June’s budget meeting, savings update, and announcement!

Point one:

Frugality seems to be catching, like an infectious disease.

First hubby told me he was being more careful with items he uses everyday in his line of work, trying to make things last longer and carefully re-using things.

It showed, because he spent $586 less in June than in May on work-related expenses, but his income was almost exactly the same dollar amount, so it wasn’t that he had less work and therefore fewer expenses.

The man has gotten very excited about meeting our goal.

I spotted a tube of toothpaste cut in half (and I wasn’t the one who did it!). Did you know if you cut a tube of toothpaste in half, you find enough product in there to last another week?

Seriously.

Ditto for hand lotion, facial cleanser – anything goopy in texture clings to the inside of the packaging.

The takeaway from this is: if your spouse doesn’t get initially excited about getting out of debt or meeting some financial goal, don’t get impatient and testy. Just be patient and keep talking up the dream. They’ll come ’round. Meeting goals together is great stuff.

Point two:

Budget meetings (and having a budget in general) are powerful things.

We put aside $3,000 this month (on top of our monthly tax man savings) earmarked for a down payment for our first home.

Grand total since we started our No Spend Challenge: $6,000.

We track our spending, so after crunching the numbers we found that we could put aside a huge chunk into our down payment savings account.

Because of this habit, we know exactly how much we can move into savings (this was extremely helpful when we were getting out of debt – every dollar being accounted for, food and bills taken care of first, we knew we could safely send large payments to the creditors).

After not crunching the numbers, we found that we had gone under budget in several categories:

• we halved our restaurant spending.
• we spent $218 less on groceries (yes!)
• $61 less on entertainment (but those cheap bowling passes have been getting lots of use and the kids have still been having lots of frugal fun)
• our Misc. category (for “blow” money and things that don’t fit in any other category) had $155 left over
• All told, we spent $586 less in June than in May, so I made another immediate transfer to the House Fund savings account.

These little things add up!

Little things add up so much that in fact, I was inspired to begin work on another ebook: The Temporary Tightwad: How to radically reduce your spending, meet a money goal and change your life forever, now available on Amazon!