Going for Not Broke

Photo by  Artistic Operations / Pixabay.com My husband’s car is on its last ... tire? It had been a good, reliable vehicle for years, but it is officially at the point now when it costs more to repair it than it is worth. So, rather than pump a bunch of money into it, we’ve spent just enough to keep it on the road. Our hope is that we can make it last until we paid down enough debt that we can buy another vehicle. But now, we’ve reached the point where we might not have a choice much longer. And as we job hunt, we feel a sense of urgency to have a second reliable vehicle. What if my husband and I get jobs in different cities? Carpooling to work won’t likely be feasible. So on my to-do list: Try to assess what the least amount a dependable vehicle would cost, and figure out a way to get us to that magic number as quickly as possible. I’m not sure how to go about the first part, though: figuring out the minimum we’d need to spend for a dependable vehicle ... the ...

( Stuart Miles / FreeRangeStock.com ) Question: Someone gives you a present. You open it, give the gifter a sincere smile, and say, "Thank you," but you know that gift is something you'll never use. Not once. What do you do with it later? Me? I keep them. I just can't shake the feeling of guilt that goes along with regifting or selling them. As a result, my family and I have lots of items we either haven't used in years or have never used at all: An electric knife, electric griddle, a big mixer, something called Yonanas. The list goes on and on. But the bottom line is, Yonanas and electric knives don't fit my family's lifestyle. They never have, and I doubt they ever will. So I think I might need to get over feeling like it would be ungrateful to get rid of them and post them in places like Craigslist or some of those online sales sites on Facebook for sale. That way, at least we can have the cash to pay toward part of our debt. Wouldn't...

I'm fighting the urge to buy new carpeting. ( Merelize / FreeRangeStock.com ) When I did some online research on this topic, most of what I found involved impulse buys in a department store — handbags, dresses, and shoes. Those have never really been a problem for me. I avoid overspending on those items by avoiding the department store altogether. Problem solved. Well, almost. I do still have to fight the temptation to spend money I don't have, but it's on more pricey items than a new handbag (well, the kind of handbags I'd buy, anyway). No, I have to fight the temptation to upgrade my computer or smartphone. When I find out we might have a little extra cash coming up, rather than thinking, "Hey, we can pay off X credit card!" I think, "I wonder if that's enough to replace the living room carpet." Don't get me wrong. We could use new carpet. My husband and I have lived in this house for nearly 16 years, and we've never repl...

( Chance Agrella / FreeRangeStock.com ) I've been away from this blog for a long, long while, but my husband and I have still been slowly winnowing down our debt. We still have a long way to go, though. So much for my hope to have everything but the house paid off before my daughter started school . We need to get even more serious about getting rid of our debt. Due to ongoing hardships in the industry we work in, my husband and I are both unemployed at the moment. We're OK for now, because we each get a severance. We hope to have jobs before that runs out, but we'll be economizing in the meantime, just in case we don't. We need to make what we're getting right now last as long as possible. So, our journey continues. I am always on the lookout for coupons, but because we do most of our grocery shopping at Aldi , the coupons we can use are few and far between. The longer our joblessness lasts, the more likely I'll be to cut luxuries like our TV subsc...

( 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.

With tons of work due, I had the chance to get a little overtime as the holidays approached, a rarity for me. I was looking forward to being able to have a little extra that can be sent toward my bills. But, that's not how it all worked out. Instead, I had emergency surgery, thanks to a very angry appendix, and wound up missing a week of work. I have no idea the cost of the surgery, the resulting hospital stay, follow-up visits to the doctor and other connected expenses, but it's a far cry from the extra I thought I'd be sending toward my debts. Oh, and then my oven went out. Yep, my budget plans for the next few months have taken quite a hit. My short-term goal is simple, to make it through the next few months without charging. Hopefully the surprises end there. Oh, and Happy New Year to all.

I sat among my mom, a couple of her brothers and both of her sisters as they reminisced recently about their childhood. Having grown up in rural Oklahoma at a time and place when most families had their own garden, mom and her siblings laughed as they talked about the foods they ate. My grandma did not buy tomato sauce in cans, boxes of single-serving packs of yogurt and frozen pizzas. She bought gunny sacks of flour, large boxes of non-instant oatmeal and beans. Lots and lots of beans. They got their veggies from their own garden but did little canning, so the greens they ate came from in-season produce only. "We were all skinny back then," one of my uncles said, and his siblings agreed with hearty laughs. I couldn't help but be envious of what my grandma's food bill back then must've looked like. She didn't buy foods in convenient packaging. She bought a limited array of staples for cooking. I doubt she ever heard the phrase, "What's for...

