Say a prayer!

Ok, say a prayer! My husband's review is tomorrow. Every year he has worked with this particular company he has gotten a 3% bonus. That is the highest bonus they hand out. It means about $1500 after taxes for us if he gets this. I am soooo hoping he gets another 3% He will know tomorrow if he gets it..but we will not see the money for about 6-8 weeks. So say a prayer for him! This will help build our money to slam the credit card :) Well, it least that is what he said he would do with it. I hope he will do that along with our money over our $1000 ef fund. We will see!

More good news!

We got a call from our bank today..the one we are refinancing our house through. I assumed he was calling to set up the closing date. Supposedly that will happen sometime next week. But what was really good to hear was that our interest rate dropped another 1/2%! Our mortgage payment (which includes taxes and insurance) will go from 1,180to 1,030! As well as from a 30 year to a 15 year! I am totally stoked about that! Prior to this percentage drop..we were looking at it being about $15.00 more than we were paying. We simply felt that was worth it considering we were going from 30 to 15 yrs. Well, actually it is more like 11 years because we pay bi-weekly. I feel the sun shining today!

Hurry up Bank People!

We applied for a refi with our mortgage company. We are changing from a 30 year mortgage to a 15 year. We are also lowering out interst rate by nearly 2%. We applied for this refi back in the beginning of October! Still waiting on the final paperwork. It is frustrating to wait this long. My husband phoned yesterday and they said we are now in phase 2 of 4 phases. They warned us it could be a 90 day delay due to the overwhelming amount of people trying to take advantage of the lower rates, but this just feels ridculously slow...especially since it is a straightforward refi. We are already customers with this mortgage company. They take our mortgage payment out of our paycheck every two weeks and we have been with them for over 7 years and have never missed a payment. We are not asking for more money than we simply owe therefore there is no appraisal required.

Ughhhh.....I just want it overwith and done. But of course, they are really in no rush...I mean they lose money right!

Cute envelopes!

Who says budgeting can't be cute and fun! Check out these envelopes.

I personally do not do the envelope system. My husband and I each have an allowance. My amount covers the groceries, misc needed household things, and any extras I desire....such as a new book or makeup. My husband's allowance is his food money and misc. splurge money. His is quite small but he feels it is enough. Anyway, I just keep that set amount of cash in my wallet and when it is gone it is gone. We both feel debiting gas is more convenient than paying cash for gas in our cars. Other that that we do not debit anything.

Still, if I did do envelopes..those babies are cute!

Our family could get bigger.

Strange things have been happening in my family and today was a kicker. My brother called and asked me to watch his 1 year old daughter. His wife has been leaving for weeks and coming home for a day or so then going a-wall again. She has no family that she in contact with and she has left one baby already with an ex-boyfriend. However, my brother is not the best fit for a caring parent either. He has some issues as well.

There is really more to their story than I could share here, but basically there is a good chance they will both not care for their baby and leave her to my mom. However, my mom and I spoke frankly tonight and I can tell she thinks I am a better fit for raising my niece than she is...she loves being a grandma and would like to remain grandma.

Months before my niece was born my husband and I discussed this possibility. We both already had a feeling the parents would not be the kind to stick around. Now that the mother is starting to leave her constantly it is looking more and more like that is a real possibility.

After this week's events it is kind of creepy to know that my husband and I have decided to go forwarded on doing our best to add rooms without adding debt to our home. Sort of like God is preparing us for this very real possiblity. Now more than ever, the need for rooms is beginning to appear. I assured my mom that I would take my niece in a heartbeat if my brother wanted me too. I hope it doesn't come to that. I hope and pray he grows up some and takes care of his daughter, but if he can't I totally will. I am just going to pray that God allows what is best for the baby to happen and for security to come to my niece quickly.

Walking tall!

Sorry I have not posted much, but honestly I have not had anything new to tell ya! I must say since we paid our cards off it feels SOOOOO GOOD to be credit card debt free! We have been living out of our pantry this week. I feel more and more determined to keep up my tight hold on our spending now more than ever! Paying stuff down is motivating. We have just stayed put most of the week. We also worked a little on our bathroom, but this was projects that we had budgeted for and/or already had on hand. Just chillin around the house, homeschooling the boys, and staying out of the stores!

Oh, have you heard of the lady who has set a goal of spending no more than 1500 for the year on her groceries/toiletries. That is one tall order, but cool to watch her try!

Are you hurting the economy?

Well according to Fox our frugal habits are killing the economy. Maybe so...but I am marching on! No longer will I help the the big credit company CEO's line their pockets. Instead, I vow to pay off debt and save to line my own!

How about you?

Trapped!

Want an easy way to save some dough! Stay home!

We have been trapped due to the lovely ice/snow storm sweeping across the nation for the past two days. I am running low on diapers! But more snow is on the way this evening. I really need to get to Aldi's if I want to stick to my food budget. Anytime I shop anywhere else my money does not go quite as far. So I really hope I can get there this evening and get the rest we need for this week. Especially diapers!

Are you trapped with this storm?

Tax documents are in!

We have recieved all of our necesary tax documents and have packaged them up to go my mother-in-law. She runs her own buisness doing peoples taxes. We get the nice family discout---Free! Plus we get the fast family speedy service---jump to the head of the line!

She is so fast, we will likely see our stuff done with-in the week. I was looking in our quicken accounts and discovered we received nearly 8,000 back last year.

