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...

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. ...

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...

Since 2006, I've had a freelance project that I work on twice a year. The work takes about two weeks, which would be a lot less if I didn't have a full-time job to do at the same time. It's given me my share of headaches, but for the most part, I've enjoyed the work. It gives me lots to read on local history, it's work I'm comfortable doing, and it pays decently. Now is the time of year that I have to work on it (hence my absence from this blog recently) but unlike in the past, I had a lot of trouble getting into the work this time. Rather than just diving right into it, I would find myself surfing the web, checking email, doing the dishes, you name it. My change in attitude could be due to a lot of things: I've got a toddler now to keep up with, my work schedule has changed, the format of the work has changed, and I've been feeling very behind in my housework. However, I think the ultimate reason may just be that for me, this project has run its cou...

This year has been tough on our pocketbook. My dad had major surgery , and because he was hospitalized three hours away, we spent a lot of money on fuel, fast food and motel rooms. Thankfully, he's finally home, and we're hopeful his health with continue to improve. Also, I got speeding ticket. I fully admit speeding, and I make no excuses, so I have no one to blame but myself, but that was still $150 we didn't really have. Plus, my daughter had hearing tests that are going to cost us a couple hundred (thankfully, though, her hearing is fine), our roof is leaking, and my husband has to have some costly dental work done. We've put a lot of things on our credit cards to accommodate, so, so far this year, we've made anti-progress. Here's hoping the rest of the year goes better.

I took a couple of days off from blogging, thanks to a hectic schedule and hopes of earning a little extra money for debt repayment. I did earn a little, which is nice. $16 and change so far, but I'm hoping to add to that. My plan to get up early before my daughter hasn't worked out so far, though. When she has a bad night, my husband and I do, too, and it's just too easy to stay in bed longer. It's something I need to do, though, not just to get work done, but to have time for exercising, too. (I really need to get in shape.)

For a few years now, I've had an idea for a small business. The idea is for a personal grocery shopper. For a fee, I would go to the grocery store for people, select items on their shopping list and deliver them right to their door. Normally when I'm kicking around this idea, I only get as far as thinking, "I wonder if it would work." I know similar businesses exist in other cities, so in some communities, it probably would work. I just don't know whether it would where I live. Yesterday though, I thought a little more of the logistics: Should I pay for the groceries upfront then have my clients reimburse me when I drop of their bags? If I do it that way, how can I guarantee that I'm not going to be stuck with a boatload of groceries I don't need because I get to their door and they don't have any money? How much would people around here pay for such a service? How would I charge, by the number of items they request? Would it be feasible to get two...

Back in the early 1990s, I landed my first full-time job at a newspaper. I used a Macintosh computer to build ads, and from there, my preference for Macs grew. I've owned PCs, mostly because they're easier on my pocketbook, but they get the job done too. I just like Macs better, so back in 2006, I bought one to use while I do freelance work. Now, it's 6 years old, a dinosaur in the tech world, so every now and then, I have to talk myself out of buying a new one; the old one does just fine -- for now. On Saturday, Woot had a good deal on a Macintosh computer -- roughly $250 cheaper than it would've been if it were being sold through Apple. It might've been refurbished -- I didn't hang around the site enough to see because the temptation to buy one for myself was pretty strong. It had the Lion operating system (mine has Snow Leopard) and more RAM than my current one. I told myself I'd go back to Woot at 10 p.m., and if the site wasn't sold out, I'd ...

I've been fighting the urge to buy for the past few days. I've found myself searching online for the following: A dishwasher. We have one, but it's old, noisy and unreliable, so I've been doing them by hand ever since we moved in. Until my daughter was born, that worked fine. Now, though, I feel like I just finish them, and within hours it needs to be done again. As I stood in the kitchen this morning looking at the dishes that have accumulated, I found myself thinking, "Boy, it sure would be nice if the dishwasher worked." A free-standing pantry. My kitchen is small and my cupboards are full. Therefore, I have a few appliances, such as a bread maker, that are stored on the countertop. I don't know that we have enough items to put in an extra pantry to justify the expense, but it sure would be nice to have some more counter space. Birthday and Christmas gifts. Five or six years ago, I would be out with other last-minute shoppers on Dec. 24. Over the p...

Since Thursday, I've finished a freelance project, finished getting stuff ready for the consignment sale, got most of the for-sale items dropped off, and I chopped, cooked and froze a bunch of fruits and veggies so they wouldn't spoil. I had hoped to get some frozen dinners made and put away as well, but hopefully I can tackle that today. I thought about gathering up the items for the consignment sale that my husband and I forgot to take with us, but I think I'll just plan to stick them in the next sale. I also need to bill my client for the freelance work I did; hopefully, I'll get my check before I need it to buy paint, but I'm not holding my breath. I'd rather not take the funds out of savings, but I will before I'll charge it.

Sorry, folks, a little later than usual posting today. I have several nephews who are in to sports, and when I can, I like to go watch them play. I also get a kick out of reading about them in the local paper. My subscription expired back in April, but by then, my nephews were done with all of their sports. I decided to let it lapse and thought I'd be fine without it. Now that the school year is starting up again and football season is right around the corner, I couldn't help myself. I spent another $29 to renew it for a year. I decided that it's worth the expense to me. However, now I have to offset the cost in my budget.

I've worked a little overtime this week, which will help with buying supplies to fix our house. When I was younger, I loved working overtime and getting a bigger check. These days, I'd really rather stay home and be a mom. However, I just keep telling myself that by going in on my day off, I'm helping my daughter, too. It reminds me of my husband: Last year, I spent seven weeks on maternity leave while he had to go back within two weeks of our daughter's birth. During those weeks when I was off and he wasn't, he, too, was feeling very much like he would rather stay home. To remind himself of why he was going, he clipped a photo of me holding our baby in the hospital in the days after her birth, and put it on the viser of his truck. Family can be a great motivator.

Few things inspire me more to do the work to get my debt paid off than seeing other people do the same thing. Sometimes on Saturday nights, I get a dose of inspiration through watching a show called "Princess" on CNBC. The premise of the show is that a woman who spends like there is no tomorrow gets a series of challenges designed to get her on track financially from Gail Vaz-Oxlade, a financial expert. I've seen Vaz-Oxlade in a similar series called "Til Debt Do Us Part," in which she helps couples do the same. I can't say I really get tips from the shows, but it does help to see others who owe large debt start feeling empowered to take control of it.