Going for Not Broke

I made it through yesterday without spending anything, which, of course, I should be able to do for just one day. The real test will be when I get through an entire week without shelling out any dough. I think all of the incidental spending I do contributes the most to us not being able to make any more progress than we do, and if I don't cut it out, there's no way I can make my goal of being debt free by the time my daughter starts school. Odds are, she'll start school in fall 2016. That's just four years and two months away. I've got a lot of debt to whittle away between now and then.

Yesterday's post about taking a spending break weighed on my mind for the rest of the day. I kept thinking, "Why wait? Why put off taking a break from spending?" So, I've decided to make today a dry run. I will make a conscious effort not to spend anything at all, not even pocket change to buy a Diet Coke out of the breakroom at work. Tomorrow, I'll need to put gas in my car, and my iDisk, which I use for freelance work will cease to exist on the 30th, so I plan to go ahead and try out the GoDaddy replacement, but I can consciously do this for just one day. I say I'm making a "conscious" effort not to spend because, while I know I've had days when I spend nothing, I can't say when they were. If I've got change on me, I don't stop myself from taking a walk down to the breakroom when I get bored at work or when my eyes start to get a little tired. Making not spending anything my goal for the day, hopefully, will help me to think twi...

I've read several articles lately about people taking spending breaks during which they buy absolutely nothing. Not gas for their car, not food for their pantry, nothing. I've considered setting aside a week to see if I could meet such a challenge, but to not spend anything, not even buy a soda out of the vending machine at work, sounds a little daunting. Maybe I should start small -- spending nothing for a day, then two, and maybe by day three my momentum will be building enough that I could stretch it into a weeklong endeavor. I have no idea how long it's been since I've gone a whole week without spending a cent. Right now, I'm eyeing the second full week in July to give it a try.

On Saturday, I went to an arts and crafts festival to sell some beaded jewelry I made. I didn't take much because I didn't have much, but I sold five items and made $19. Unlike many other festivals, the booth space was free. I'm hoping I can get a little more stuff made so that I can eventually open a store front on Etsy , a website that sells handmade items and supplies for making handmade crafts. It will take me a while to get enough stuff to turn a profit; beads can be kind of pricey. But it was encouraging that people were interested in my jewelry. Sidenote: It's Another Woot-Off Typically, the Woot website features a single product at a discount each day. Once the product sells out, Woot waits until midnight Central time to feature another item. Every now and then, though, the site has a Woot-Off, when another item is posted as soon as one runs out. I love keeping track of Woot-Offs to see if anything that I can use for gifts comes up for sale.

I can't hardly wait to see my phone bill next month. Because a technician had to come out to our house to make the adjustment to our Internet, we'll probably have a rather outlandish service fee for this month, but next month ... well, I'm very much looking forward to it. Not only will it be under $75 for the first time in years, it will even be under $50. The cost of the service is usually $48. For the first year, though, it will be only $25. Of course, once all of the taxes and surcharges and whatever else they add in are accounted for, I'm sure the bill will be a lot closer to $35 than to $25, but either way, it's still better than $110.

People who read this blog regularly might remember that one of my freelance sources dried up. I've been dragging my feet about finding a replacement for it, and there are quite a few reasons for that: I'd like to concentrate on my hobby, beadwork. I really liked the freelance work I was doing through that company (Demand Studios) and still have a slight degree of hope that maybe, just maybe, there will be more work coming soon. However, DS has changed how it handles projects, and as a result, hasn't needed my skills for about six months now. It's probably time for me to just write DS off. I've tried a few other places that just didn't pan out, and the thought of going back to scouring the web for legitimate, reliable opportunities just makes me tired. I'd rather spend my time at home playing with my daughter rather than working. Well, it's time I weigh my goal against all those reasons for not replacing the work. The hardest reason to get past...

As I've been planning for months, I finally called my phone company, dropped the landline and boosted our Internet speed. Unlike my previous calls to the phone company, the woman I talked to never once tried to talk me out of dropping my phone service or selling me a "cheaper option." I did, however, spend more than 30 minutes on hold waiting for a customer service rep, which was starting to wear my patience thin, but if it results in overall savings, I can take it.

