Top 10 Ways We Save Greens

In honor of Dave Letterman's Retirement, today's post will feature

Top 10 Ways We Save Greens 

10. Bringing Coffee and Lunch from Home 
This one is pretty self explanatory. Pack In, pack out is not just good for hiking but for going to work as well :)

9. Visiting Flea Markets for Ideas
Sometimes it really stinks to not spend money. When we get in this mood, we go to a flea market to look around and gather ideas. We start to look at pieces and talk about how we could design a DIY project around the concepts we like. One of our favorite flea markets is the District Flea Market, but Eastern Market is one of the largest in DC.

8. Home Brewing 
Nick is a home brewer, and by default I have learned quite a bit and have become a Sous-Home brewer. I will do a thorough cost analysis on Nick's next brew, but for now trust me that after the initial investment in equipment, Home brewing pays for itself :)

7. Zero Tolerance for Compromise
We have saved money by not compromising on our budget. If we don't have the money, we don't spend money. This past week has been challenging! We are both CRAVING a good meal out, but our entertainment budget has been allocated for the month to a race registration. We are learning the art of making firm decisions about our money and also learning the repercussions of these decisions.

6. Planning Ahead 
This is more of a long-term money savings technique. We are still getting the hang of planning ahead, but I have to say it feels great understanding that we already have a little set aside for a week off this summer and holiday travels. Saving money little by little will save us from stress in the end :)

5. Free Activities
We are always looking for things to keep us busy and not focused on our lack of spending money. Though DC has many restaurants and bar temptations it also has a lot of free activities, museums, a ton of volunteer activities, great hiking trails near by, and free events through the Embassies, universities, and other organizations. I've learned that the key to keeping a free activity free is to bring snacks; otherwise, we ALWAYS end up buying food or drinks! Cherry Blossoms are right around the corner, but here is a photo from last year.

We are also finding things to keep us occupied at home: Potluck dinner with friends, game night, learning Russian-again, writing blog posts, preparing for future adventures, and putting together photo books to be printed at a later date. I think this weekend may be the time to switch out our winter clothes!

4. Coupons
Coupons have become key to our Sunday shopping. We spend time looking through what's on sale as we plan out our week of meals. We have an App on our phone that helps us keep track of what coupons we have while we work our way around the store.

We are also on the look out for coupons for baseball games ($2 Tuesday games), oil changes, and % off coupons for stores we frequent. I have given up on Groupon and Living Social for the time being, unless I know it is something I will use in the next month.

3. Working Out
Working out has plenty of physical and mental benefits, but Nick and I have also noticed an additional benefit- we don't spend money after a long workout. Honestly, it probably has to do with a lack of energy to actually go out :) After a long workout the couch looks really good!

Stock photo of beautiful people running... I'm not sure when they got this pic of Nick and I? Damn we look good :) 

2. Planning our Meals 
This tends to go hand-in-hand with coupons, but in planning out meals for each night on Sunday we can ensure that we aren't tempted to just grab a pizza on the way home. Each week we plan out 4-5 meals and account for leftovers for at least one maybe two meals. This allows us to be creative and try new recipes, but also prep in advance if we're going to have a busy day at work, or if we're going for a quick run after work. Planning is key to our cost savings :) Lot's of food pics coming your way next Friday on my post, Two weeks for $41.

1. One Income Budget 
The biggest way we have been able to save money is creating a budget from only ONE income. This has cut how much funding is "available" to us to spend on monthly expenses and forces us to put the full second income towards our student loans. This was one of the best pieces of advice we have followed. I understand that not everyone can do this. We can't pay our minimum balance of our student loans as part of the one-income budget, but we can pay for everything else.

If your even able to put $50 or whatever you can afford from your paycheck into savings or towards a debt payment, it helps. Whatever you can do, look at your budget and try to stick with it :) It is hard and frustrating at times, but I am optimistic that it will be worth having a whole income not going to debt in a few years :)

Gas Rewards

Reward programs never seem to be straight forward. I am always thankful for the extra "help," but more often then not I feel like it takes more work to figure out how they work then they may be worth. 

Our Credit Card offered us reward points, or the option of the 1% cash back. I can handle this type of reward, every time I got up to a $25 cash back reward I applied it to my balance. Simple and Easy. Note: we are not using our credit cards anymore, but those random $25 were nice :) 

I still have not taken the time to figure out how I actually earn bonus reward points from my debt card. But, perhaps this blog post will encourage me to take time and research that program.  

