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 would you want to have a No-Spend Month? Most people probably don't plan a no-spend month just for the heck of it (though that was kind of how our very first no-spend month started). Having a good reason ... read more
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 they let us keep using YNAB 4 indefinitely. We took them up on that for exactly 3 years! Now we're making the switch to the new YNAB. First I'll explain our reasons for switching and our reasons for ... read more
$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 quick trip to Grocery Outlet at the beginning of the month. I filmed both that haul and our monthly grocery haul, which you can watch below, or keep reading for the item-by-item price ... read more
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 student loan debt. That was the same time we started using YNAB (You Need a Budget) for our budgeting. With YNAB's report features, we pulled together our annual analytics and made a ... read more
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 everything extra to our loans, then when big expenses came up (like Christmas or life insurance) we just made a smaller payment to debt that month. It worked great and I wouldn't change ... read more
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 goals. You're making sacrifices to lower your expenses. You're working extra jobs to increase your income. And you're making progress! You're reminding yourself that the financial freedom will be worth ... read more
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 we asked for your advice about where to keep our $25,000 emergency fund so that it didn't lose money as inflation picked up. If you don't want to read the post and ... read more
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 in 5 years instead of 15 (or 30). We don't know exactly how we're going to make it happen, but that's our plan. We like a good challenge. So if you're currently working hard to pay off debt, ... read more
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 the last two months in the year. You'll see the progress we've already made when I share our monthly budget update next week, but I wanted to be sure I explained how we decided on our goal ... read more
Transparent Family Budget Update– October 2018
If you're here to see what real family finances look like you've come to the right place. As always, I'll share what our family earned, spent, and saved last month in detail. But first... We are super excited to do something new here at Six Figures Under! For more than five years we've been sharing these monthly budget updates on the blog, along with more than 500 blog posts covering content about finance and frugality. About three years ago we published Frugal Fresh Start, an easy ... read more
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