Category Archives: Saving Money

Word of the Year

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Fun fact is that I have never made a “New Year’s Resolution”.  I have in the past and even made a couple of goals for this year.  But I am have been thinking and figured it would be a good time to try something new. I am going to chose a word to focus on this year.

REDUCE

This might seem strange but I need to spend some time and energy reducing things in several areas of my life.

First up is my pantry.  Kendall will graduate from high school this year.  She is already deciding on a college and then in two additional years she will be off on her own adult adventure. Zach at the same time will be graduating high school and staring his adult adventure.  I am guessing that within 3 years we will have an empty nest. That means we will probably need less than 1/4 of the pantry that we currently have. In reality, if we don’t consume and use up most of the “non favorite” items now then they may be here forever.  The pantry challenge is going to help with this idea. I am also planning on not purchasing any meat unless I find a deal I can’t pass up until June. I definitely want to empty out and turn off our chest freezer and move the convivence freezer out of our bedroom. This should definitely help reduce the clutter in my room as well.

Along the same lines, I am currently storing items in our pantry, the laundry room and our shower room. I would like to reduce this to having all the food in the pantry, using the laundry room as a storage area for paper products and then laundry items. This would leave the shower room for self care needs. In reality, I need to sort through all the items in the shower room and decide which ones can be thrown away, sold or simply need to be thrown away. This would also allow me to clean out the bathroom cabinets as well. Overall, I want to reduce the number of items that we keep on hand to a maximum of 6 months with most items reduced to three months. This will translate to a year supply for two people much easier than now.

Next on the reducing list is the number of clothes that I am keeping. I need to have a really good closet purge and reduce the items that I am holding on to. That is definitely something that will be waiting till the summer.

I have already shared plans to reduce our debit and spending this year as well. The overall goal is to be debt free except the mortgage in 5 years and totally debit free in 8 to 10 years.  Neither Matt nor I will be or can really increase our incomes at this point so REDUCE is definitely a must.

REDUCING Clutter and REDUCING my Stress yeap Reduce is a good word for this year.

Positive Budget Adjustments

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This is typically one of the times that I search to make sure that I am getting the best deal of all the normal bills. The reason is simple, I am thinking about the new year and a new budget.  We switched our internet provided right at a year ago. The first three months were $50ish then it went up to $86.75 which was still less than we were paying. We have been receiving promotional offers in the mail from the original provider  (Spectrum) but nothing outstanding aka worth the time and effort.

Well luckily that changed last week. We received an offer for $50 a month for 12 month at the same speed we had.  I went on line to make the change and also saw an offer for $50 free which I grabbed. I knew it would take some time to get everything switched so I scheduled for last Sunday. Of course it did not work out so a technician came on Monday and got it switched over.  We are going to save $26.75 a month for 12 months or $321 for the year.  This offer also included a free mobile phone line.

This offer required a little bit more research but we decided to go ahead and switch Kendall’s line to save an additional $35 a month.  I was actually trying to get a transfer pin from Verizon online when I managed to trigger a $20 a line discount for 12 months with the catch that I needed to call to get this discount.  Of course it did not come that easy. I spent 45 minutes on hold waiting to talk with someone who was only able to immediately apply it to 4 lines (one of which was Kendall’s).  I have been promised that we should receive the additional $40 discount in the next four business days.  But the hassle is worth it. Currently by changing Kendall’s line and given the $60 discount on the three lines our cellphone bill has decreased by $120 a month or $1440 a year!

That means that I am $1761 closer to paying off Home Depot!

Pantry Challenge update

I did a quick shopping trip on Tuesday 12/30 to end out the year.  I am going to attempt to only buy diary that we are completely out of or other items that are necessary in order to keep eating.  I am also significantly reducing my Amazon subscribe and save orders as well. This past week we have been focused on celebrating birthdays and eating left-overs.  Today, I realized that we are out of ranch powder and I used up the remaining thyme in our soup tonight.  Neither are required to eat so we should be good.

Pantry Challenge Preparation

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I am trying to spend part of my winter break working on Pantry preparation.  I had already been thinking about participating in a pantry challenge but with the new heating and air system it is a definite we need to now.  First I have been working on a list of all of the different meals we could have based on items in our freezers and pantry. My goal is to have a list of sixty items. I am planning to share this list once I get it organized and typed up. Here are some of the other ways I am working to get prepared to make this pantry challenge successful for both the months of January and February.

So far in the last week I have made a batch of sloppy joes (8 meals), two extra meals of meatloaf muffins, two extra meals of bagels and one extra loaf of bread.

I have been searching the pantry to try and restock on any items that we might run short on during the next several months.  I ended up at Costco last night to pick up items for our dinner party on Saturday as well as the items we needed. I ended up spending $306 which puts me over the grocery budget for this month however I will let you know next week what our budgets actually look like for next year.