I've been looking at my recipe books when I can to see if I can come up with some additional recipes that I can make in big batches so that one cooking session will net a meal or two and some frozen dinners. For this round of grocery shopping, I plan to make: Roast Chicken with Potatoes and Carrots (a recipe I found in one of my Weight Watchers cookbooks) Mexican Chicken baked potato (also from WW, but I'll need to make it slightly different for my husband's share) Turkey lasagna Scrambled eggs and potatoes Hamburger stew (same as I made last time) Out of last time's batch, the only thing I turned into frozen dinner entrees was the stew and beans. We had the leftovers of the hamburger quiche for an at-home lunch, and due to an unusually hectic schedule, I never made the meatloaf, but I still have the stuff to make it.

I just noticed this is post number 100. Whoo hooo! I found an even cheaper solution to my home Internet. Currently, we pay $110 a month to the phone company for our home phone and Internet service and $28 a month to the cable company for basic cable. My plan was to switch our Internet to the cable company, which would cost about $65 a month for the level of Internet speed I'd like to get, then cut out TV cable service and the home phone. That would eliminate the $110 phone bill all together, but what we pay to the cable company would a little more than double. To get TV service, I bought this: I love the Roku, which streams TV shows and movies to the TV. It doesn't require a subscription to a service to stream -- there are quite a few free options -- but to increase variety and to have access to new TV shows, I sprang for subscriptions to Netflix and HuluPlus. (Until my membership to Amazon Prime expires this coming December, I also have a whole additional set of shows ...

I'm extra late posting today. My baby girl woke up sick today, and nothing has gone like I thought it would. I feel so helpless when she's sick. I really hope she's feeling better soon. Because I haven't had a chance to really think about what I wanted to say today, this post is just a hodgepodge of thoughts. I haven't been doing any freelance work lately. The reasons are many, but the bottom line is that I just haven't made the time. However, I need to get  back to earning some extra money. Even a little bit can make a difference in the long run. I watched a couple of episodes of "Extreme Couponing" today, and yet again, I was astounded at the savings the people featured managed to get. One thing I like about the show is that it doesn't glamorize couponing at all. One of the episodes I saw today said one shopper spent 13 hours preparing for one trip. A shopper in an episode I saw a few weeks ago had a woman in it who spent 12 hours in the sto...

I had at one point decided against making any changes to my home computer, an iMac I purchased back in 2006. However, as I came across more and more stuff online that didn't work properly because my browsers were too old and couldn't be upgraded because I was still running the Tiger OS, I decided to spend the $30 for an upgrade to Snow Leopard, and I bought another memory stick to increase the speed. (I can further upgrade to OS Lion for another $30, but my system is still running good, everything online works. I think I'll use it as-is for as long as possible.) I found some information online that says my graphic design software should still work if I install the Rosetta option in Snow Leopard, but I just got the computer system upgraded and haven't had a chance to fire up Adobe yet. That's a task for this weekend. Fingers crossed it works. The $30 system upgrade and $50 memory upgrade ($80 total) is a lot cheaper than buying a new computer, which would've ...

The checkout line got me -- again . On Tuesday when I picked up my daughter from day care, I was handed a note stating she was out of diapers and formula, so my first stop before I headed home was Walmart. While standing in the checkout line, I was intrigued by a magazine cover that says it offers hundreds of ways to live on "nothing." Well, I know I cannot live on nothing -- not without going off the grid, raising my own food, and making a plethora of lifestyle changes I'm not prepared to make, anyway -- but I figured it would at least feature some tips on how to get a few free items. So I dropped the magazine in the cart and shelled out an extra $2.99. After a good 20 or 30 minutes spent trying to find the corresponding article, I gave up. No one article gives you tips on either living on nothing or getting anything for free. Sprinkled throughout the magazine, though, were tips on spending less. And even then, few of the tips -- if any -- were even useful to me. T...

