Kim | February 27, 2010
I decided to do something different with the March grocery run, mainly do a major purge of the freezer and pantry contents. This will finish off our meat stockpile, and unless Little One comes in the next two weeks; the only thing we’ll have left in our freezer is some corn and a bag of [...]
Kim | February 22, 2010
Taking care of things like balancing the checkbook this morning, I decided to check and see if the lender had applied my payment to my part of THE BEAST. Sure enough, they did. And this makes me a happy camper – the total balance is really under $40K and about half went to principal, and [...]
Kim | February 19, 2010
I checked our local student loan balances (of the four, two are serviced locally and two are out of state). Good news and bad news. The good news is that my local loan – also the smallest student loan we have – got hit HARD on the principal. Only $6 went to interest, the rest [...]
Kim | February 17, 2010
There is an estimated $730 billion in outstanding federal and private student-loan debt, says Mark Kantrowitz of FinAid.org, a Web site that tracks financial-aid issues — and only 40% of that debt is actively being repaid. The rest is in default, or in deferment, which means that payments and interest are halted, or in “forbearance,” [...]
Kim | February 12, 2010
I re-tweaked the last part of February’s menu to account for Ash Wednesday and to use up some roast in the freezer. I think we did pretty good this time around. Walmart Cereal – $5.12 (less $0.75 coupon, $4.37) Chili -2 cans at $0.97 Ground beef – 2.25 pounds, $4.23 Spaghetti sauce – 2 at [...]
Kim | February 8, 2010
I just now realized that another pay period has ended and a new one has begun. January’s budget was pretty loose to allow for groceries (mainly putting perishables back into our purchases) and to just get used to a budget – finding out what works and what didn’t. Our first budget off of Greg’s “new [...]
Kim | February 5, 2010
It’s been about 2.5 months since we stopped using our credit card totally. We’ve gone to a mixture of cash and using the debit card, and surprisingly; we have a lot more money on our hands. Granted, paying off the credit card bill and the car loan is helping that out; but not (over)spending the [...]