From the category archives:
Is it possible to eat healthfully on a budget? My friend, Catherine, tackled this subject earlier this week. I think you’ll find her points and ideas very inspiring and helpful. Go read her post here.
photo credit: Karimian
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Guest Post by Andrea from MommySnacks
Losing weight is inevitably always on someone’s to-do list. I’ll admit, it’s been on mine since our first son was born 9 years ago! Weight loss can be done on the cheap and I’m a case study to prove it since I lost 35 pounds last year.
Here are a few ideas to help you lose the poundage and save your money, too:
Using the hard pavement is one of the best ways to save money! The road is the obvious choice, but a high school stadium can also be a great way to get your exercise in by not spending a dime. Some outdoor exercises I recommend: walking, running, and climbing bleachers (at the school).
Your body can be the best piece of equipment! Doing resistance training will cost you nothing because you are using the best asset you have to work out with–you. Some great resistance exercises include: squats, lunges, push-ups, and tricep dips.
You may think this is the last place you can actually lose weight, but there are so many resources available online to help you be successful! I have found training suggestions, food journals, and supportive communities. Some of my favorite online fitness and weight-loss resources are: Sparkpeople.com, WeFitFamily.com, and RunnersWorld.com.
When you start sharing your goal to lose weight and get healthy with others, you may find that someone has some equipment they can let you borrow. Right now, we are lending our Elliptical Machine to friends. It’s a gym quality one that we purchased several years ago. Our friends mentioned they wanted to try one, so I offered ours to borrow.
Many people use the new year or new season to de-clutter which means equipment that has been collecting dust is going out the door! Check your local Freecycle goup or, if you have a little bit of cash to spare, check out Craigslist or make a visit to your local second hand shop (Goodwill or Salvation Army) or even a second hand sports store (like Play it Again Sports) to see what equipment is available for purchase.
Eating healthfully is one of the most important things when it comes to losing weight. And, despite what some might tell you, you can eat healthy on a budget.
I won’t give you advice on what to eat, but Sparkpeople.com will do just that! You can set up a plan and it will offer you menus based on your daily caloric intake. It’s not complex and it can be simple stuff (frozen meals, deli meats, etc). Oh, and it’s free (that’s the best part). Getting the eating part down and within your budget will make the weight loss you meet each week even sweeter!
Of course, if you are just starting on your weight-loss journey, please consult your physician to ensure that the plan you follow is appropriate for you. I am not a medical expert but I am a mom of 3 who lost 35 pounds last year using these ideas. And, I haven’t spent a dime on anything other than my 5k registration fees and my food (a girl’s gotta eat)!
Andrea Deckard is a stay-at-home mommy with an amazing husband and three energetic boys. Stop by Mommy Snacks to get your fill of zero-calorie “snacks” to help you Save, Earn, Live and Learn!
What are your best frugal weight loss tips? Tell us in the comments.
photo credit: Thomas Hawk
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Guest Post by Amber from The Hormonal Housewife
My husband and I were looking for a larger home for our growing family. We crunched the numbers and knew exactly how much our mortgage could be without piling on more debt. We spent time looking at homes in our area and were even considering building if we could do so on our budget.
This quest is how we ended up at a regional builder’s model home display. After explaining the building process to us, the agent told us that the overall price of the home wasn’t important; the only thing that mattered is the monthly payment. That’s when we knew we were in the wrong place.
You see, my husband and I have $35,000 in debt. How did we accumulate so much? The answer is simple: one payment at a time.
The scary truth is that the last time we financed a car, we weren’t even sure afterward how much the car itself cost us; we only knew how much we were paying for it each month. Scarier still—we don’t even own that car anymore.
We have three children now and the car couldn’t hold three car seats. We sold the car and used that money to buy a semi-dependable van. Unfortunately, we’re still making payments on a car we no longer have and we don’t even know how much it really cost in the first place.
All of our debt happened in a similar way: we financed something because even though we couldn’t afford to purchase the item, we could afford the monthly payments. My family could never file for bankruptcy even if we wanted to because we can still make every payment.