The “rules” I have set for myself

  1. Eating out as a family  only on Sundays – We have a specific budget for this.  I will also try and stretch this budget to cover meals on the go which will be needed for a couple of swim meets.  Matt and I will continue to have our “spending money” which is going to be reduced from $50 to $40 every two weeks for at least the first six months of 2026.
  2. Purchase only diary items such as milk, cheese and creamer.  I am planning to make bread during the challenge so this should not be needed. We have fruits and vegetables in cans, jars and frozen which need to get used up during this challenge.
  3. No purchasing of meat! With the exception of chicken wings needed for our Super Bowl party.
  4. Use at least 5 jars a week from the home canned pantry.
  5. Keep a list of items we run out of and when This is new this year but should help me figure out what I need in our pantry for the future.
  6. Lower the Amazon subscribe and save order to bear minimum of 5 items needed to keep the 15% discount or items we are absolutely out of.

Anyone else participating?

Saving on Saturday

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One of the most important things to remember is every $1 saved is an accomplishment.  With the huge financial expense of the new HVAC system, I am going to focus more on the little things for saving. The reason is we already do alot of things to save money and in reality, I can’t find much more that way. So now it is back to the basics of saving in every way possible.

I mentioned yesterday that I had not been out to eat breakfast. That is the first way we are saving money!

Another way we are saving money is by using items in our pantry. For us as a family this means that we need convenient foods that are easy to make and filling. Breakfast is one of the hardest meals for me because I don’t have much time to get out the door.  I spend ALOT of time in the Summer preparing food ahead but I also need to add to this during the year. Last night for dinner we had sausage balls and French toast.  I decided to go ahead and make a HUGE batch.  We have been getting six eggs a day so this was a good way also to use up the eggs. I purchased three loaves of French bread at Walmart for $1.47 each ($4.50), used sugar, milk, vanilla and cinnamon. I am going to estimate the entire cost to be $10.  Matt used the Blackstone to fry up the bread. We ended up with our dinner and around 60 additional slices of French toast.  Currently one meal of French toast for one person is $10 so for the same cost we probably have at least 5 meals for our family of five.

The final way we saved money this week is by building shelves out of pallets that we got for free last year. We have used this wood to complete the front part of the new building as well.  I did use part of my Christmas money to purchase the brackets. The total cost for his was around $30 but we have lots more space and I definitely like  organization.

Friday Financial Update

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So this is the much promised post about the big financial change that we have made.  I have hinted at this post on several occasions but did not want to share until everything was complete and final. The reason for this post is very personal, I want to be able to read this in the future, see my rationale and also determine if it worked or not.

We have refinanced the house and rolled the HELOC into it. First the facts, this is a 15 year mortgage with an interest rate of 6.25%. the anticipated maturity date is December 2040. Our age would be 68.

Next, why we choose to re-finance at this time. There are two main reasons that we looked at refinancing now. The first of which is that we or at least I have started to seriously look at and begin to plan for retirement. My top priority going into retirement is to be debt-free. I do not want to have any payments such as mortgage or car. The auto part is really something that I can’t control as much as the mortgage/HELCO.  I knew going in the HELOC was 30 years and my initial plan was to begin making double payments when we pay off the Tahoe in October 26.  The second reason for considering and seriously looking at a re-fi now is that the HELCO was an adjustable rate.  I don’t recall reading this so maybe I missed it. I realized this (my mistake) because the HELCO was a fixed rate for 12 months and then became adjustable. My realization occurred with the notice that it would increase to over 7%.

The problem…. our mortgage was refinanced during COVID at a rate of 2.75%. This has been the one down side and thing that made the decision to re-fi difficulty for me. But when you compare the fact that the HELCO was already high and had the possibility of going even higher then even math said we should re-fi.

We ended up including some cash out when we decided to re-finance in order to reduce our overall debit load and to make paying everything much easier and quicker.  As I mentioned above the interest rate is 6.25% which is less than any credit card at this point.  We will begin making payments on January 1 2026 and begin to make an extra  principal only payment November 2026 which should reduce our term to 8 years or 2034 and our age to 62.

Building Update

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A short recap…. while on vacation, after discovering we have a new fence right on our property line, one of the things we talked about doing was replacing this building.

Initially we were thinking that we would need to move it to allow for clearance to the back of the yard. Luckily that was not the case.  We started the process on August 31st.  You can see the first section of progress here

This ended up being a longer and more expensive project than was expected! But I am super excited to say that we have officially completed the project and it turned out amazing!

We have lots of organized storage place that is both dry and mostly weather proof. We have lights and even a window (see above).

