Going for Not Broke

( Chance Agrella / FreeRangeStock.com ) I did well for a little while; I kept my spending in check for a whole whopping week, and then I fell back into a few bad habits. I am determined not to let the bad habits win. I don't really know what it's going to take to get myself on track for more than "a little while," but I want to keep working at it. The holidays are coming. My plan: A credit-free holiday this year. If I can pull it off, it will be a first for me since about 1994.

( Chance Agrella / FreeRangeStock.com ) Thanks to a lack of discipline two paychecks ago, my last paycheck is very tight. So, I sat down and figured out to the penny what I can afford to spend on gas, quick fill-in trips to the grocery store, and birthday gifts for a niece and nephew without whipping out a charge card. And then Saturday happened. I went to the store to get said gifts and pick up a can of peas for a homemade stew, then swung by my sister's house for an hour or so to let my daughter and her daughter play together for an hour or so. Afterward, I wasn't feeling well, so for the first time since I'd renewed my resolve to pay down our debt, and I swung through a fast-food restaurant on our way home. The guilt kept me from buying drinks, so I did minimize the damage. But now, I've got to wrangle an extra $9 from my budget. I'm hoping either gas or fill-in groceries won't cost as much as I'd budgeted. And maybe, just maybe, if I...

I'm no where near where I hoped I'd be financially by this point. Have I paid off anything? Nope. I won't use the phrase, "it's not for a lack of trying," because I know good and well that I have not tried as hard as I should. Today, as I left work and headed to the day care to pick up my daughter, I really, really wanted to swing into a fast-food restaurant and pick up dinner. I didn't want to cook, I didn't want to clean up afterward, and french fries just sounded oh so good. But I passed them all — Wendy's, Burger King, Sonic — went home and opened up a can of ravioli for my daughter and me. Too often, though, that's not the path I choose. It's easy for me to tell myself, "Well, we'll eat out this one time, and then we'll eat at home tomorrow." But of course, when "tomorrow" comes, I give in to the temptation again. I really do want to pay off our debt, but I think at least part of the chal...

We cancelled our cable a few years ago, opting instead for a digital antenna and a Roku streaming player, reducing our monthly bill to just the cost of Netflix and HuluPlus, which gives my family and me access to the shows on ABC, NBC and Fox we enjoy (and a few other networks, to boot). Netflix and HuluPlus, for us, are great, and local channels through the digital antenna were much crisper (though we have to reposition it every few weeks to keep channels. I still don't understand why.) But every now and then, I'd feel a little nostalgia for when we had more viewing options. So, after several months of seeing the CBS All Access app in our Roku Channel Store, I decided to give it a try. Overall, I figured we'd get enough use out of it to justify $5.99 a month. As it turns out, though, we didn't. We watched a few episodes of " The Big Bang Theory ," but then sat there looking at it thinking, "Now what?" In the time we'd been watching CB...

I enjoy watching basketball, but I LOVE watching my nephews play. I try to go to every game I can. Over the past couple of weeks, though, the schedule has gotten crazy. Some weeks, there has been a game every night. That can be tough on the pocketbook, both for the gas used to get there and for the admission fees. So, I've skipped a few games, just getting an update via text message at the end of each quarter. Not fun, but it's the grownup thing to do.

Buying laundry soap bugs me. Big time. I despise that without fail, every time I buy it, my grocery bill is roughly $10 higher. Several months ago, though, I read in the Everyday Cheapskate column  in my local newspaper that the columnist, Mary Hunt, makes her own laundry soap. The cost, Hunt said, was pennies per load, though the column didn't give details on how to make it. So I did a web search and found that there are several recipes out there. Some create liquid laundry soap, but I opted for a dry laundry soap recipe I found at DIYNatural.com . (You can view the recipe here .) So far, this experiment is going well, though I notice some dinginess on a few clothing items that I didn't notice before with store-bought detergents. The next time I make the soap, I'm going to add an extra 1 cup of Borax to the mix to see if it makes a difference. I'll follow up with another post afterward to share whether the extra cup works.