Reminders of the Past!

Dh and I are trying to get back on track. We were doing so well only to somehow fall.There was a list of things that Dh and I had accomplished over a period of time. I am putting them here as a reminder for myself to get us back on track and having that sense of "peace" that we somehow have lost.

This was a post last year in which I had typed up on how our progress "was" going:


20 months ago Dh and I decided to make some changes with our spending etc and I can't remember them all in which we have tried but I thought I would post everything in which we stuck with :) I also want to note that since making changes slow but sure we have not lived from pay to pay in the last 20 months.....I do fall off of the wagon from time to time and even though our Emergency fund isn't where it should be I have to stop and remember that over the last 20 months we have had to use it for stuff like paying cash for our new to us older van when our car went Ka-put and this past May we had emergency Vet bills etc..... I had posted this on another message board to give them an update from then till now so I am just copying and pasting what I had typed earlier........Well here goes the things in which we have tried and seems to be working for us :)



(1) We pay ourselves first .....I remember when first trying this after reading different financial books I was Very skeptical.....I remember thinking "Yeah right!, how on earth are we going to pay ourselves first when we have a mortgage and bills to pay and food to put on the table, there is barely enough now to cover all of that never mind trying to find any money to put away for us." Well we did it and it worked

(A) We decided on an amount to put into our retirement fund "pretaxed" from dh paycheques....

(B) We made sure that we had from $5 to $20 each( The amount depends on prices rising etc...like when gas went up we would have about $5 each to compensate the rising prices) to keep in our purse/wallet so we could go out for a tea if we so desired, this helped from having a feeling of being broke.

(C) We opened up an ING account this past year and have $100 automatically taken out of our regular bank account into our ING account.

We did not try all of these at once....For example, we started putting money into our retirement and before moving on to another idea to try, we waited for 3 pays or 6 weeks to give it a chance and to see how it was working for us........The first pay we "felt" it......the second pay felt doable but......... by the 3rd pay it worked! We adjusted and it became a habit We also knew that if this didn't work either we could cut back on the amount of $ taken off of dh paycheque and try again or.....just cancel this idea for now.

After an idea became a habit , it took us 6 weeks or 3 pays, we would move on to another idea and try that for the same amount of time and so on and so on.

(2) Changed our Mortgage payments from monthly to every 2 weeks....... this ended up putting a bit of extra money on the principle of our mortgage. And it was such a pleasant change to divide up our mortgage payment and pay on payday every 2 weeks opposed to one lump sum once a month.........it really did make a difference.

(3) We still have our change jar ......this has paid for a nice dinner out for the family every 2 or 3 months if that is what we are aiming for at the time......alot of times now I will use it for a treat like to go out for an ice cream cone with the kids etc. It is sooooo amazing how that can feel after once living from pay to pay.

(4) Freedom account---- Still working on this one I find it hard as I keep getting into a routine of paying things off as they come in......but, I do have a couple of hundred in there now to go towards house and property taxes due in Feb. This week I will be adding some more to it......

(5) Emergency Fund.....this one seemed to take forever , still is taking forever. Dh family and my family have been having a rough go of it so we have been trying to help them.....everything seems to be ok now as of a couple of weeks ago, so now we can focus more on this. I find though that over the months even with helping our family, having the odd emergency happen etc.....we still have $1500 in there. I am just thankful that we could help them as before starting these changes it would have been impossible to come up with any money.

(6) Stockpiling.....all I can say is WOW.....major impact on cutting $ from the grocery bill. If for example mayo is on for a great sale I will by 12 jars and that will last us for 1 year minimum etc. We are at the point right now where we only have to buy loss leader/sale items except for milk,eggs, fresh produce ....things like that.

(7) One day I sat down and I called our phone company and insurance company to see what I could do to cut back expenses even if it was just a little bit....it all adds up ...I changed our insurance deductable from $250 to $500....saved us and extra $5 a month........then I called the phone company.....I got rid of our call waiting and this saved us $6.87 a month......I asked about our long distance plan as we were paying $29 a month ( I did need this to keep my sanity as we had no family or friends in this province) anyhow, because I asked, the man at the phone company said that they had a deal which was not advertised and a customer had to inquire in order to get this deal....I ended up getting that same exact plan for $29 a month dropped down to $18 a month .....I couldn't believe my luck! and all because I "asked". So total savings with insurance and phone was $22.87 a month or........$274.44 a year

(8) We had a Will made up.....this will save alot of $ and heartache for our children if anything were to happen to dh or myself.

(9) I went online to crowntools and they have a budget sheet where you can type in your income,taxes and tithe. I put in a lower amount of our income which I felt we could live off of......for Income I put our take home pay, taxes I put in $0 and tithe I put $0 as we do help out with family and friends but we never know how much it will be which they need......anyhow, I played around with the figures that the budget gave us and was amazed at how doable it really is! I still go there even now from time to time as a refresher and when I feel like I need to get back on track and focus more on what is important to us. Here is the website addy:

http://www.crown.org/Tools/budgetguide.asp

That is all I can think of right now. I am thinking of our emergency fund and forgot that even with what is left over we have used it over the months........when our car broke down we replaced it with a new to us older van and paid cash ......emergency vet bills this past May etc...

As I mentioned I wanted to share with you all an update since starting this journay 20 months ago. Maybe someone here might pick up even one idea, I don't know but it sure feels good that we don't have to worry about living from pay to pay. Also I have found that to get ahead we couldn't just live within our means.........We had to live below our means but yet we feel so much better off and truly Blessed!

It doesn't matter how much you start off with in savings or making changes.....start little and you will find just like us that once you get use to making changes eventually you will be at a point where you can add a bit more as time goes by.

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I need this as a reminder. maybe some of the information will help others as well.

I need to work on again:
(1) Get an emergency fund up and running ($1000 min.for now)
(2) Start deducting money "pretaxed" from each pay for retirement.
(3) Start our Freedom account over.

(4) Getting our mortgage payments back to bi-weekly.For some reason with this move we just did dh decided to put our mortgage payments back to monthly, we are calling Monday to have it switched back for next month to every 2 weeks on payday.

(5) Mix up my frugal mix recipes to have on hand like,brownie mix,taco mix,biscuit mix,cream of soup mix,donut mix (for baked not fried, almost like a cake donut), onion soup mix, almost hamburger helper mix and there are a few others which I need to go over in my binder of recipes.

That is what I will start forcusing on, focusing on #1, #4 and #5 first.

Sooooooooo, Let the Journey begin! :)