I've been a little behind on a handful of home tasks, including clipping coupons. On Saturday, I took the time to get caught up. While thumbing through one of the circulars, I came across an add for a Loreal rewards program , which awards registrants with a free box of hair color after they've purchased five. I love free stuff. According to the website, registrants can also get other perks. I just signed up, so I'm not sure what those are yet, but I'm looking forward to them. According to the info in the circular, participants may receive only two free products during the duration of the program, but the program ends Dec. 31. No more often than I color my hair, I probably will get only one free box, but hey, I'll take it.

I've finally decided to pull the plug on my landline phone. As I mentioned in a post back in February, I've toyed with the idea for quite some time. But now, we've decided to finally take action. Right now, our Internet connection is through the phone company, which has held me back from making the change. But we've decided to move our Internet to the cable and just get rid of the landline. The Internet itself will cost more through the cable company, but overall, it will still be a savings. Our cable bill will go up $60, but we'll eliminate the $110 monthly bill from the phone company.

Because my daughter has been sick for part of last week, I didn't get around to blogging, but thankfully, she's feeling much, much better now. I didn't get to spend as much time as I had hoped gathering recipes for my first run at making my own frozen dinners. I had envisioned finding things like a low-fat lasagna, a way to make lean burgers on the go, etc. Instead, here is my list for the first one: • Ground turkey meat loaf and veggies. • Crustless cheeseburger quiche. (Also made with ground turkey.) • Hamburger stew. • Beans (per suggestion from Steve in my last post.) Ideas I've seen online include labeling and dating everything before putting it in the freezer. I don't know what the best marker for that is, because it needs to be washable so that I can reuse the dishes. However, labeling won't be absolutely necessary until I have enough stuff in the freezer that I forget what's what. I've got time to figure it out.

I've been trying to give some thought to what kinds of foods would make good homemade frozen dinners.  (My first post on the topic is here .) Tomorrow is grocery day, so I'd like to have an idea what kinds of things I can make to make sure I have all the ingredients. So far, I'm planning stew (per my husband's request) and a crustless cheeseburger quiche. Hopefully, I can think of another seven options between today and tomorrow.

A quick recap : I bought a lightweight TV because articles I have read about older, heavier sets falling over onto young children had me worried about my daughter's safety. However, my husband and I worried the new TV would be even easier to knock over because it is so lightweight. Therefore, I had been shopping around for a new stand to which the TV can be mounted. Well, after shelling out more than I had planned on the TV, I was further dismayed to see that the stands that appealed to me all cost more than $100. I could find a cheaper one, but I wanted one similar to what we have because it has cabinet doors. So, I took a stroll through the electronics department at Target to see if I could find something that would allow us to install a mount on the cabinet we have for less money. I didn't see anything that would work like that, but I did find this strap, which costs less than $20: It screws into our current cabinet and the wall behind it, holding the whole setup sec...

A few months ago, I was considering buying a new computer -- I thought I needed to upgrade to continue my freelance work. As I posted here , I found through further research that a new computer is not absolutely necessary at this point. I can get by longer with what I have. However, for the past few days, I've been really wanting to buy one anyway. My home computer, purchased in 2006, cannot process everything online as it should. Most websites still display just fine, but just knowing that the day is coming when most websites will be too advanced for the software I makes me want a more current one. Hopefully, this passes soon. I cannot afford one right now, especially since my husband and I know that our heating/air unit might not make it through the summer. Gotta fight the urge.

Every so often, my electricity provider sends me a letter saying I should sign up for its guaranteed bill program. With this option, customers pay the same amount every month based on an average of their past usage. The amount the customers pay is the guaranteed to be the same for 12 months, regardless of whether our electricity usage or the rate increases. Right now, we do something similar. We pay an average, but it fluctuates based on the previous 12 months. For instance, in June, we'll pay an average based on usage from last June through May. In July, the amount we pay will be based on our usage from last July through this June. There is a lot less fluctuation from month to month than we'd have if we paid only for what we use every month, but we still have some. The benefit of the guaranteed program is that, should our usage or rate increase to beyond what we're scheduled to pay, we never owe the difference. At the end of the 12 months, the utility company considers...