If we get roughly the same back this year then we will be able to pay off our last credit card and a personal family loan. We borrowed money from my parents last year with the deal that we would not have to pay them the $1,000 back until tax season. We had a tree in our back yard that had to be removed. It was a huge pin oak and the roots were hitting the foundation of our house. It cost a little over $1,000 the remove it and rather than putting it on a card they were gracious enough to offer us a free of interest loan with the condition we would pay them with our tax refund this year. The other personal family loan is to another set of grandparents. We bought our house 5 years ago and it needed new windows really bad. We did not have the money for them and the granparents insisted on paying for them. We made the same deal with them, that we pay them $1,000 each year at tax time. So this year we will pay them $1,000 and owe $2,000 still. We have never not paid them so everyone is fine with these loans. Still, I will be glad to be rid of them just the same!

You may be wondering what we did with last years tax money. Well we paid our personal loan and we paid off a credit card with it then too. We were down to no credit card debt. We racked up our credit card again redoing two bathrooms in our house and taking a vacation to the beach. We were not planning to spend so much on our bathrooms. It is sort of a funny story I will share in another post.

But I will be honest, we are bad about clearing our credit card debt just to turn around and jack it up again.

We hope to be different this year. We plan to do no more remodeling to our house that we can not pay cash for immediately. We have no plans of anything big, but we do need some small things here and there. Trim in a few places, one bathroom needs a new light fixture/mirror and faucet. It also needs painted. But nothing major like we have done in the past.

We also are not planning to go on any major vacations. We do hope to take our kids on a few day trips like to an amusement park or water park. But no big trips like to the beach or on our annual family renunions to Gatlinburg TN.

We have watched a lot of Dave Ramsey videos and are now seeing the error of our ways. We no longer wish to live paycheck to paycheck. So even if appears that we are one of those poeple who will not succeed at this debt free thing I hope you will stick with us through this journey. I started this blog for an incentive....to have people prod us along and keep us on the straight but narrow path to a debt free life!

Vote for the Plasty Awards

Be sure and check out Dave Ramsey's 2nd annual Plasty awards. Theres are some cute good ideas for how to hack up your credit card. My favorite is the 'Death by Dominos"

Claifornian's getting IOU!

Oooh I would be so steamed! I hope this does not become a trend. I agree wholeheartedly that this will cause a lot of distrust among taxpayers like myself who allow the state to hold more than I owe! As soon as we are debt free we intend to change our holdings....now I am definately going too!

Nothing much to report.

So far so good. I did go over my food budget, which I have not done for the past three months. But this week was an exception since we had some major food allergies to deal with. Basically our son can have very little processed food. Nothing containing Milk, Soy, or Corn. So I will now focus on purchasing more fresh fruits and vegetables and cooking supplies. His bread will need to be homemade and most of our sauces like spaghetti sauce and apple sauce will need to come from scratch. Most store bought canned items contain corn syrup or soy products to maintain flavoring and freshness.

We were already contemplating a garden...so I was excited to see this post by Oh My Aching debts on ordering seed catalogs. Since we homeschool, we feel growing from seeds will be a neat project anyway. We plan to put our boys to work in the designing and building of the raised planter beds this spring.

Monday is payday....so I will be putting up our two week budget and show what debts we will be attacking. I am hoping to be able to get our EF to 500 and pay off our Khols credit card bill of $200. Then we will be on to our second credit card, which is around 4,000. We should have it gone with our tax refund. After that is when the fun will begin! Getting rid of either one car payment or my student loan. So come back and check out the budget!

So much for snowflaking this week.

Well, I reported a few days ago that I was psyched to have close to $50 left in my food budget. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case. We hit a little snag in our menu this week. Our youngest son was diagnosed at the doctor's office with more severe allergies than we realized. I knew he was allergic to milk, but felt he was likely allergic to something else due to his breakouts. But I could not figure out what it was so we had him tested.

We saw the allergist yesterday and they performed the skin test right away. It appears he is not only severely allergic to milk, but also corn and soy! His condition is pretty bad in that the ordered us to always keep an Epipen around. We also had blood work done to back it up. She explained some things to me about allergies and it is truly important that I eliminate all this from his diet with a hope of introducing to him in about 3-5 years. Our hope is that his memory cells will have died off and he will no longer have reactions to such food. The key to to this is really removing it from his diet as much as possible.

I was feeding the kid lots of soy milk since he was allergic to milk. However, we recently switched him to rice milk and I did notice a slight improvement in his conditions.

But now I must add soy and corn to our eliminated food list. When we say corn, we mean anything with corn.....that includes High Fructose Corn Syrup! Which is in practically everything!

Also, when you find a product that is milk free it almost always contains soy! If you find something that does not have soy it contains corn. I told my husband I imagine it will cost close to 15.00 a week for his special foods.

Tonight I am experimenting with some homemade bread that does not contain corn, soy or milk. I replaced the butter with olive oil so we will see how it turns out. We have a health food store nearby and I plan to go there soon and see what they offer as far as products for this diet.

When we discovered what all he could not have I went to the store to replace a few of our more common foods for him. I purchased some extra fruit for the week, buckwheat pancake mix and pure maple syrup for breakfasts, and also a few minor snack items. Some special pretzels, honey flavored post cereal and orange juice.

Tonight our menu called for a special Chinese dish--Sweet/n/sour Chicken. This has soy sauce and corn ingredients. So I cooked his chicken separate, put no butter in the rice, and gave him carrots as a side.

So needless to say this unexpected shopping spree took all my extra money I had planned to snowflake. But I am still within my budget of $250.00. I really hope to simply not go over that budget or I will simply feel like such a failure.

Greeting cards anyone?

Guess I wasn't the only one who did not mail out greeting cards this year!

Check out this report Hallmark Down

Did you mail out cards?