website: Cost 2 Drive.

You enter the year, make, and model of your car and then your start and end location. It will figure the cost to drive based on current gas prices in your area. We will then take that amount and multiply it by the number of days in the month that my husband will be driving to that particular destination. Then we add them all together and add $20 or so (for miscellaneous errands) to give us our monthly gas budget. This is also great if you are trying to budget for a family road trip!

Going to Dinner--$50 a Month

So even on a tight budget, it is healthy to go on dates. My husband and I do fun activites and/or go out to dinner 4 times a month for less than $50.

This is how we do it:

CityDeals.com


City Deals is awesome because they have gift certificates available to buy for like 50% (give or take) off. So at the beginning of each month, I will order a few for dinner/activites that we can do for our dates.

For example, last week we went to Pizza Factory. Our bill with the gift certificate was only $8.

They have all sorts of rockin deals on their site. It is worth a peek for sure and their deals change all of the time.

Turn the Spender Into a Saver!

Typically in a marriage there will be one spouse who saves and one spouse who spends. There is some truth to the theory, "opposites attract." In my marriage, (obviously since I have this blog) I am the nerdy saver who is very practical, frugal, and will save every penny I have. My husband is just the opposite-- He is the fun, relaxed, care-free one in the relationship who likes to spend.

As a couple, we have the same goals, but we have still have a hard time finding the balance between spending and saving. I want to save every dime, (almost to a fault) and he wants to save a little, and have fun too. We decided we would budget $25 each for our own personal fun money. As he did not check our mint.com budget very regularly, we were finding he would go over his $25 very quickly. We tried to envelope system (where you put cash in evelopes for each category of your budget) but when the cash was gone the debit card would get pulled out. I kept trying to think of ideas to help him stay within our budget.

Finally, I was talking to my friend and she told me about a method that she and her husband use to keep their budget. In their marriage, she is the spender and he is the saver. They have 3 bank accounts. They have their joint bank account, and then each have their own personal bank accounts. Usually I am not a fan of married people having separate bank accounts but they only use it for their "fun money." They each have an allotted amount that is automatically transferred at the beginning of each month into their separate accounts. She spends her "allowance" each month until the card won't work anymore (kind of like a monthly gift card to herself) and he, being the saver, has a card that is loaded due to his lack of spending.

I thought this idea was absolutely BRILLIANT! We just need to get to the bank and get our accounts set up so we can try it out.

What do you think? Could this work in your marriage?

Perkstreet: A debit card with cash back

I am sure you Dave Ramsey fans out there have heard about Perkstreet. We opened our account a couple years ago and we have really enjoyed earning free money. We used our Perkstreet debit card for almost everything and earn 1 to 2% cash back. This account, combined with our Ally Bank account, has given us a 2% raise.



The great thing about Perkstreet is that it is not a credit card. There is no interest and no fees (as long as you are making purchases with it each month.) And who doesn't like free money? We love Perkstreet.

A Word on Gift-Giving

I love to give gifts. I love to find the perfect gift for someone for their Birthday, Christmas, Wedding, you name it. However, I am learning quick that with a limited budget, I cannot afford to do all of the wonderful things I would like to for all of the people that I know and love.

We budget $35 a month for gifts. Some months we do not need to buy gifts and so the money is  saved for big Birthday months (ours are April, June, and July) and Christmas. This gives us a total of $420 we can spend throughout the year.

This does not sound like very much because it's not. I have learned to give homemade gifts from the heart so that they will still fit in the budget, and hopefully they will still be meaningful to the recipient.

Siblings' Birthdays: One of the gifts that I started giving to our brothers and sisters for their Birthdays is a loaf of homemade Ooey Gooey Cinnamon Bread from lilluna.com. This bread is as good as it sounds. I like it even better than the kind from Great Harvest. I wrap it up in Saran Wrap and stick it in a paper bag with a bow. You can smell the bread even through the paper and it is delightful. You can find the recipe here.


The recipe makes 5 loafs so I usually scale it down to two (giving one loaf away and keeping one for ourselves. Shhh!)

Kids' Birthdays: For my little Eli's Birthday, I like to stick to the rule: something they WANT; something they NEED; something to WEAR; something to READ. I personally think that we can get too carried away with kids' Birthdays. I know that we all love our kids and want to give them everything in the world to show them our love. But the thing is, they do not need EVERYTHING they want. If they get everything they want every Birthday or Christmas they will learn to expect everything they want and be dissapointed if one year they do not get it all instead of being grateful for what they did get. That was probably a major run-on sentence but you get what I mean.

Kids' Christmas: For Christmas, I follow the rule above but just double or triple it, depending on the budget that year.