We struggle to buy clothing and pay for haircuts but we can still make all those payments for so many things we no longer have or are unable to use. Isn’t that sad?
As a couple, my husband and I are determined from now on that we will only buy things we can completely afford instead of making payments we think we can afford. Admitting to the world that we have so much debt because we made poor decisions is embarrassing. The reason we do tell others is because we are passionate about spreading the truth that monthly payments led us deep into debt.
We are working hard to become good stewards of the money with which we’ve been blessed by doing things like using cash and searching for deals on sites like Money Saving Mom. We hope to help others do the same.
Amber Clark is a former English teacher who is now the proud mother of three beautiful children. She is the author of The Hormonal Housewife and hopes to use her blog to encourage women to be better wives, mothers, and home managers.
photo credit: LemonJenny
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Once again, Pizza Hut is offering its BOOK IT! program to children in K-6th grade, including homeschoolers. This program is designed to motivate children to read by rewarding their monthly reading accomplishments with a free, one-topping Personal Pan Pizza each month!
If you homeschool, you can sign up here to receive the free pizza certificates to award to your child for the 2010-2011 school year.
Click here for more information.
Thanks, Shannon!
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I loved Michelle’s guest post today over on Attention Target Shoppers on her journey towards becoming more frugal. If you’re new to frugality and wondering how to get started, her thoughts and ideas will be a great help to you.
photo credit: winterofdiscontent
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I can hear the groans right now. You were all pumped about these great new money-saving ideas you were going to learn and implement from this series; the last thing you wanted to hear about was a boring topic like budgets.
Remember how you promised me yesterday that you were going to stop making excuses and commit to change? Well, setting up a budget is your first opportunity!
Without a budget in place, all the money you save is pretty superficial. I’d go so far as to say that without a budget in place, bargain-shopping, coupon-clipping and deal-hunting are likely not going to save you any money. In fact, you might be spending more money in an effort to save money–which totally negates the savings, right?
A budget gives you the ability to track your spending and saving–and hopefully to see an increase in savings and a decrease in spending. Without a budget in place, your money will just be running through your fingers with no set objectives. A budget gives you parameters and purpose, it gives you boundaries and it gives you freedom to live creatively within those boundaries.
How much have you spent at the grocery store over the last 4-8 weeks? Average that amount out and use it as a basis for your initial grocery budget. Ultimately, you’re likely going to want to whittle it down quite a bit–since saving money is one of the big purposes of having a grocery budget!–but now is not the time to worry about that. It’s a huge step just to start with a concrete budget in place.
Don’t put undo pressure on yourself to come up with some crazily-low and impossible-to-stick-with figure for your grocery budget. This is not a contest or a competition and if you want to persevere and see long-lasting benefits, you’ll want to give yourself some breathing room.
Over time and with practice, you’ll likely be able to reduce your original grocery budget figure fairly significantly. But just remember: it takes time. You’re not going to cut your grocery bill in half this month. However, if you slowly shave off 5% here and 5% there, within 6-10 months, it’s very possible you can have it lowered by 30-50% or even more.
Always give yourself grace, though. If you’re ever feeling frustrated or stressed about it, step back and remind yourself that it’s just a grocery budget. The world’s not going to come to an end if it’s $5 or $10–or even $30 or $50!–more than you’d like it to be.
What benefits have you found from sticking with a grocery budget? What advice would you have for someone who is brand-new to the idea of budgeting? Tell us in the comments!
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If you missed the first parts of this story, check them out here and here.
In Part 2 of our story of saving 100% down for a home, I left you hanging after my husband, Jesse, had unexpectedly lost his job soon after graduating from law school.
To say this job loss came as a shock would be an understatement. In all honesty, it was devastating.
We had worked and scrimped and scraped our way through law school. We’d made it through without any debt–by the grace of God. And Jesse had landed a good job.
We’d moved to Kansas City for this job and we expected it’d be one he’d be in for at least a few years. We were excited to get started saving and making traction on our financial goals after years of just barely squeaking by.
Then, without warning, we were left without our primary income source–in a new city with little support, few friends, and even fewer business contacts.
