Yes, I woke up to a heavy rain! This is great it will mean snow in the mountains and we are basically fogged in but what a help to the winter wheat that is sown all over the hills around this place. I can hear the farmers singing!
I love the fact that other bloggers do the same things I do with their spare time, shows me that I am not the only nut on the planet. My Sissie and I were discussing blogs about saving money on cooking and at the grocery store, little secrets we have picked up over the last 26 years of trying to get out of debt. Obviously the little secrets did not work. What we finally came up with in our discussions is that Sis and I already do all those things. We have always been scratch cooks. We have always, shopped the sales for food and bought loss leaders and kept a pantry to save money. We both sew and mend and can make do and make something last. If I pick up a book on money saving strategies, I am already doing 90% of them and the other 10% I just would consider too cheap or unsanitary.
The main problem I see and I don't know if anyone else encounters this, but the only place to cut back is groceries or personal items. We have never had cable in the last 25 years. I keep cutting every expense I can and I always have. But when you have set bills, mortgage, taxes,car payments, doctors, you can't cut those. We try hard to keep our utilities down and we think about ways to save gas, but these things although they help have not really kept us from going into debt. I guess I can be as frugal as I want at the grocery store and it really won't help me make my car payment. When you have cut the budget back to the bare bones you still have the massive bills to pay and that is discouraging.
My question is, when you have already done all the cutting, what do you do?
I just received my internet bill and it was $24.99 down from $59.00. I just received my first reduced cell phone bill and it was $111.00 down from $185.00. My life insurance however went up from $30.12 to $46.50. So not everything is a win. By March first daughter # 2 will be off our car insurance so that will go down by at least $50.00 a month. I find that these breaks in adding to my budget help me get out of debt faster than a free can of tomatoes at the store. But I'll take the free can of tomatoes any day.
I was able to sew most of the day yesterday and I got a great deal done, but I have to do the same thing today and tomorrow. Taxes are for Friday and Saturday, yippee, I can't wait. (Heavy Sarcasm)
Trying to get caught up and I don't think it will ever happen, if it did I would complain about being caught up:) You gotta love me.
Have a great and productive day!
Kim
It's a hard question, and one that I question all the time, especially after reading financial books that say to do pretty much what I've already been doing. It's frustrating. But once you've cut it all to the bone, then just keep moving. Start shifting things and playing with the numbers we have. I will be the first to fess up that the last thing I need to cut from my budget is my cellphone, which just went up, from $77 to $89. Then again, it is my only personal bill, so that's what keeps it in existence.
ReplyDeleteTanner is that just for you? I would call them and see if you can get a discount through work or AAA or anything like that. Or threaten to change companies :)
DeleteI have cut everything I can. I cook from scratch, keep an eye on the utilities but I won't let mom freeze. Car insurance should go down since DS went on to his own policy but I need to log on to check it. I have reached a point where there really isn't anything I can cut so I am just changing the way I do things.
ReplyDeleteWe shop at three markets and buy what is cheapest at each(all within a few minutes of each other), I changed the back flood light to a motion detector one(found an adapter I had purchased and never used) so now it comes on when activated instead of staying on all the time. I have draft dodgers on all the doors and windows so I am open to any and all suggestions anyone has.
I think when you are at the barest of bones....then you have to love yourself enough to just say "this is good enough." And then you just keep going. It may not be the fastest race, but at least you are running it.
ReplyDeleteAfter we have cut basically everything we can the only thing we can do is figure out how to make more money. I actually enjoy living frugally but there are plenty of times that having extra money coming in really helps out (seems I always have a list of wants a mile long!).
ReplyDeleteI don't know if its possible here, but for those who receive bonuses or have employers who will pay out unused vacation / sick / personal time days, it would be a good practice to just plunk that $ down on debt. Including tax refunds. Because unless you are prepared to go out and earn more money somehow which may not be reasonable, especially for you Kim, as you work so hard already, it seems you could be in debt for many years to come. That is how we did it. For 3 years every bonus, every tax refund, every windfall no matter how small would go right to a debt and when that one was done we'd move on to the next, snowball like, and continue the practice. I would scrimp and save my vacation days so I could get the full two week allowed payout. That was almost $2000 by itself. Tax refunds between $2200 and $4500, and annual bonuses that could range between $1000 and $5000. It sucks to do it this way, seeing such large sums of money come and go in a day and eat pasta or rice every night but it works pretty quickly.
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