Debt SUCKS

I am ashamed to say that we are still in debt. We were in debt when The Man got kicked out of the military. He is receiving unemployment while he is looking for a job but I was not prepared for such a life change. We were able to afford all or debt while he was in the military. Now, I'm not so sure that any of that was ever a good idea. Those loans we took out and the credit cards we used are coming back to haunt us now. We have been barely skating by since March and now I am afraid we might end up drowning. We will figure it out in time. And, by the grace of God we will come out better and smarter on the other end.

Have a super fabulous wonderful day!

My Biggest Money Fail

I am good at paying bills on time and making sure that everything is taken care of for everybody. I find that my weakness is when The Man or one of the kids wants something. I can go for a long time and not buy anything for myself but find myself trying to fit things in for The Man or the kids as soon as they ask. I wont buy myself a pair of tennis shoes that I don't NEED but yet when The Man asks for a video game or a "man toy" I manage to fit it in the budget as soon as possible. This gets me discouraged sometimes. I am trying to pay off the last of the credit card debt and these extra expenses don't help. I have been good about not adding more to the debt but the money buying these toys could be used to pay them off faster. I would feel bad telling him no on a request, unless of course it is something outrageous like a new car, because I feel he deserves to have these toys because he works hard and supports us. I am not sure how to say no without feeling guilty. Any suggestions?

ETA: Today I am feeling guilty for buying guitars for The Man and the boys but this should let them learn something new together.

Tax Return

Yay!!! We filed our taxes and found out that we will be getting a nice sum of money back. We are going to spend it on three things.

1. van tires- Our vans tires are getting a little lower on the tread that I would like so we are replacing them before they get a chance to go bad. This is our family vehicle that carries us all regularly and that we can drive longer distances to travel. With the weather here I find that I am a little more cautious with the tires and brakes on our vehicles.

2. bank loan- We have a loan that we took out to buy our minis. This will pay this loan off and the money used to pay the payments can go towards paying off something else. They are our fun cars and great on gas for small errands especially in the towns where the streets and parking are much narrower. If we don't have to go out as a whole family these work great. The Man's mini also makes a great commuter car for him to drive back and forth to work. It is very cheap on gas costing us only about $20 every other week.

3. My mini repairs- Older cars seem to have to have work done every so often. My mini is in the shop because The Man tried to do something under the hood and knocked out all of my brake lights and signals. The shop is going to have to replace the wiring that goes to the lights. While they are in there I have also asked for them to double check that my car has been converted to unleaded gas vs. petrol. This will make life much easier when we bring these cars back to the states as I don't think I have ever seen leaded fuel and so I would have to put an additive in my gas tank every time I filled it up. They are also going to double check and make sure there are no other major engine/hose/seal problems for me. We are putting this money aside to pay the bill when it comes time and that it wont hurt our normal monthly expenses.

If there is any left after these 3 things then we will have a little fun money to spend on non necessary items. We find that getting this money in a lump sum is nice so we don't have to save it ourselves and then we can pay for larger things at one time. In the past we have used the money to pay off a car, ship our dog to England, pay off credit cards, or purchase large home furnishings. What do you do with your tax returns if you get them?

Cloth Gift Bags

I had a bright idea a few years back when wrapping a bunch of gifts for Christmas that wasting all that paper to wrap gifts was horrible for the environment and my wallet. I talked to my mom and asked her if she would be willing to make me some gift bags as a gift for Christmas. She did over the past couple years. I now have bags for Christmas in holiday/winter prints and birthday bags with birthday/party prints. I love them. They almost completely eliminate the waste of wrapping paper and tape. It helps keep our garbage can free for other household waste and I love all the different prints. The design is pretty simple. It is basically a pillow case with a drawstring. A little tip for keeping your bags though is to either make a special bag for the receiving person to keep or let them know before handing over their gift that you will need your bag to be able to reuse. I have found that adults are OK giving the bags back but children like to have a bag they can keep. Depending on the size the drawstring can be removed and used as a pillow case or the drawstring can be left in and the bag used for kids carrying around their prized possessions.

These are also a great money saver. If you buy your fabrics after the holidays when the prints go on sale or use a coupon you can get the fabrics for just a couple dollars a yard at most fabric stores. A yard of fabric can make a few different sized bags. Also watch for different types of yarn, ribbon, or cording to go on sale and pair it with your fabric. Right now is the perfect time to look for clearance holiday fabric to start on bags for next year.

I store all my bags in a Rubbermaid type container in the storage closet. This keeps them all together and makes for easy access. I haven't sorted mind into size differences yet but you could always do that inside your box as well.