When our grocery store started to do Gas Reward Points I was determined to figure out how it worked and how it could benefit us. This has been one of the easiest Reward programs to follow, as long as we remember to use the points we earn each month. 

Step One: Buy Groceries, every $100 in groceries earns you 10 cents off on gas. 

Step Two: Once you accumulate gas points, usually shown on the bottom of your receipt, go to the participating gas stations and use them. The stations are usually easy to spot because they have flags out front with the grocery stores name. 

Step Three: Using your Points. I lost my grocery card, so I always use my phone number at the store. The pump lets me use the card or put my phone number in to bring up my reward points. AWESOME. The pump gives you all the prompts to enter your store card/number, lists your available points and asks you if you want to use them- Yes/No, you then swipe your debit card and you are off. The first couple times I followed these steps and now I am a pro!! 

We have saved 50 cents and this past week 70 cents on gas. We have not yet made it to a full dollar off gas, but we'll get there. You need to pay attention to when your reward points expire, so you don't miss out on 10 cents.

We are always on the look out for coupons to double or triple our gas reward points. For the month of March, we found a coupon for 3x the gas rewards if we went to the gas station and picked up a coupon. So each week, we went to the gas station for the coupon.

Nick and I both have Safeway cards and have found that we get different personalized coupons. For example, if I don't use my card for a month, I get extra reward point coupons, or a coupon for $5 off our overall grocery bill. We have been trying to use one card each month and then switching when the other card gets better deals. Just an idea, if you don't mind managing two cards.

Happy Shopping! 

Month in Review- March 2014

Over the course of month one we have had some growing pains and great learning experiences. Here is a snapshot of where we stand after one month:

Unexpected Costs: 

• Oil Change and new headlight for the Car
• Medicine
• Laundry
• Extra week of Food...oops :( A new post to come on how to eat for 2 weeks on $41.20 and what's in the cupboards. I will post an update next week. 

Unexpected Income:

• Sold our Billy Joel tickets for NYC to Nick's Mom- don't feel too bad for us, we are still keeping our tickets to see him at Nat's park in DC. 
• Nick got overtime this month :) Go NICK!!
• $25 Cash from our Credit Card points

March Splurges:
We spent our entertainment fund on a nice lunch at Mount Vernon's Tavern and also signed up for the Boilermaker 15K in Utica, NY. This will be our fourth year participating in the race! Both purchases were well worth our play money for the month.

Funniest Moment: 
One of our line items in our monthly budget is personal money. Being able to place a little income in our personal accounts helps to alleviate a little pressure on a tight shared budget. We can spend money on something we individually want, versus a group purchase. This could be a fun beer, in Nick's case, or going out for coffee in my case.

When budgeting, I offered to pay my gym membership out of my personal money; however, after watching Nick make a bunch of small purchases, I've got to say I got a bit jealous at the fact that more then half of my personal income was tied up in my gym membership. I decided to brings this up to Nick and make the case that my physical and mental health is a group benefit; therefore I should be able to consider my gym membership, aka myself, a group expense :) Let me just say, I did not expect to win this argument, and my LOVING husband saw through my crap but still agreed that my fitness was a group benefit. At the end of the day, we agreed that I would decrease my personal money slightly and the rest of my membership would be supplemented by our budget! Let's just say this "argument" lead to plenty of laughs :)

Lessons Learned/Tweaks to April 2014: 
I think the biggest tweaks deal with adjustments in our budget. We need to breakout our costs out a little more to help us better manage where we spend our money. For example, in weekly expenses we had "Weekly Expenses," it has now been broken down into groceries, laundry, and short-term savings.

We upped our short-term savings money to include "unexpected" costs that are not so unexpected. For example, we need to get a oil change every three months, our monthly medicine expenses, an upcoming summer weekend away, and holiday expenses. None of these items are truly unexpected, so we tweaked the budget to put money aside for these foreseeable items. Saving 10 bucks a month for an oil change will allow us to be sure we have $30 every 3 months without sacrificing on groceries or our entertainment budget line.

Total Payment to Debt: $745. 75, on top of our minimum payments

Current Debt: $172,738.81

* This number will look lower then the $745.75 payment from our first debt amount of $180,000. Over the course of the month, we decided to use a portion of our savings to pay off our credit cards immediately and focus solely on the student loans. Though this does put us at greater risk if something happens, we determined this is the best option for us at this time. Therefore, after we complete our debt elimination, a new counter will be started for our savings. At this point, our savings has enough to cover expenses for about a month... Scary, but also motivation to get moving on our debt so that we can get moving back to savings. 

