Bountiful Baskets & other random things.

We'll start with our Bountiful Basket! I have been wanting to do this for a while, but kept putting it off. I'm glad I finally did. I showed up at Peterson's Country Store expecting to keep the kids in the car and just grab my basket, but there was a huge line! So I hauled the kids out, with the laundry basket and went to stand in line. We probably waited about 20 minutes. Since it was my first time, I just assumed that was normal, but I guess the truck was 40 minutes late so next time will probably be different.

Here's a picture of our loot: We got 2 bunches of romaine lettuce, 1 bunch of spinach, 3 artichokes, 1 cantaloup, 1 watermelon, 7 apples, 5 yellow onions, 6 peaches, 3 pears, 3 yellow peppers, 4 tomatoes, 12 random peppers and a bunch of bananas. If it wasn't my first time it'd only have cost $16.50, but I had to pay a first time fee of $3 which isn't bad.

Grace was hugging the watermelon and a pepper cause she said it was her buddies. LOL She kills me. The fruit will be nice for Mike's lunch. And we made banana smoothies when we got home. The onions are always useful and the cantaloup will make a great breakfast this week. Not sure what we'll do with the yellow peppers, but I'm already planning a quick salsa with the tomatoes and peppers. Only thing I'm not sure on is the artichoke. I've never worked with raw artichoke before, so we'll see!

Here's a picture of Mercy enjoying some of the banana. What a sweetie.

Lastly, here's the double rainbow from the other night. It was probably the brightest rainbow I have ever seen! But it made me laugh because of the Double Rainbow guy. You can check out his YouTube video here. Funny stuff!

We'll end with where we're at with the debt-snowball. Mike's probably cleaned about 14 or so lines this month and it's only the 11th. So that's about $140 to throw at the debt. One of my bartenders was a sweetie and gave me $20 for helping her out the other night. I told her I didn't need it cause I just like helping but she insisted so that's put in the snowball envelope. This week we're out of grocery money but we're planning on grilling kabobs tonight and then we have hotdogs, sloppy joes and probably a roast for early this week. I'm hoping for some good meal deals soon cause my stockpile of meat is gone. Should be coming up though cause it's grilling season. Enjoy your Saturday!!

One Week Down

Ok it's been one week of budgeting and our debt snowball. I'm exhausted. No, not because of this, but because of a long week at work and my day off filled with things to do. On the up-side I had 12 people in my SMART card class (which is $150!!), I had to take some tables at work the other day and made $27, and we just found out our insurance rates have gone DOWN (coverage has stayed the same) so we'll be saving an additional $46 a month! And by saving, I mean throwing another $46 a month at our debt!

Ok let's start with the budget. Right now we have it planned that we're spending $14 more than we have coming in. AND I had to make copies of the test for the SMART class which was around $6 and I didn't put anywhere in the budget yet....hold on. Doing that now. Depending on how the rest of the month goes, we may be able to tweek our gas budget a little, but I'm not sure. My husband's truck eats gas and it costs a ton to fill up! But his bonus at the beginning of the month was $40 more than we expected so it could come out of there. I'm finding a lot of little things that we'd forgot about that we have to put in the budget. There's medicine for the dog that makes our lawn stay green ($20 a month or so), my newspaper subscription (for all my couponing) and then formula. I'm done nursing so we have to add the cost of formula. I'm not a brand-name snob, so we're going with Kroger brand and it's been working just fine. And there's $2 off coupons on the top of the little puffs baby food snacks so that makes it around $10 for a canister. And we have to see what the dentist will be like. I'm probably due for x-rays but I wonder if they'll let me skip those. Dental stuff is expensive when you don't have insurance for it!

Mike and I had our first financial meeting last night. He was mostly asleep on the couch, but we did get to make sure we were on track (this is where I found out his truck eats gas) and we could talk about other stuff we have coming up (i.e. father's day...not sure where I'm going to fit this in the budget). The weird thing is we have money in our checking account right now. And if you look at our budget, it says we don't. It's cause we had money from last month's checks and I paid all the bills that were due at the beginning of the month, last month. It'll be interesting to see how the end of the month turns out.

