Saving Money

Posted By Kim on 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 to that glorious principal. It’s so nice to see it lowered significantly.

Greg’s local loan – not so much. Despite getting the March payment in under 30 days from the last payment, only $26 went to the principal and the rest interest. So that mega-loan is barely going down. And since I have the other half of the loan debt with about the same interest, I’m expecting the same thing to be posted (once the lender decides to post it).

I’m trying to remain positive about everything, even the principal going down by $26 is better than it going up. Or just staying the same. Once Little One is here and the birth is paid for, we are going to take the rest and pay off as many loans as possible (best case would be my local loan and my Perkins loan) and then snowball the living daylights out of the remainder of what’s left. It’s fun saving money and all that but another reason why I’m ready to deliver is to start sending in snowballs of additional principal payments on the loans. I guess it’s much more fun to watch principal go down than balances go up.

Best part about this: no additional stupid tax was paid. YAY!!

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Tags: debt, financial goals, student loans

Posted By Kim on 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,” which means payments are halted while interest accrues.

- The $550,000 Student Loan Burden

Ouch (on the $730B and the 40% part). And I don’t particularly feel bad for the woman in the article, especially at this part:

“Maybe half of it was my fault because I didn’t look at the fine print,” Dr. Bisutti says. “But this is just outrageous now.”

Maybe half of it was your fault? Half? I hate to be harsh, but SERIOUSLY? Even though we got tripped up on the daily interest nonsense, we at least understand the basic formula of student loans (and loans in general): borrow money == pay back what you borrowed + interest.

*headdesk*

And speaking of student loans, we sent off our March payments already – within 30 days from our last payment – so HOPEFULLY the majority of the payment will go to principal, not interest.

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Tags: debt, student loans, stupid tax

Posted By Kim on 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 $1.98 (less $1.00 off two, $2.96)
Cheese – 1 pound, $3.88
Red beans and rice mix – $1.47
Cream of Potato Soup – 2 cans at $1.26
Clams – 2 cans at $1.38
Pizza crusts – 2 at $0.52
Pizza sauce – $1.14
Manwich – $1.00
Ham steaks – $2.98
Tortilla chips – $2.00
Ramen – $1.98
Scalloped potaotes – 2 boxes at $1.00
Tuna fish – $0.77
Tea – $2.24 (less $0.50 coupon, $1.74)
1 pound of black forest ham – $3.50
1 pound turkey pastrami – $2.98
1/2 pound hard salami – $2.34
Oreos – $2.19 (less $2.19 with coupon, FREE)
Total: $49.04

Safeway
Chicken breasts, 2 pounds – $2.02
Pita Chips – $4.99 (less $5.99 with coupon, FREE + overage)
Total: $1.02

A few things that we noticed:
- It’s a better value for us to buy cheese and milk in bulk from Costco.
- If you go up to the deli at Walmart right before it closes, you can buy the already sliced meat for half off. The black forest ham was $7/pound, we purchased a pound for $3.50
- We really lucked out with the pita chips coupon, because we had overage that was applied to our purchase of chicken breasts. We saved a total of $10.66 (91%!!) at Safeway between coupons and their little club card. A grand total of $15.89 saved between coupons and club card at Walmart and Safeway.

Our grand total was $50.06, and we have about $10-15 budgeted for milk and cheese. We’re still on track quite nicely, and we don’t feel deprived or anything like that in our eating.

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Tags: budget, food, grocery by the numbers, menu planning, safeway, walmart

Posted By Kim on 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 job” paycheck is basically lived off of, and it went really, really well. I know I need to up grocery a leeeeetle bit more (it doesn’t hep Mama’s having crazy milk cravings), but other than that; we stayed on budget exactly. Everything we bought had a spot SOMEWHERE in the budget, and we had absolutely zero overspending and no impulse buys. We came close – really close – but it didn’t happen because of the budget.

We also found out that when we’re Stressed Out is when we’re more inclined to impluse buy, mainly for fast food. Thanks to the budget and the menu plan, we were able to resist.