At first, we were pretty confident finding a new job wouldn’t be too hard. After all, we were in a big city and Jesse had his law license. How hard could it really be to find something which would pay the bills?
Well, apparently it was a whole lot harder than we’d initially envisioned. The days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months.
We applied for just about every job under the sun we could come up with that would be a possibility. We prayed harder than we’d ever prayed before. We contacted anyone and everyone who might have a possible job lead. We followed up with every application and did our best to leave no stone unturned.
And yet, no one was even calling to offer Jesse an interview, let alone a job.
I wish I could say that I kept a cheerful attitude through all of this. On the contrary, I woke up every morning with a sick feeling in my stomach wondering how much longer things would go on like this. And I’m very ashamed to admit it, but I often found myself angry at my husband.
I felt alone, scared, and stressed, and I took out my frustrations on my husband–which was the last thing he needed at one of the lowest points in his life. Our marriage started feeling the toll and during those months of unemployment, there were times when it was only hanging on by a thread.
[Just a short side note: A few months after all of this took place, God really convicted me of how wrong my attitudes were during this whole experience and I went and humbly asked for my husband's forgiveness--which he graciously gave to me, even though I didn't deserve it. I'm thrilled to report that our marriage is much stronger today as a result of all of these trials and I believe beyond any shadow of a doubt that I am married to the most wonderful man in the whole wide world! He has stuck by me through thick and thin and loved me no matter what. I'm so blessed to be Jesse's wife!]
Gratefully, we didn’t have any debt and we were still living on a strict budget, so the job loss didn’t plunge us into complete financial ruin. I can’t even fathom what it would have been like had we piled up a bunch of debt in law school or followed the advice given by many after law school to go buy a house and live extravagantly now that my husband was officially a lawyer.
While our marriage was in bad shape, we did make one good decision and that was to be as creative and resourceful as we could in order to avoid dipping into our Emergency Fund unless we absolutely had to.
At this point, I had an online bookstore and a small personal blog which I’d slowly been growing. I had recently written a course on Supermarket Savings and we decided to experiment and run a big blow-out sale. We set up an affiliate program for the sale and notified as many of our online friends and companies about the sale.
By God’s grace, the three-day sale on our ebook package earned enough money for us to live on for a few months. We could hardly believe it! That was a huge bright spot in the midst of tremendous discouragement.
We started to really think outside the box when it came to our income: Jesse took on some contract jobs, we got a newspaper route, and I continued to bring in some supplementary income through the online bookstore.
It was also during this time that the idea for MoneySavingMom.com was born. There weren’t any blogs listing weekly deal match-ups for drug stores at that point and many people who had purchased my Supermarket Savings ecourse were writing and asking for more help and counsel.
I’d learned a lot about blogging and monetizing a blog over the past few years and I figured starting a frugal, money-saving blog might be a great opportunity to test some of those ideas out. Jesse was excited about the idea, so we brain-stormed a name and set up the site.
At that point, I was hoping the site would provide a place for me to practically help people learn to live on less by sharing things which had allowed our family to stay out of debt and live on a beans and rice budget. Little could we have dreamed that MoneySavingMom.com would someday soon be earning a full-time income and help us be able to save to pay cash for a home!
Unbeknownst to us, while it seemed like we were getting nowhere in the job search, God was doing some pretty amazing things behind-the-scenes to lay things out for our lives to be turned upside-down–in a very wonderful way!
…to be continued
photo credit: thinkpanama
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I’m excited! So many of you have asked for me to do a step-by-step tutorial on how to cut your grocery budget. Now that the blog transition is done and I have more time for writing, I’m tackling a big project during the month of March: 31 Days To a Better Grocery Budget.
This series will give 31 tips and ideas for how you can significantly cut your grocery bill without sacrificing quality or quantity. Some of the ideas might be ones you’re already doing, but I hope everyone is able to pick up a few new things to further maximize the mileage of your money at the grocery store.
And March 1-2, 2010 (that’s Monday and Tuesday of next week–believe it or not!), I’ll be hosting another Freezer Cooking Day marathon right here, with FishMama’s help. If you’d like to join in, we’ll have a link-up on Friday (February 26, 2010) for you to share your plan and recipes.