  If you do not have a sewing machine or would just rather buy bags they sell these WrapSacks online for ease. You could also buy reusable shopping bags or tote bags to use as cute gift bags.

Holiday Spending

Every year I hear how many people go in debt to buy their children/family gifts for the holidays. It is really sad knowing that they are going to be paying for months to come for just a day or two of happiness. I used to do this but about 3-4 years ago I had a brilliant idea. Instead of waiting until the last minute to buy gifts and spend money I opened a special savings account. We have $50 dollars a month deposited automatically so we do not miss the money from our spending/ bills money. This gives us a total of $600 for the year. Another nice part of having this account dedicated to this purpose is that if I find a great deal that one of my kids would love in June I have the extra money already set aside to buy the gift to put up.

Since I started this holiday account I have also limited the number of gifts my children recieve. I cut this down to one gift per child from the parents and one gift from the jolly man in red. There might be a few extra gifts for the whole family like movies or games but limiting the gifts has made for a much more pleasureable experience for everybody in my family. Since limiting the gifts I find that we do not spend the $600 just on the holidays, now it even includes the kids birthdays. I am so glad that I started this gift fund so that I am not one of the people going into more debt just for the holidays. I have recommended this option to some of my friends who do stress about the money at the holiday times but none of them has yet to do it. I will continue to try to give my advice when they are complaining about how to pay for the holidays but, you know no body will listen until they are ready for the help.

Ebates Headache

So as I mentioned about buying the soccer shoes for my son and going through ebates to get the deal, it has been nothing but a headache. I did not get any money back from them when I shopped through their site because I used the "we miss you" coupon that adidas sent to my email. Well apparently you cannot use a coupon found elsewhere when you are using ebates. This is not the first time I have been denied the money for some reason or another but this time I was able to at least get an explanation. At the moment I am waiting on the money sitting in my ebates account to be deposited into my Paypal account and then I will not be using them any more because I feel like I can earn money faster with Mypoints and Swagbucks as they have other ways of earning the points than just shopping online.

Yay One Better On Our Credit Debt

When we paid some debt off with our tax return we paid off two of our credit cards. I wasn't sure that we were going to keep these cards open since they were charging a $39 per year membership fee. I called today to ask them to remove the fee and they did without any fight. It is only for one year but I can call again next year and ask them to waive the fees too. If they don't waive the fees then we can close the accounts but for now they are just in case of an emergency. We shouldn't have to use them because we have also put a little money in savings in case of life's little emergencies. I spent a total of 15 minutes on the phone and I saved us $78.00 this year. Yay I can put that money towards some other debt.

Tax Return- Debt Repayment

Being of a lower income and having 3 children we have been getting some pretty hefty tax returns since we have been married. We enjoy this extra money because it helps us get closer to our goals. With this tax return we were able to pay off 2 of our 4 credit cards and pay my mother back. Paying off the credit cards is nice but paying my mother off money that I borrowed more than 5 years ago feels even better. I feel so lucky to be able to repay her and not owe her anything any more. We have two more credit cards and our van to pay off to be completely debt free. I figure that the other two credit cards will take about a year to pay off and the van should be within the year following that. I really wanted to be debt free by January 2011 but I have come to more of a realization that while we are living in England we need to experience the country as well as repay our debts. With our enjoying England and repaying what we owe I think It should only add about 6-9 months of payments to my original January 2011 date. This will also be paying our van off about 3 years prior to the original payoff. I must say I feel really blessed that life is going great and that even though I was scared England was going to leave us totally broke, it hasn't and we actually have more now and new experiences.

The Free Store

Being a part of a military family does have a few perks. Most bases have some kind of help for families in need. Here they have a free store commonly referred to as the Airman's Attic or Community Closet. This is like a free thrift store. Being overseas this is open to all ranks but I believe that in the States it is usually limited to E4 and below. You can go in and find clothes, housewares, books, toys and more. The only rule is that nothing there is for resale. This has been a great resource for us since we have 3 growing boys who always seem to need clothes. The best part about it is that when my boys are done with the clothes or shoes or toys we can bag them up and take them back to help out another family. We also take in stuff that we have bought ourselves to help replenish their stock. I find great joy taking a bag of stuff in to help others. It really helps me in reducing clutter and it definitely helps in my debt plan.

Free $5 Gift Card

Today I got another $5 amazon gift card from Swagbucks!!! Swagbucks is a search engine that you can earn points for searching anything that you can imagine. Once you get enough points you can cash in your points for prizes. They have lots of prizes but I usually choose to get the Amazon.com gift card since I shop on there all the time anyway. This is very helpful at helping my budget.

