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Inspired by my dear friends Ross and Angel, I am dedicating this post to the economy, budgets and our personal cut backs--take inspiration if you can!! :)

Since things have been pretty tight these past few months, we've had to take a long hard look at where our money seems to be disappearing to, and coming up with creative ways to make it disappear less.

For the first time in....ummm, okay, well EVER for Josh and I, we sat down and crunched some numbers into Quicken online. (it's free and SO fun!--yes...I did say fun.) We spent one whole night just entering in data and putting proper labels on everything. I was somewhat surprised at how long that took to look up checks and trying to remember what a certain dollar and cents withdrawal was for, but we did managed to get it all in there!! And then we were able to look at the pie charts and goal sheets Quicken had for us.

I had to laugh because it pretty much told us "Congratulations--keep living like this and you'll be in the negative every month!!" Not really what we wanted to hear but it was sobering none the less.

It was hard not to fall into the inevitable rut of "justifying" all of my purchases, as if they were somehow better than Josh's. But in reality, aside from paying for someones retirement at Starbucks, I really don't have many frivolous purchases. It's the standard groceries, clothes and shoes for kids and school lunches. As much as I would love to get my nails done regularly, extend my wardrobe every season, or be tan year 'round--that's just not in the cards for us right now.

But what was nice was to see what I normally spend on said groceries, and set a budget based on that figure. We tried to be VERY realistic, otherwise I will just loose this game and I'm way too competitive for that. So a grocery bill of just under $500.00 a month, went down to $300.00. Which meant meal plans were a must! Another aspect to the "game"...I'm up for it!

As far as meal planning--this has been my favorite part of this whole fresh new look at our financial life. I used to plan out the meals based on what sounded good, which lets face it, being nearly 7 months pregnant was NOT a good idea!! Now our meals are planned on what meats are on sale that week and how far can I stretch that one package of boneless skinless chicken breasts? (yet another game) Instead of taking my recipes to the store with me, I take my check list and what's on the list is ON THE LIST. Not on the list? Forget it. As best I can anyway--like I said, I am nearly 7 months pregnant and I have a very forgetful brain, so I often see things I forgot to add to the list. And there is nothing worse than coming home and unfolding that reality!

Usually the meal planning is for one week, and I try to prep all the meals for that week on one day/night. Ziplocks are my friends. And having a deep freeze is pretty awesome too. I will say this, God has blessed me with this new thinking and helping me be creative and frugal (creative I have always been--frugal? not so much) with the limits we have set for ourselves. One of my new favorite tricks is that I can feed my three kids full on ONE chicken breast, rather than the 1.5 or 2 I had been prepping, cooking, slaving, portioning, and garbage disposing previously. The trick? Pound it thin. Seriously...that's it. I pound it out and cut it in strips. Voila!

I still have issues when my stock pile of the pantry basics are down, so I haven't quiet let go of that, but I just go thru way too much oil, sugar, flour, canned beans, canned tomato's, rice and pasta to "budget" those out of the picture.

The only other real trick we've installed is on the eating fast food routine. Every Wednesday night after FOS we would all be so hungry since we generally eat dinner around 5:30 pm and don't leave the church grounds till about 9:30 pm. So we'd stop at either Wendy's or Starbucks, and way too often at both places. (As much as I hate them for it, I also LOVE that Starbucks is now closed at 9 pm) So now--if we know we're going to be out and about for the day, I pack a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, apples, cheese, crackers, juice or milk sippy's, raisins and other snacks depending on how long we're going to be out.

I'm not sure I've really seen the financial benefits of this quite yet, but man does it ever feel good to know we're not only saving ourselves money, but the time and headache of the orders never being right, ( how hard is it, really??) and not to mention the CALORIES!!! If we do stop at Starbucks (a "luxury" I'm not willing to forgo) we've cut back to a regular drip coffee with cream, or a hot tea. The kids get nothing, and to my surprise, they don't stop breathing or vanish into thin air when we pull away from the drive-up window--WHO KNEW!) The kids now know they can get ice water or if we splurge we get a huge mochaccino and split it between us all.

As for the rest of the spending we've cut back on car insurance for the car that sits in the driveway, changed our cell phone bill to a lower plan, after March Madness is over we'll be cutting back to basic cable, and my hope is for the summer to have ZERO TV (for one we won't be home much, and two I remember a summer growing up of no TV and it is one of my favorite summer memories ever--we made a huge Lego land, rode bikes, talked to each other, read books and watched movies--and I lived to tell about it.)

So ya, I do sit in the dark much more than I used to and I started wearing slippers and sweatshirts around the house more mostly just to see if it makes a large enough impact on our power bill or if it's just not worth it at all. I'll keep you posted on that.

This year will be a biggie for us in the fact that we usually blow our tax return on fun things and we load up at Costco. Not this year--we're going to pay off a few things to lighten the monthly output load. As much as I desire a new couch. :(

I hope that this post has been of some help to you, the reader. Maybe you can take some ideas from us, or you can use this info to see that you're in way better shape than us, or that you're not alone and that we can be of some encouragement to you! Either way...know that the Lord has blessed us in many ways for this "new" way of thinking!!

I have also learned that cheap soap makes you use more lotion and that a q-tip by any other name is NOT a Q-tip.


(don't you just hate posts without pictures??)