I’ll be sharing details tomorrow on how I make up my Freezer Cooking Day plan on a budget and how you can, too. I plan to share a play-by-play of my cooking day on Monday and then finish up with a Freezer Cooking Day Accomplishments link-up on Tuesday.
If you’re planning to join us, be sure to sign up on our Facebook Event Page and follow along with the Twitter hashtag #oamc. If you’re new around here and wondering what Freezer Cooking is all about, you can check out some of my previous Freezer Cooking Day posts here.
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Would you like to earn a little side money taking surveys? Pinecone Research is once again open here for new registrations! But hurry, it will close up fast. (Thanks, Linnea!)
Pinecone Research is one of my favorite survey companies. They pay $3 for every survey completed and the checks come within days of completing a survey.
I also highly recommend MySurvey. I signed up with them a few months ago and have already been paid by them. Unlike many survey companies, you earn points for every survey and screener you take and these points can add up quickly! Go here to sign up with MySurvey.
See more survey companies you can sign up for here.
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I don’t watch TV. Ever.
Except for something historically monumental–like the presidential elections–or, when the Olympics are on. I find the Olympics to be incredibly inspiring and interesting, unlike 99.9% of the rest of what airs on television.
As I’ve been watching the Olympics these past few days, I can’t help but notice so many financial lessons which can be gleaned from the success of these highly-trained and experienced athletes. The principles which they’ve applied to achieve athletic success can be equally as helpful when it comes to finances:
None of the Olympic athletes woke up one day last month and decided they’d compete in the Olympics. No, they’ve spent days, weeks, months, years, and even decades preparing, planning, and practicing.
I read the autobiography of Michael Phelps last year and found it fascinating that he and his coach had set exact goal times–down to the hundredth of a second–that they were aiming for him to hit in each of his Olympic races in 2008. They practiced for these times over and over and over again, and they were forefront in Phelp’s mind at the Olympic games. I have no doubt that having a clearly mapped out strategy is one prominent reason Michael Phelps brought home eight gold medals from Beijing.
If you want to be financially successful, it’s not enough to say, “I’m going to get out of debt.” Or, “I want to save to pay cash for a car.” No, you have to have a clear-cut game plan. You have to have goals and then break those down into attainable, bite-size objectives.
Olympic athletes make phenomenal sacrifices. While the rest of us are sleeping, or vegging, or shopping, or eating, they are in the gym training. They don’t live a normal life or participate in many of the social activities that most in our culture do because so much of their focus and energy must be devoted to physical training.
If you want to succeed financially, it’s also going to require sacrifice. You’ll likely have to give up some of the societal “norms” if you’re working your way out of debt or living on a beans-and-rice budget in order to save for a big purchase or stay out of debt. You might be driving an old car, wearing thrift store clothes, and clipping lots of coupons. Your friends might not understand or think you’re weird. That’s okay. In the long run, those sacrifices and your counter-cultural living will pay off with big dividends.
No athlete ever makes it to the Olympics without exerting enormous self-discipline–probably more than most of us can fathom! They push themselves through pain, injury, exhaustion, and excruciating fatigue.
They don’t give up when the going gets tough. Winners aren’t quitters.
I believe self-discipline is one of the greatest keys to financial success, as well. If you’re not willing to stick with a budget, to say “no” to what you can’t afford, and to stop living beyond your means, you’re never going to get ahead.
If you keep going, keep plodding along, keep sticking with your budget, keep pressing forward when it seems like you’re not getting any traction, you will reap the fruit of your efforts.
An Olympic medal is probably not a reality for most of us, but implementing the principles of Olympic athletes in our personal and financial lives can result in amazing success–which will hopefully be much more long-lasting than a one-time Olympic victory.
photo credit: Shazz Mack
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MoneySavingMom.com is an upbeat and encouraging blog dedicated to helping you find great deals, stretch your hard-earned dollars, and live on less than you make so you can save more and give more. I'm glad to have you here!