Tonight Greg and I get to make a new budget for the paycheck of the pay period that just ended. We need to tweak our stupid student loan payments so it doesn’t get eaten up by interest, and we can do our monthly Date Night and distribute out blow money. And finish up Little One’s cloth diaper stash – hurray!

Happy, happy, happy!

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Tags: budget, cloth diapering, financial goals, menu planning, money philosophy, student loans, stupid tax

Posted By Kim on 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 credit card is a BIG help.

For most of our married life, Greg has been the Accountant/Financial Guy. In that, he took care of the money and made sure we had a savings; and I paid the bills with the said money. This meant I was happily oblivious to our credit card, mainly those little things called FINANCE CHARGES.

In December I remember looking at the credit card statement for some reason and saw a line: “FINANCE CHARGE: $19.99″. $20 EXTRA that we had to pay to the credit card company.

$20 x 12 months = $240 in finance charges for last year.

That’s a lot of money that we could have used for MUCH better things. Like well, food. Date night. Anything but giving it to the credit card company.

Seeing that little line on the statement was my “credit card conversion” and basically; that was the end of the credit card for both of us. Now that we have 1) a budget 2) cash/debit card system and 3) paid off the card; we’re a lot more picky about what we spend our money on. It hurts to shell out cash or use the debit card a LOT more than using the credit card. We use the debit card at places that automatically take the money THAT MOMENT from our account, so it’s an instant “we better have needed X, because we’re Y poorer now.” instead of “la la la, just charge it and we’ll pay it later!” We did that so many times in our married life, and later always became MUCH later because Life Happened and suddenly; we were carrying a balance.

I know plenty of people who charge and pay, or use a card for the “rewards”. Personally; we’d rather not tempt Life and just cash flow what we need. If we don’t have the money, we can’t buy it. It’s amazing how many people have said “but why don’t you guys just charge X, Y, or Z?” or “Greg’s making good money now, you can afford to use a credit card.” or even mock us at the idea of saving up money for something. Saving up money has cut down on the amount of impulse buys (mainly me ) happening and really making sure we get the most bang for our buck. Overspending is WAY down, and ta-da; our savings account is the beefiest we’ve ever seen it. Including when Greg and I were both working and bringing home about $25/hour combined.

I know a lot of people LOVE LOVE LOVE their credit cards (I was one!), so don’t take this post personally if you are one of those. It’s not my goal, but rather to flesh out in my mind why we don’t use credit cards as to appease those who think we are ABSOLUTELY INSANE for not.

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Tags: budget, credit cards, Dave Ramsey Method, debt, financial goals, money philosophy, stupid tax

Posted By Kim on January 31, 2010

Since we are going to be buying things like perishables, we’ve changed our shopping strategy from once a month to twice a month. We also significantly upped our food budget, yay!

Based on what’s planned for the February menu, we purchased the following for two weeks:

Bread Outlet Store:
6 loaves of wheat bread – $6.96 (should last us the month)
1 package hamburger buns – $1.04
1 package hot dog buns – $1.04
1 package sloppy joe mix – $0.69
Total: $9.73

Dollar Store:
Scalloped potatoes – $1
Au gratin potatoes – $1
Tortillas, 2 packs – $2
Total: $4

Walmart:
12 pack chicken Ramen – $1.98 (pregnancy craving)
Fish sticks – $3.76
Cottage cheese – $1.54
Sour cream – $0.82 (we got the smaller container this time)
Malt-o-meal cereal – $5.12
English muffins – $2.12
5 pounds of sugar – $2.78
1 pound colby cheese – $3.88
2 packets brown gravy mix – $0.38 each
1 packet chicken gravy – $0.72
1 jar pizza sauce – $1.14
1 can cream of celery soup – $0.88
1 can cream of mushroom soup – $0.88
Jiffy baking mix (big box) – $2.54
1 box onion soup mix – $0.98
1 pound deli ham – $2.48
1 pound deli pastrami – 2.98
1/2 pound deli salami – $2.34
Pepperoni – $2.98
Hot dogs – $0.88
Total: 41.56

Albertson’s
Chocolate Quik (Albi’s brand) – $3.29
Kikkoman stir fry sauce – $2.19
Albi’s chocolate chip cookies – $2.99
Total: 8.47

Our grand total was: $63.76, with $42 from our change jar that we FINALLY cashed in last week.