I have shopped 2x with cash only now and not really had a problem. This week, Mercy slept the entire time, which helped. I ended up spending $83 and a couple bucks of that was from our toiletry fund ($30 a month for toilet paper, diapers, etc) So for the month so far, we still have $10 in our grocery fund. We decided to try Bountiful Baskets this week and that ended up costing us around $20 so I had to take that out of the budget. But, I think I'll be really happy with it. It'll be an entire basket of produce for only $20 vs a head of lettuce, some apples and potatoes for $20. And we're finally getting Grace to eat some real food.

So that pretty much covers the budgeting news for the week. I always wrote down our bills and had a ball-park figure, but putting in the grocery, gas and extras has been making a difference. It's not hard for me to not spend money. Hell, more often than not, I'm too busy to think about it. But at the store Grace will want a treat or a $3 juice cup (with a princess on it or something). Unfortunately we waited so long to start our Total Money Makeover cause she's already used to things. Mercy will just be growing up with us budgeting and saving. Grace is used to going out to eat, ordering pizza, and getting new toys all the time.

Ok on to the really exciting news. We started May with owing Great Lakes $2921. This was a loan Mike took out in college. It was a $5000 loan and we've ended up paying over $6k for it because of interest. One thing I'm learning, my kids will never had student loans! Before our house is paid off, we will have all of our kid's college funds going and rolling and I hope they never have student loans. So back to Great Lakes. As I mentioned in a previous post, we took money out of our savings to throw at this. We ended up getting some unexpected money from my Grandma. She does this every once in a while and it's a nice surprise. It went straight into the debt snowball. I had the SMART card money, the tips, plus another random $20 or so. And Mike had his line-cleaning money from May. That wasn't much, but we got distracted with the fence and he couldn't get out much to clean some times. This month he's already at like 10 or 12 lines cleaned (at like $10 a tower) and it's only the 9th! I also took about $100 out of our other checking account. That was the account we threw all our extra money in before. It actually is the account we paid for all Mercy's doctor bills. We own her straight up :)

So May 1st was $2921....balance as of today: $392!!! We have paid off almost $2500 in a month and a week! Granted, it was "found" money, not all earned money, but it's getting us going! If we didn't have dentist appointments this month, we'd be paying that sucker off! But I still have another SMART class this month. I really need to get some flyers out. And Mike has the line-cleaning money still. It will be paid by the middle of July.

Next thing on our list is my car. That's such a weird feeling. We have $6500 let on that, so it will take us more than just a month once we start attacking it, but I'm hoping to have a big dent in it by Christmas and have that paid off by this time next year. We'll be adding $78.51 (the Great Lakes minimum payment) to the monthly payment of $164 so that little extra will help, but it's really going to be the budgeting and throwing all the extra money at it.

Ok I'm almost done. I really think the Lord is watching over us and helping us with this. I don't think we would have had all this extra money before we sat down and started budgeting and controlling the urges for material things. I'm so thankful that Mike and I are both employed and we are able to have insurance. I'm thankful that he's helping us with our NFP so we don't have to add more kids to the equation (yet!) And I'm thankful that our kids will be raised to live debt-free and realize they don't need to rely on credit to enjoy their lives. Ok I'm done. I'll update again later!

Sunny Saturday!

Finally, a nice day! We got so much stuff done today too! Mike cleaned 4 towers which is a great help with our debt snowball. I attacked our laundry and have about half of it done. Hopefully will get it finished tomorrow. I also cleaned the kitchen and Grace's bedroom & closet. I did some major purging and got rid of some toys she doesn't play with or even remember she has. We've been rotating toy bins so the Legos and Mega blocks went back downstairs and a bunch of Barbies came up. Grace kills me. Every one is "so beautiful" and all the Ken's are "so handsome". I pulled out some accessories and a ton of clothes, so she should be set for a while. I even had Mercy in her room with her (all little toys were put away so it was safe). It was so sweet to see my kiddo's playing together.

Mike got the lawn mowed and Grace played outside while he was mowing. And he got the garage cleaned out so we can finally park inside again. I like not having to lock my doors every night on my car. Grace did get a nasty cut on her leg from the left-over chain link. That means all of us (save Mercy) have been attacked by the chain link.

Lunch was a hodgepodge of stuff - bread-sticks, chips, etc. Then we cleaned ourselves up and headed to church. I Moby wrapped Mercy, and she was asleep until we walked in the foyer and all my church friends oogled her and she woke up to get some attention :) She pretty much stayed away all during church too. Father Clarence is back from his sabbatical and he was very much missed. And we unfortunately had an organ player at church and it was just awful. I felt so bad for Linda was singing.