Parents' Birthdays: For both sets of parents, we do something a little more special than bread because they do so much for us. We still do not spend a lot because we can't, but we try to do a little something extra to make their day a special one. The same goes for Christmas.

Spouse Birthdays, Christmas, and Anniversary: For each others' Birthdays and Christmas, we try to keep it at $50 each. For our Anniversary, we usually just go on a nicer-than-usual date.

Whatever it is that you spend on gifts, follow these steps

1. Name an amount that you will spend on each child, parent, grandparent, sibling, ect. for each event. For example: Kids Christmas: $70 each X each child, Kids Birthday: $50 each X each child, Parents' Birthday: $35 X each parent, and so on.

2. Add them all together and that is your total gift money for the year.

3. Divide that amount by 12 and that is what you budget for each month so that when the big day of Christmas rolls around, you will already have the money set aside.

When in Doubt, Check Online

We decided to get rid of our huge entertainment center (refinsihed from the D.I.) because we move a lot and didn't want to be hauling all around the country. I started shopping for a wall mount for our tv to save some space and to protect our tv from our little toddler.

I checked the selection at Wal-mart in the store and their wall mounts were priced at $95-$189. I was thinking, "Are you kidding me? It is just a piece of metal and some screws!"

$95 was definitely not in the budget so I decided to check online. I am not kidding you I found one on the Wal-mart website that looked just as good for $17.  I ordered it and it has been working great.

I have had many other similar experiences just like this.

So moral of the story is, when in doubt, check online!

Food Storage: List to build it at $10 per week

This is a very economical way to build your food storage slowly. My mom wanted this list so I thought I would share it with all of you too!

This list will build you a years worth of basic food storage for one person or a 3 month supply for a family of 4.

Week 1     2-48oz bottles of oil
Week 2     50 lb wheat (or 25 lb flour)
Week 3     4 lb macaroni and 4 lbs spaghetti
Week 4     6 cans meat or fish
Week 5     1-28 oz bottle peanut butter
Week 6     5 lbs honey
Week 7     25 lbs of sugar
Week 8     15 lbs dry milk
Week 9     8 cans fruit, vegetables, beans or soup
Week 10    6 cans meat or fish
Week 11    25 lbs Rice
Week 12    1 lb yeast
Week 13    10 lbs dry beans
Week 14    6 cans evaporated milk
Week 15    1-28 oz bottle of peanut butter
Week 16    8 cans fruit, vegetables, beans or soup
Week 17    25 lbs flour
Week 18    4 lbs macaroni and 4 lbs spaghetti
Week 19    8 cans fruit, vegetables, beans or soups
Week 20    1 lb baking powder, 1 lb baking soda, 5 lbs salt
Week 21    2 lb yeast
Week 22    2-48 oz bottles of oil
Week 23    15 lbs oats  
Week 24    2-3 lb shortening (cans)
Week 25    25 lbs flour
Week 26    8 cans fruit, vegetables, beans or soup
Week 27    25 lbs Rice
Week 28    1 gallon vinegar
Week 29    10 lbs dry p beans
Week 30    5 cans cream of chicken soup and  5 cans cream of mushroom soup
Week 31    5 lbs brown sugar
Week 32    10 lbs oats
Week 33    6 cans meat or fish
Week 34    25 lbs sugar
Week 35    50 lbs wheat (or flour)
Week 36    6 cans meat or fish
Week 37    1 lb yeast
Week 38    5 cans cream of chicken soup and 5 cans cream of mushroom soup
Week 39    2-48 oz bottles oil
Week 40    50 lb wheat (or flour)
Week 41    8 cans fruit, vegetables, beans or soup
Week 42    1 lb yeast
Week 43    8 cans fruit, vegetables, beans or soup
Week 44    2-3 lb shortening (cans)
Week 45    1-28 oz bottle peanut butter
Week 46    15 lbs dry milk
Week 47    15 gallons of water
Week 48    10 lbs dry beans
Week 49    2-48 oz bottles of oil
Week 50    1-28 oz bottle peanut butter
Week 51    6 cans evaporated milk
Week 52    5 cans cream of chicken soup and 5 cans cream of mushroom soup

Some weeks you will not have spent as much money, so set aside the extra for those items that will cost a little more. For every person in your family double or triple the amount of the item you are buying that week. Or if you are like me, you may just buy half of the amount listed and build food storage for several years. Do whatever fits your budget.

     

Mint.com: A Great Budgeting Tool

Soo I cannot take all of the credit for our ability to keep a budget. Mint.com is a FANTASTIC resource. There you can link up all of your bank accounts and it will track everything you spend. You can create a cutsomized budget on the website easily. Every couple days I will log into Mint and categorize our purchases and see how we are doing on our budget. It also lets you set financial goals and creates different graphs and pie charts showing different elements of your finances. I would not be able to budget without mint.com!