I think that about does it for the month. We are SUPER excited to have put $745 on-top of our minimum payments toward our student loan debt!

We have a total of 36 Student Loans. They range from a principal balance of $928.85 to $13,754.66.
So to help Nick and I stay motivated, we will also be listing our countdown by remaining Student Loans. Some will take 2 months others 8-10 months, but in the end they will ALL be paid off :)

Foodie Friday: Roasted Chicken

I realized today that I write an awful lot about food on a blog about being frugal. But, food is a HUGE part of my life. First off, I love to eat and secondly a realistic approach to not spending excess money is to prepare your own food. In looking at our budget, groceries are 20% of our single income budget, only surpassed by our rent which accounts for 50%. Which means, in order to write a blog on the joys of saving money to use toward debt, I have to capture the largest component of entertainment in my life- cooking!

Yesterday, I was "lucky" enough to have a early start at work, but that also meant that I was able to get home by 3:30pm. So why not cook a time consuming whole chicken??

Nick is slightly obsessed with making the PERFECT roasted chicken. I believe we have gone through 10 different recipes at this point. He has done his research on techniques to making the perfect bird. I can't complain since I benefit from this amazing meal each time.

But with him at work it was up to me to not mess this one up. I received a full tutorial by phone before I began. Nick had prepared the bird in a brined the night before, so the foundation was set for the perfect meal.

If you have never put your bird in a brined 24 hrs before the meal, I highly suggest you do. It provides the bird with a plump moist taste that a lot of birds lack after sitting in a roasting pan. Now if you have a rotisserie, you may be okay :) Also, may I come over to your place to use this so called rotisserie??

Once the bird is out of the brined, it is rinsed and then thrown into the roasting pan. I placed a quartered lemon inside the bird and then basted it with a butter and spice combo (Salt, Pepper, Chili Powder, Paprika, Oregano, Rosemary, and Basil). Today is the first time I realized that a stick of butter goes into this basting process. Oh well, I guess I won't be making Cooking Light with this recipe.

For the next 1.5 hrs, the timer is set to go off every 15-20 minutes for basting, and at 45 minutes the bird is flipped.

Once the bird is cooked it is pulled out and stood up on it's head to rest. This is suppose to allow the juices to flow into the breast meat. It reminds me of someone stuck upside down and wiggling their legs yelling, "get me out of here," but that's just me!

After all of this pomp and circumstance, dinner is served!

Buying a whole chicken is a great way to have a home cooked meal last at least two meals, depending on the size maybe two meals and a lunch leftover. We were able to get our chicken on sale this week for $.99 lb. so it was a very inexpensive meal. Add a little carb and some veggies and you have a tasty dinner :)

Have a great weekend and I hope a roasted chicken is in your future.

Interest vs. Principal

As we get closer to the end of the month, Nick and I also get closer to making our first extra payment towards our debt. I think that we have a good game plan, but I have been reading up on debt elimination to make sure that I cover any "blind spots." If you watch House of Cards you will get this reference :)

I am not looking for a brand new system, but to figure out the best practices to eliminate our debt in the least amount of time. For example, I already learned about adding in short-term costs that should be accounted for in our budget monthly to help us take care of planned life expenses. Example: put $10 aside each month for an oil change so every three months you don't have to find $30 in your budget to take care of this necessity.

About three weeks ago, I went to the library and borrowed Dave Ramsey's The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness. It was perfect timing to get through Chapter 7 on Snowballing your debt the week we were going to make our first extra payment to debt. I will be sure to do additional write-ups on his book as we get further in the process.

Taken from www.daveramsey.com

The general idea behind Snowballing your debt is to pay off your debts by the principal balance, low to high. This will allow you to accumulate additional funds as you pay off your debt to put towards the next highest amount. Dave uses an analogy of a snowball rolling down the hill collecting snow, just like your money will roll down the debt list collecting minimum payments as it goes. The motivation behind paying by principal is to allow you to have some quick wins on your smaller debts and to keep you motivated in your payment plan.

However, I struggle with the idea that in the mean time our higher interest rate loans will keep going up and we will owe more money on these loans in the long-run.