$5 and change ... That's how much money my daughter has in her piggy bank. It is also thousands of dollars above and beyond what my husband and I have because of the years we've allowed stupidity to rule when it comes to our finances. To get to the point where we're making decent headway on paying down our debt, I know what we've got to do: Make -- and stick to -- a "no exceptions" policy. In the past, I've found that our efforts to eliminate our debt often get thwarted by the phrase, "Well, just this one time ... ," which is often followed by phrases such as, "we'll dine out," "I'll charge these clothes," etc. If we did, in fact, limit such actions to "just one time," we could still make good headway, but we never do. Instead, making the "one-time" exception just makes it easier to buy restaurant food or to charge clothes or other nonessentials a second time, then a third, and so on. ...

I've been away from this blog for a while. It's been a time issue, plus a "boy am I bummed I haven't made more headway" issue. But I'm still here, still trying to beat the debt. More posts to come.

Back in December, I signed up to work small jobs through MTurk (a site owned by Amazon.com ). I've completed several jobs there, and in total, before taxes have earned $78 and change. Overall, I have a positive outlook on working through the site, but my expectations weren't that grand going into it. I didn't expect to make what would equal minimum wage -- or even close to it. I looked at it as a way to generate a little extra income, not to get rich. Just as expected, I didn't make what would've averaged out to minimum wage. (I wish I had kept track of how much time I spent working for that $78; that way I could average it out and provide an estimate. I'll keep that in mind for when I work through the site again.) The verdict: Because the tasks are generally short, MTurk is great for earning a little income when you have 30 minutes or so at a time to spare. But be prepared for it to take a while to accrue even $20 (unless you qualify for some of the ...

My car has been acting up lately. I cannot tell you how much I wish I could afford something else without having to go further into debt. In order to get back and forth to work, ultimately, that may be exactly what we do. But I'm calling that Option Z. For now, I've been doing what I can to earn a little extra to send to our creditors. I signed up for MTurk , a site through which users can do a wide range of tasks for pay, through Amazon a few weeks ago, and after the latest car trouble, I decided to put the site to use. Here's my take on MTurk: You would have to have little debt AND a rather low cost of living to be able to make a living working through the site. For my current purpose -- earning as much extra as I can to help pay down debt -- it's OK, but I won't be reaching my goal anytime soon. Most tasks are time-consuming so it would be tough to even be able to earn minimum wage doing them. You can qualify for higher paying tasks, but I don'...

Every now and then, I go online and find a calculator that will breakdown how long it will take to pay down my debt. I like to see it amortized so that I can see at a glance how many months it will take for me to knock milestone amounts, such as $1,000, $5,000, etc., from my total debt. One of the best calculators I've found is at What's The Cost . This one gives users the options to see how long it will take and the total interest they'll pay if the take on their debt by balance and by interest. The problem, though, is that sometimes, once I see that how long it's likely to take, I start feeling rather overwhelmed by what we owe. That's what happened to me last night. I ran my debt on the calculator right before bed, then I had trouble sleeping. I'm trying very hard not to feel overwhelmed but rather feel spurred to action.

I mentioned in a previous post  that I haven't been showing much self discipline financially so far this year. Thankfully, for now, I'm having a spell of doing better. Sitting down and seeing exactly where I am helped get me back on track. Hopefully, I'll continue to do better. First off, I'm going scale back the anniversary party  I was going to hold for my folks to just a big family dinner. I was going to do games with door prizes, but now, I've decided to just make lasagna using my mom's best recipe. It will still be costly, because it will be dinner for at least 20 people, but it will still be easier on my pocketbook. The next thing I hope to do is to figure my checkbook* daily. I have a tendency to try to keep track of it mentally, then when I start to fear that I might've left something out of my mental total, I'll charge necessities, like gas or diapers. So far, for the last week, I've done better with my checkbook. And knowing exactly whe...

For several years, my husband and I have kept track of our total debt and spending with spreadsheets charting what goes up and what goes down. On a monthly basis, we would get together and look at where we stand financially. My thinking was that seeing just how much we owe would force us to keep that total in mind and strengthen our resolve to pay it down. Overall, I think it's helped, but it alone hasn't been enough to inspire us to eliminate all of our bad financial behaviors. If it were, we would've been a lot better off several years ago. It has, however, inspired us to be a little better about our spending. I know this because we haven't been as diligent about the spreadsheets since our daughter was born. I say "we" because my husband is further behind in his share than he typically is, too, but I haven't really even tried to keep up with my part, especially this year after all of the long trips back and forth to visit my dad in the hospital. Even...

See that wonky-looking stuff on the right of the screen? That's what my iMac is doing these days. All in all, I can't complain. I bought it in 2006, so I got seven good years out of it. I was in the middle of my twice-yearly freelance project when it started this, and at first, rebooting would get rid of it for a little bit. Not so much now. I want to buy a new computer, but I won't. I have a laptop that works fine but runs much, much slower. I'm in the process of transferring all of my necessary files to flash drives. Scribus Update I had mentioned in a previous post that I was going to use Scribus as I worked on my freelance project this time to see how well it worked. I knew my computer's days were numbered, and rather than buy Adobe InDesign again (which I'd have to do because CS2, the Creative Suite version I have, will not work on a new operating system) I thought I'd see what my other options were. Well, it was slow going key command...