I get so inspired reading all of your accomplishments each month! Thank you for sharing them with me and letting me share them with the rest of our community! If your month didn’t shape up to what you had hoped, don’t give up! I like what Linda shared on her report. She said, “Do NOT […]
Real Family Budget Update– April 2019
April’s numbers are in, which include a tax refund! For the past two years we’ve had to pay at tax time, but this year we overpaid. By a lot! Between new tax laws, our businesses not growing like they have in past years, and that one time we accidentally paid $2000 instead of $200 for […]
Debt Smash-athon MARCH Progress Report
We made some healthy financial progress this month! And by “we” I mean all of you! Our family’s progress was pretty minimal this month, but it’s so encouraging to see that as a group we are making huge progress! I loved reading your reports. I read every single one. I’m smiling from ear to ear […]
Why we started giving our kids allowance that’s NOT tied to chores
I have always been against the idea of giving an allowance to kids. I mean the kind of allowance that kids just get, whether they’ve been helpful or awful, completed all their chores or none of them. I wanted my kids to earn money rather than give it to them. I wanted them to learn […]
Real Family Budget Update– March 2019
If you saw our budget update in February you know that March was a tight month for us. One of the things I really love about living on last month’s income is that we have some time to plan how to handle a month of lower income. As you’ll see in the spending details below, […]
6 Hacks for Storing Food in Small Spaces
Whenever we talk about our food storage (or even just monthly grocery shopping), we always have readers who say they can’t keep food storage or shop for a month at a time because they just don’t have the space. I definitely understand small spaces. When we were first married we lived in the tiniest little […]
Cost of Setting Up Our Airbnb Rental
We already share exactly what we earn and spend in every category of our family budget. Now we’re also sharing details for our Airbnb rental. You only see the net income from Airbnb in our monthly budget updates, and if you’re thinking about hosting with Airbnb (or have no plans to ever host, but are […]
Debt Smash-athon FEBRUARY Progress Report
January was fabulous, but February was EVEN better! As a group we are making some serious progress on getting out of debt and improving our finances! I am so impressed! Big numbers are great, but what’s so much MORE impressive to me is the sacrifice and hard work that those numbers represent. THAT is what […]
$300 Monthly Grocery Shopping After a No-Spend Month– March 2019
After having a no-spend month with a pantry challenge in February, we were eager to do our March grocery shopping, so eager that I even went on a Saturday. We went to Winco, Sam’s Club, and Sprouts and spent nearly $300. We will grab a few things later in the month (I just got 6 […]
Real Family Budget Update– February 2019
If you’ve seen my last couple of posts, you know that February’s no-spend challenge didn’t go exactly as planned, but we made it to the other side. I shared the story last week (here and here) and now I’ll go into all of the numbers. But first, here’s your reminder to quickly fill out your […]
What I Learned from a No-Spend Month– What Worked and What Didn’t
We just finished up No-Spend February! While not everything went as planned, we’re still counting it as a success. Even with the unplanned spending, we still made some great strides that will show up even beyond our February budget update. Now that it’s over, I want to evaluate what worked well and where we struggled. […]
When You have to SPEND in a NO-Spend Month
We don’t call it a No-Spend Challenge for nothing! If it were easy, it wouldn’t be a challenge, right? At the beginning of February, we set a goal to not spend anything on eating out, household goods, entertainment, trips, or any other unnecessary spending. In addition, we decided to make our no-spend month a pantry […]
Debt Smash-athon JANUARY Progress Report
Way to go Debt Smashers! What an amazing month! I was so impressed by all the hard work you put toward paying off debt in January! I absolutely loved reading through all of your progress reports. You are up against some big challenges, but you’re making great progress. For those who are new here, in […]
Is a No-Spend Month Actually Worth It?
A no-spend month saves money in more ways than you probably realize. A no-spend month also has a positive overall impact on your future finances. If you think that a no-spend month will just make you spend more later, then you need to read this. I got an overwhelming reaction when I shared our No-Spend […]
Real Family Budget Update– January 2019
We had a great budget month to start the new year out. We didn’t have any huge expenses and we kept our spending under control. As always, in this transparent budget update I’ll share with you exactly how much we earned, spent, and saved in January. We made some serious and surprising progress toward our […]
How to Save with a No-Spend Month
Are you going strong in your financial goals? Want to keep up the momentum? Or maybe January was a struggle and you want to reset and start over. Either way, a no-spend month could be great for you! Let me tell you what’s involved. It’s not as scary or as hard as it sounds. Why […]
Switching from YNAB 4 to the New YNAB– Plus a hack to make it better
We’ve been using YNAB for a long time. It was with us through nearly our entire debt-free journey. YNAB 4 was a part of how we handled money in our family and we weren’t ready to part ways when the new online YNAB came along. YNAB (the company) understood that parting would be hard so […]
$327 Monthly Grocery Haul for Our Family of 7
It’s been a couple of months since we’ve had a normal grocery shopping month. During November and December we didn’t do our normal monthly grocery shopping trips. It was good to get back to it! We waited until nearly half way through the month to do our monthly grocery shopping, though I did make a […]
Annual Spending Report 2018–California Family of Seven
Have you ever stepped back at the end of the year to look at your spending totals for the year? Of course, this is only really practical and possible if you’ve been tracking your spending throughout the year. We started tracking (and minimizing) our spending back when we decided to pay off over $100K of […]
Transparent Family Budget Update– December 2018
Happy New Year! It’s time for our last budget update of 2018! Thinking back on December, I can’t say enough about how nice it is to have sinking funds for things like Christmas and life insurance. When we were paying off our student loan debt we didn’t do sinking funds because we were funnelling absolutely […]
Join the 2019 Debt Smash-athon!
If you’ve seen our new BIG goal, you know we’ll be pretty focused in 2019. We’re excited to have a huge goal to keep ourselves making financial progress. I know so many of you are working hard to make financial strides in the new year, too. I love hearing what you’re doing to reach your […]
How Our Emergency Fund is Fighting Inflation
Have you ever thought about the money in your savings account becoming worth less over time? Aren’t savings accounts supposed to grow? If the interest rate is less than the rate of inflation, then you are actually losing money, well, purchasing power, because your money isn’t growing as fast as inflation. A few months ago […]
Transparent Family Budget Update– November 2018
I’m really excited for November’s budget update because it’s the first month that we’ve focused on our new BIG financial goal. If you missed it, I wrote all about it here and even shared about it in our first-ever live video. In short, we’re going to be working hard to pay off our mortgage. Like […]
Our Next BIG Financial Goal– Why We’re Paying Off Our Mortgage in 5 Years
A couple of weeks ago, we announced our big financial goal for 2019 (and beyond) in our very first ever Facebook live video. We thought about waiting until it was actually 2019 to dive in, but honestly once we made the decision, we couldn’t wait. We just wanted to get started instead of frittering away […]
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