In looking through a list of our student loans, I organized them by principal and then by interest. I think we may be able to achieve some quick wins to keep us motivated and some high interest payments by working with a hybrid plan. In order to pay off the higher interest rate loans, we can pull a few of them higher in our payment plan list. I believe this will help us stay motivated, but also stop us from paying more interest then necessary on some of our loans. A compromise is in the works!

Question of the Day: How do you prioritize repayment of your debt, by interest rate or by principal? 

A Free Weekend

Happy Monday! For the first half of your day, if your work environment is anything like mine, you'll be going around asking or answering the same Monday question- How was your weekend? Thanks to good friends and family we kept it low key and still accomplished a lot. Not all weekends can be free, but here was ours in a nutshell.

Friday Night
Nick met me after work for a run around the Potomac to Teddy Roosevelt Island. You could say it was a run over the bridge and through the woods!

We came home to a fun Belgium beer and then a game night with friends :)

Saturday
It was a beautiful day of sunshine. I decided to spend the day in the sun and 74 degree whether reading. A day of relaxation was exactly what I needed.

Sunday
We got started early cleaning up the house, doing laundry, updating our budget with weekly expenses, and then I started the grocery list. We seem to follow the same dreaded Sunday routine each week. I have found that by sitting down with the Safeway App while creating meals for the week, we tend to buy whats on sale and in season.

We made our trip out to Costco for a few long-term necessities. We decided to go cart-less this week and bring in just two reusable bags. This allowed us to get in and out of the store quickly, but also mitigated the amount of items we could add to our Costco list. We ended up getting out of there with only one item not on our overall list, and two items (brussel sprouts and salsa) in a larger quantity then required for the week! Then off to Safeway for the rest of our weekly items.

I made our granola for the week and Nick made up two fun pizzas, BBQ Chicken and Buffalo Chicken.

 It was a productive weekend, and besides groceries and a fun 6-pack we were able to get through the weekend in our usual frugal way :)

So, how was your weekend? 

Money Motivation

I guess this post serves more as a mid-Month One update on our money saving/debt payment plan.

Staying Optimistic while being frugal is hard. The day The Game Plan was posted everything was great and my motivation to succeed was high. The blog was started, a new budget to live on one income laid out, Nick was ready to join the cause, I was reading a new book and other financial blogs on personal finance to gain different perspectives, and was learning how to use social media as a tool. Everything was looking up and I was ready to go.

Week one is easy! You are motivated and ready to take on the world. But then it dawned on me, I had committed to making our debt disappear to a public audience. I had posted it on Facebook and Tweeted about this "great" plan. I started hearing from friends, family, and others wishing us luck on this feat. It was a little too much at once and let's just say I was overwhelmed and a bit nervous. I had a mini freak out moment about mid-way through week two and my reservations about committing to this project started to creep through.

What was I thinking?                                 What if I fail?      
How can anyone get out from under all of this debt?          Why could I not be content on just paying off our student loans month to month for 18 more years?               Maybe we should just focus on the credit cards and savings, and leave the student loans alone?

So, I did the only thing you can do in the middle of a work-day and when your not spending money...

I was lucky to have my work-out clothes with me and I decided to go for a run. I headed outside and turned on my Pandora 80's Cardio Station and jogged out my frustration down the national mall and around the Potomac. After doing the inevitable stair climb to the Rocky theme song, including air punches of course, I went back to work with a more optimistic attitude and brighter outlook of the future.


In order to truly be successful and rid ourselves of debt I had to realize that this was not going to be a "project" this was going to be a lifestyle change. This is a long-term change and I was going to need to find motivation daily to be successful.

So, since I hear list are fun to read on blogs, here is this weeks list.

Things that keep me Optimistic and Motivated:

1. BodyPump Classes- Making me physically and mentally stronger. I love them :)

2. Roar by Katy Perry- This has been on my motivation list for awhile, but makes me want to take on the world whenever I hear it :)

3. Hanging out and Talking with Family and Friend -  I have made a greater effort to connect with everyone in my life a little more often these past few weeks. Being able to hang out or chat by phone with new and old friends has been really positive for me and makes me feel all around happier!

4. The Sunshine- We may be getting snow again, but everyday it is nice out I have been getting myself outside for a walk or run. Nice weather is just a great motivation to do anything.

5. Writing this Blog- The blog is keeping me busy in the evenings and is motivating me to find new things to write about, and new ways to save money! Sorry for the lack of personal photos on this post. As a new blogger, I am learning that I need to start taking photos of everything :)

What motivates you to conquer your goals?