After church, Mike & Grace went to 7-11 and got Slurpees because we had some leftover grocery money this week in the budget. Nice little treat.

We had burgers on the grill and oven fries for dinner. Grace ate an entire burger. She has never eaten an entire homemade burger. I'm so proud!

I got some cutie pics of Murp (our little nickname for Mercy) and some of the fence too. Posted. It was a great day. We did it all without spending money and got to spend time with our family together. Tomorrow I got to run some cereal up to church for the youth retreat and then I'm going to take the girls to feed the ducks at first dam for a picnic.

Total Money Makeover

We're really doing it. We've been mentioning it for years. We've previously cut up the cards and promised not to get new credit card debt. But this time, for real, we're going to be debt free!

If you have never listened to him, I highly suggest finding a station that plays Dave Ramsey and just listening for one episode so you know what I'm talking about. Right now, he's my personal hero. Dave Ramsey promotes "Living like no one else, so you can live like no one else". This means sacrifice and extra work to get yourself out of debt. He has a bunch of baby steps to help grow your personal wealth and live on cash only. Here's a quick recap of those:

Baby Step #1: Save $1000 emergency fund

Baby Step #2: Pay off all debt using the debt snowball, not including the house"

Baby Step #3: Save 3-6 month emergency fund

Baby Step #4: ...??

So we're way far away from Baby Step #4 but I think it's children's college fund and then Baby Step #5 is paying off the house.

The hardest thing we've done right now is cut our emergency fund down to $1000. We had about $2400 in savings and we dropped it down to $1k so we can throw the rest towards our lowest debt. I'm one of those people that wants to have a good safety net incase something happens like me losing my job. But I guess we've already lived through that. And survived.

The next hardest thing is actually writing a budget. We had been using mint.com to see where our money was going, but I haven't been on there in a long time. It is a good tool, but I think what we're doing now is better. I used the guide for a budget in the back of his book and put in into my Excel. Then I created formulas so I don't have to do the math :) Then I put in our incomes and budgeted out the rest. This month we all have dentist appointments and our new insurance doesn't cover dental, so we're looking at about $350 for that, but we're at a zero'd budget. This means we're not spending more than we have coming in.

We also use the envelope system for groceries, gas and entertainment. A set amount of cash goes into each envelope and when it's gone, we're done. I shopped yesterday for groceries with a $100 budget for the week and spent $71 :) Thank goodness for coupons :) The one thing I'm noticing that we're missing is "Blow" money. Money that we each get to buy whatever. I realized that we didn't budget this when one of my friends said we need a play-date which usually includes coffee or something. I have no room in my budget for coffee or something. So we'll be re-working the budget this weekend so we can have a little play money.

If we just pay minimum payments and don't snowball anything, we'll be paying off our debt until 2025. That's 14 more years!! Grace will be 18 and moving out! If we snowball our debt, but keep it at the minimum payments, we'll be paying off our debt until 2018! That's 7 more years!! Grace will be 11. Way better option. But I'm in fan of the next one which is attack it with everything we go. All extra money goes toward the debt, and I'm hoping to have it paid within the next 3-4. We're looking at a debt which is the same size as our yearly income. So if we can live off two-thirds of our income, we'll be debt free in 3 years. Hopefully soon, but we'll see. Anyway, I'll be keeping you updated!!

Baby Laughs

Mercy laughing and some Tummy Time. Love this kid!!

30 Day of My Life?? How about just Life?

Mercy's stories.

I gave up on the 30 days of my life thing. Life just got in the way. Here's a video of my cutie-pie telling a story. She's just too sweet!

Day 8 - Someone I Miss

So back in the early 2000s, my little sister graduated college and decided to go to Italy and cook. Then she met her husband and they had a baby and she's been there ever since. I know I'm an adult now and we move on and have our own lives, but there are times I really, really miss her. We are best friends and, although not as close as we used to be, I feel like we have this connection even though we're on different sides of the planet. She's funny, silly, a bit blond at times, but that's what makes her....her. I doubt she'll ever move back to the U.S. but she does come and visit and who knows, maybe one day we'll visit her. I just hope she knows how much I miss her and that I think of her often. I love you Jocey!!

Patrick (my nephew), Jocelyn, me & Grace ~ January 2007

Jocelyn