Usborne Books & More

So I decided to become a consultant for Usborne books and more so that I could get some great learning books for my boys but also to help earn a few dollars extra towards paying off debt. I am still waiting on my kit as mail can be goofy coming from stateside to the APO address. Once I get my kit I will spend time learning all about the company and hopefully it will give me some ideas on how to host home shows. I am hosting my own eshow right now but so far I am the only person who has placed an order. Hopefully just one of my friends will place one so I don't feel like a total loser. If you would like to look at my website you can find it here. If you find something you would like to buy you can do that through the website and it will be sent straight to your house. If you just browse at the selection please take a minute to at least sign up for the monthly drawing for $50 in books. I think this is a great incentive from the company. I cannot wait to get my package in the mail. Even though the books will be for the kids for fun and to learn from I am like a kid in the candy store when I get packages in my mail box.

Farm Fund

We are working our tails off to be debt free. I figure it will be the first quarter of 2011 when we will have all our credit cards and our van paid off. After we pay all of this off our money goal will be to put money away in our "farm fund" savings. The farm fund is to help us in the future to buy a house on some property and to be able to have what I am referring to as a mini farm. We hope to have a medium to large garden, some chickens, and possibly a cow or two. The mini farm will not be able to be started until my husband retires from the military in 8-10 years unless we manage to get stationed somewhere we love when we go back stateside and find a killer deal on a property. Currently we are learning about gardening through books and trial and error. I hope to learn some canning skills as well this year so that we can preserve the garden bounty. Right now we have some winter onions and garlic in the ground that should be ready to harvest in June. We tried to grow some tomatoes and eggplant this past year but we got started a bit too late and only ended up with one tomato that was edible. The beginning of February we are going to order our plants and seeds for our garden this spring. We would love to have a couple of chickens but due to us living in military housing right now it is not possible. I am a planner so I have this all laid out on a spreadsheet so that I can see the end result. I figure if we play our cards right we should be able to live on The Man's retirement check and part time jobs. This is definitely not most people's ideal living but this is our dream.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Wow 2009 is done and we are now into 2010. What a wonderful year I am hoping this to be. I am still working towards my goals at being debt free. I have made up a bills plan and hope to have 3 out of the 4 remaining credit cards paid off by May. The final credit card is going to be a little tougher but I think with being strict maybe it can be paid off by December 15, 2010. I will still have about a year to pay on our van and then we will be totally debt free and never to have debt like that again. After we pay off our credit cards we are going to start putting money away in what I have named "farm fund". I am hoping to have enough money to either be able to pay cash for or only accumulate a small mortgage to buy a house with 5+ acres so that we can work at making a mini farm. I want to be able to raise some chickens and have a garden and maybe if we feel brave enough raise a cow or two.

This year I will also turn 30. I am not dreading turning 30 at all. I am actually very excited about it. I had quite a rough start to my 20's that I am convinced now that I have the life I love I most certainly am going to have an awesome 30's. I must credit The Man though for helping to make my life so wonderful now. He is a very sweet loving husband that supports me in all that I do. He also helped bring some very wonderful children into this world and who couldn't love him for that.

This year also will be The Man and I's 5th wedding anniversary. I am thrilled to have made it so far and still so happily. We had a bit of a rough start but we have settled into a great groove and I couldn't ask for a better husband.

My goal this year other than paying off debt like a crazy woman is to try making more of our food from scratch. I don't mind cooking or baking I just despise dishes and a dirty kitchen. My good friend B showed me how easy and yummy homemade bagels are and that is going to be my next new adventure.
I hope everyone is looking forward to 2010 as happily as I am. Happy New Year!!!!

Frustrated with mail order shopping!!!

So, as I am trying to stretch the dollars I have so that we may become debt free I keep hitting brick walls. I have seen some amazing deals that I would love to take part of for the holidays and just because they were great deals. The problem I am having is that because we live in England with an APO address a lot of places either will not ship at all to an APO or they want to make you pay a higher shipping charge. It is no more expensive to ship to me at an APO than it is to ship from Washington state to New York so why are we being penalized?? It is already way more expensive to live and shop here and then when I find a great deal online it would be nice to be able to take part in it. I really wish that online stores would reconsider their shipping policies and ship to the APO/FPO shipping address of people who are serving all over this world to help keep them safe in the land of the free.

WOOHOO

So my goal right now is to be able to have all our debt paid off by January 1, 2011. I just got one of our cars paid off. I was able to pay it off in 3 years. This is such a great feeling. Too bad the car is going to have to be sold so that we can move to England. We still have 6 credit cards and another vehicle to pay off but this is a great start.