The front is probably my favorite! Made from all wood that was free to us!

The sides have been painted a gray color.

 

Even the back looks nice!

Yay for checking another project off the list FINALLY!

 

 

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A deal is not a good deal if you cant use the item or if it goes bad before you can use it.  I am seeing more and more people talk about couponing again. That is great and I would love to get back to full force but in the mean time, if you are spending money you don’t have on a good deal then you are just dumb.  No one needs 17 bottles of detergent on a shelf!   I just finished working on my Amazon subscribe and save order, I follow a couple of rules, if we don’t need it skip it, if a snack cost more than 45 cent, skip it.  I will pay up to 90 cent for protein or good granola bars.   Today I noticed that I have 4 bottles of Tide on the list as well as a huge container of Tide.  I decided to figure out which was cheaper, turns out the bottles were by one cent an ounce so that is the one that will be delivered at the end of the month.

Last Saturday, I headed to Dollar General to pick up sodas on sale.  I purchased 3 12 packs of Diet Coke and 2 12 packs of Dr. Pepper. I also picked up 6 boxes of water flavors. Total spent $27.22 total saved $23.25!

CVS is a hard store especially when some people count Extra Care Bucks as money and others as coupons. I use them as coupons!  I had 2 ECB, a $4 off a purchase and $2 off a purchase. I was able to use all three and pay twenty seven cents for the following, travel size hair spray, travel size toothpaste, a new bath sponge and 2 carmel candies!

That is how you save money!

Pantry Challenge/ Saving Money

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Yes I am writing this on a Sunday. I did most of the work for this on Saturday. But I wanted to share about the building that feels like it is sucking up most if not all of our time.

I work all summer long to get easy to prepare meals in the freezer to make the school year go easier. I also wanted to start using up alot of the food we have here so that I can reduce the food bill for the rest of the year.  I have  not been to Costco since the first of August before school started.  I am picking up items that we are completely out of but I am making a conscience effort not to buy items unless absolutely needed.  We are about 6 weeks in and at the point where our convivence foods are gone. Yesterday we finished up both the chicken nuggets and bagel bites. One of the items that I have the most of is ground beef. When we purchase a whole cow, we get alot of ground beef and I know we can eat it. I am thinking that at this point we have almost 50 # left in the freezer.   We used up the last of the Costco meatball about a week ago.

On Friday, I took a pound of ground beef and decided to make some meatballs to go with our spaghetti.  They turned awesome, so good in fact that I decided to go ahead and make a huge batch. I turned 5 pounds of ground beef into 96 meatballs that can be used for spaghetti, meatball subs and even Swedish meatballs.

While the last batch of these were baking yesterday, I ended up gathering up all the ingredients for Taco Soup. I decided to make a double batch so that I could can up some for quick and easy lunches.  We are eating the soup for dinner this evening and I will have 5 half pints and 12 pints of taco soup to use for lunches or even future meal!  I am excited to have these convivence items instead of purchasing.

Replacing a Building

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The second thing we decided to accomplish on our vacation was converting the metal building from the fabric and metal tubs to a wooden structure.  We knew it would be a process but I did not realize it would take over a month.  We started with this

We removed the metal to expose the fabric

The fabric was easy to remove but the pole took a little bit more effort.

By the end of the first weekend of at least 15 or more hours of work we were down to the floor.

We used the leftovers/remnant from the kitchen floor to make it harder to lose screws and easier to clean.

We were able to get up most of the walls on that same day but it was another long long day!

Weekend 3 complete and not on to the fourth in the next update!

 

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  1. We have been extremely busy the last several weeks. We are in the process of converting the fabric metal pole structure that covered the beetle (Matt’s Volkswagen) to a  wooden structure covered in metal.  I knew it would be a process but did not think it would take over a month.  We really focused on getting it under roof.  Last Saturday we spent close to 8 hours solid on it and I made the decision that it was not a worth to try and continue at that pace to get it under roof. The current plan is to get a door on tomorrow. A tarp is currently over the roof and  it will likely be a month before we work on the roof.  My current plan is to start sharing pictures tomorrow.
  2. Zach’s truck broke down in the school parking lot on Monday. We had it towed home and then after some working and investigation, it appears that the fuel pump is part or all of the problem. The goal is to get that replaced tomorrow however the part was delayed so it may take a little bit on Sunday as well.
  3. Working has been a bit much. I am struggling to get in a routine. But I am hopeful that things will start to improve.
  4. Next week Braxton’s baseball starts which means that we have at least 3 evening of games.
  5. I am planning to do some big meal preparation over the weekend. The current plan is to make a double batch of taco soup with half or more canned for convivence. The second big preparation is meatball. The Costco meatball are all gone and we have lots of ground beef that can be used.