Getting ahold of it all

Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Lydia. I'm 27 years old, and my hubs and I have been married for 4 years as of yesterday. We have no children due to a disease I have called Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), but we do have 2 very sweet and large dogs and 2 cats. We live in Salem Oregon in a lovely house that we just adore, and we do our best at living within our means.

What does this mean? Well, first of all, we don't have any credit cards. We pay for everything straight from our checking account. We budget ourselves week per week and forecast our future finances so we have a big picture outlook. Hubs does the maintenance on our vehicles himself, and drives a motorcycle when the weather's good. We do have 2 vehicles that are financed, but those were unavoidable. We both work full time on different schedules in different towns and we just can't be a one vehicle household. However, the vehicles are our ONLY debt.

But mainly, the thing I'm most known for is the fact that I clip coupons. Like a mad woman, actually. I print them off the internet, I take them off of tear pads at stores, and I buy at least 3 copies of the Sunday paper every week (except weeks with national holidays because there are no coupons those weeks). I use coupons combined with store sales, store coupons, clearance deals, and rebates to get name brand products for cheaper than the store brands. Most of the time, I can find something for free, and then there's the real deals out there that you actually MAKE money by buying something. Stick with me and I'll show you how to do it. It's fun, it's legal, it's easy, and it just makes sense.

So, the other thing I do is keep a very organized Excel spread sheet that keeps track of our household finances. It's organized one week at a time and I have (hold on) a full year planned out financially. It's this spread sheet actually, that has caused me to finally break down and start this blog. I was going over it today in great detail and realized, I can save a LOT more money that I currently am. That should be "we" can save a lot more money, but I say "I" because I'm the one in my house that's responsible for the finances and the keeping track there of, but really, it's our money and it's something that both hubs and I need to work on. This paragraph should be example enough of how disorganized I can be sometimes!

That being said, I've decided that it's completely feasible to do much better that we're doing now. To start with, I'm going to see about trimming our utility bills as best I can. You might try this as well. Call your utility companies. See if there's any way that they can give you a discount on your services. Specifically, check with the phone company and the cable provider that you use. Bring up their competitor's prices and package deals and see if they'll match them. Ask for a loyal customer discount. If nothing else, ask them to go over your package with you and see if there's anything you can cut. We recently did this with our cable television and internet provider, and found out that if we added a land line, it would save us $10 every month. Yes, we ADDED a service, and it's now costing us LESS. This is only good for 12 months though, so we have it marked on our calendar as to when we need to cancel the land line and renegotiate a price. Be careful about those deals so that you don't stick yourself with a higher bill later on. I know I can still get rid of one of our two DVR boxes and discontinue some of the channels we get, so that's my goal for this week.

Another area that needs help is our meal budget. Last week, hubs and I were complaining that we had no food in the house and needed to go grocery shopping. To get together a list, we both went into the kitchen to see what we needed in order to prepare meals for a week. You know what we needed? Milk. We had enough food for plenty of meals! We just had to open our eyes and think about what could be made with what we already had on hand. So, you'd think our food budget for that week would have been next to nothing. No, it was nearly $150. Now granted, we had our anniversary in that 7 day time frame, so we went out to an expensive dinner, but still, that's way too much. And, to top it all off, I only made 3 of those meals that we said we had the food for. We ate out the rest of the time because I was too tired to cook or we didn't have enough time to wait for a home cooked meal.

If I had made up meals ahead of time and stuck them in the freezer, we could be eating in less than 20 minutes and saving money. That's hard for me to do since I work 7 days a week, but I know that I can carve time out of my days to do more than I do, and save money in the process. As well as being easier on our budget, eating at home is easier on the body. I can avoid all the salt and huge portions that restaurants give us, and be more organic than most restaurants as well.

This can be done. I know it can, because I read blog after blog of other families who are doing it quite successfully, and nobody has been committed yet! Frugal living doesn't have to stop in the kitchen either. I have well over a year's supply of toiletries including shampoo, conditioner, soap, body wash, deodorant, tooth paste, tooth brushes, make-up, hair color, eye drops, pain killers, sanitary pads, tampons, toilet paper, face wash, the list goes on and on. Take Christmas for example. I was able to pull off Christmas for less than $100, shopping for 15 people, and they were good presents. I can do nice gifts for birthdays, baby showers, any event requiring a present, for very little money. Living frugally can be done. You have to be dedicated to it, but it's totally possible.

So, I promise that the next post will be shorter, more to the point, and hopefully more specific. Until then, I'm off! Have a lovely Friday.