My husband was committed to paying off debt. The only problem was, we were dirt poor. No savings. Nothing of value to sell. A family of four living on roughly $46K a year. I’ll admit, when my husband told me his plan I had a very “Yeah right, whatever you say dear” attitude about it. I had taken care of […]
Living on one income is difficult, there’s just no getting around that fact. It takes discipline, sacrifice, and a lot of prayer! Here are 10 of the best tips we’ve learned over the past 20 years to help stretch your budget as far as you possibly can. This post may contain some affiliate links for your convenience, which means if […]
In our nearly 23 years together, I had always handled the money in our marriage. I kept track of our budget in my head, and I kept us from spending more than we had, but my method wasn’t very good at keeping Nerdy in the loop, or at tracking every penny of money.Back in January of this year, we decided […]
Ok, before you write me off as mental for broaching the topic of Christmas in April, give me a paragraph or two to explain!You see, if I want to have a truly debt free Christmas then I have to plan ahead. Like waaaay ahead. If I wait until November to start thinking about Christmas then I either break the bank, […]
The thought of preserving potatoes used to scare me. I thought it would be far more complicated than it actually turned out to be. I like to buy potatoes in bulk when I find them on sale, but unless you have a root cellar, potatoes aren’t going to last much longer than 2-3 weeks without preserving them in some way. […]
I admit, I don’t exercise as I should. In fact, unless walking up and down our stairs twice a day is considered adequate exercise I’m way below the bar.I know that I need to exercise for my health. I want to be around to see my kids and grandkids grow up. However, I know me well enough to know that […]
I pass three grocery stores and a Wal-Mart Supercenter on the 5 mile trip to shop my local Aldi. I’ve had people ask me why I wouldn’t just save myself the gas and time and shop at the nearest store. Here are my top 5 reasons. #1 – Less OverwhelmingExcept for a few rare occasions that they get a good deal […]
This post contains referral links for your convenience. For more information, please see my disclosure page. Thanks! The final step for our meal plan is making our grocery list that we’ll take to the store with us. The Grocery List I will preface this section by saying that my method is probably redundant to most people, but it absolutely […]
Making the PlanWe now have our recipes and our master list. It’s time to plan our meals for the week.I generally plan one week of meals at a time usually the day before I intend to grocery shop. Planning any further out than one week usually spells disaster. All those once-a-month shopping people have my deepest respect. I cannot think […]
The Master List Is InvaluableOur master list is the single most important piece of my meal planning arsenal.Before I started using a master list of recipes my meal planning was disorganized and rather chaotic (read: expensive and wasteful).Remember that big recipe binder we talked about yesterday? It had some amazing recipes in it (even if they were expensive to make).But….it […]