Frugal Friday

I posted my goals for 2010, but I wanted to touch a little more on finances.  I have some goals that I want to go a little bit more in depth with.  I mentioned here about starting our baby fund, starting our CHRISTmas fund, and to stop using credit cards.  Well, there are some things we need to work on in order for those things to happen.


We have already started saving for our baby emergency fund of $1000 that Dave Ramsey recommends.  As of right now we are just shy of our halfway mark.  But I know that with the Eating from the Pantry Challenge I will be able to free up a couple hundred dollars, and hopefully in some other areas as well.

We are not using our credit cards anymore.  I plan on storing the information from them such as account numbers and so forth and then cutting them up.  We don't want them anymore!!!  We plan on using cash and our debit card for everything.  Some people do not agree with using debit cards and some others do.  We choose to use them, mainly in part of our bank.  They offer a program for each time you choose to use your card and hit "credit" you earn two points for each dollar spent.  Those points can actually go towards direct cash into your checking account.  Another reason is our bank will reimburse you ATM fees.  You know those pesky fees banks want to charge for using their ATM, well are bank reimburses you those fees once a month.  So, we have a benefit of using our debit card.

Another area we started was putting money away for CHRISTmas next year.  We have always used credit cards for CHRISTmas or even gifts in general, and that was just caused by poor planning.  So this next CHRISTmas I will be prepared!

Some other ways I plan on freeing up some extra cash that will be used towards our debt is cooking/baking from scratch, eat out less, and lower our grocery bill.

I will be updating our progress at the first of each of month to let you know how we are doing.

To find out more frugal ideas head on over to LifeAsMom.