So our initial goal of $60 for two weeks (so, $120 a month) is pretty accurate, although we still will need milk in the coming week. February is a “tweak the budget” month, so we’re allowing extra wiggle room, especially for food. We are in agreement that we will gladly pull out funds from other places in order to up the food budget as needed. Food is not something we want to scrimp on (unless we ABSOLUTELY have to).

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Tags: albertson's, budget, dollar store, food, grocery by the numbers, menu planning, outlet bread store, walmart

Posted By Kim on January 29, 2010

One of our student loan payments was posted today. It was for what I call “The Beast”, which is the majority of the total loan debt. Greg and I both are responsible for The Beast, almost 50/50 as well. Two payments to two lenders for two almost equal balances. The January payment showed $90 of the payment going to interest. The one that just posted (for February) showed an overwhelming $30 going to the principal. Meaning about $200 went to interest.

I about had a breakdown and called up the lender, who happily informed me that they do daily interest accrual. And because we waited to make sure we had money to pay them (crazy novel concept, I know), we had a long stretch that accrued interest. And it ate up a metric crapton of the monthly payment.

Currently Greg and I are in mild panic + extremely angry mode, and are reworking how we’re going to do the budget and the loans. Because this is quite frankly, ridiculous. We also need to look at Greg’s portion of The Beast and see if the same “oh well, we accrue interest daily so if you have a long gap in payments – even if they’re made before they’re due – almost all of your payment will go to interest” junk going on.

Maybe next month I can get my part of The Beast down below $40K. But right now, it’s still above it. ::headdesk::

Category: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Tags: budget, financial goals, student loans, stupid tax

Posted By Kim on January 26, 2010

Because I’m sure everyone is itching to know how much student loan debt we have, I made a page for it. Actually, I wanted a page with a debt progress bar; and I finally found a suitable WordPress plugin for that.

You can access it by clicking “The Debt” tab at the top or by clicking here.

I also added a progress bar for what we’ve paid off so far, since it was looking pretty depressing with just the student loan debt.

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Tags: debt, student loans

Posted By Kim on January 25, 2010

Still working on getting the shopping list together, but here’s how February is shaping up:

Breakfasts: Pancakes, cereal, muffins, eggs and bacon, egg sandwiches, breakfast burritos, biscuits and gravy, eggs and sausage, waffles, eggs in a basket, French toast

Lunches: Wraps, soup and sandwiches, nachos, quesadillas, soup, English muffin pizzas, clam chowder, sandwiches, tuna salad

Dinners: Sunday chicken dinner, pasta with sauce, sloppy Joes, enchiladas, taco skillet, fish, ham and scalloped potatoes, homemade pizza, tater dogs, stir fry, chicken pesto lasagna, tuna casserole, pork chops, chili dogs, tacos, split pea and ham soup, beef lasagna, fish

Category: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Tags: menu planning

Posted By Kim on January 25, 2010

1/2 pound ground beef
1 package taco seasoning mix
2 1/4 cups water
1 1/2 cups uncooked pasta
1 1/2 cups frozen corn
1 can drained and rinsed kidney or pinto beans
1 medium tomato, chopped
1/2 cup sour cream
1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese
1 tablespoon chopped fresh chives

In 12 inch skillet, cook beef over medium-high heat for 5-7 minutes, stirring frequently until brown. Drain. Stir in seasoning mix, water, uncooked pasta, corn, beans, and tomato into the beef. Heat to boiling, stir. Reduce heat to medium-low. Cover, cook 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally or until pasta reaches desired doneness and most of the liquid has been absorbed. Stir in sour cream. Remove from heat, sprinkle with cheese and chives. Cover and let stand for 2-3 minutes or until cheese is melted.

—
Another Internet find that we all enjoy and creates plenty of leftovers, as well.

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Tags: recipes