savings

save money with membership

Purchasing a membership is one way you can save, and still enjoy getting out of the house. Reciprocal memberships are memberships you can purchase to a museum, garden or other attraction that gives you the benefit of getting you into similar places. For instance this membership to The Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia grants you [...]

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What to do with a windfall

Yesterday we got a check in the mail for over $2,000. I was expecting it, so I had budgeted for it, but we also received a $30 check and $150 for selling a bedroom set we no longer need. In the past I would have jumped up and down, and then immediately squandered the $150 [...]

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how to: take charge of your finances

I’m no expert (and really why would anyone listen to an “expert” these days?) I’m not one of those frugal people who has lived all my life with no debt, and saved tens of thousands dollars. We’ve been focused on raising our family, and when emergencies hit we had no safety net so things got [...]

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the puppy jar repurposed

If you’re a regular reader you may know that we recently cashed in the last of the change from our “puppy jar,” which is actually a large water bottle (5 gallon), since we were ready to cash in all our change for a puppy. Part of the $650 in change we saved over 2 years [...]

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decrease your expenses: how we saved $17,000

Previously I talked about gathering all your financial info so you know where you are starting. I call this digging your head out of the sand. When I started digging my head out of the sand the first thing I did was wrote down everything we spend money on in a typical month, and everything [...]

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add it up

One of the biggest changes I have made over the last few months is due to Ramit Sethi’s $1,000 challenge. (link includes all 30 tips) Ramit challenged readers to save $1,000 in one month and shared tips on how to do just that. If you are already pretty frugal, and not a spendthrift like some [...]

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save your pennies

For the last 2 years we have been saving any change we have in a large, plastic water bottle. It’s called the “Puppy Jar,” since we are saving for you guessed it, a puppy! We don’t use a ton of cash, but any change we do have (and a few donations) have gone into the [...]

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cutting the cable

We finally pulled the plug, well mostly. The one holdout on our monthly expenses was the cable “bundle”. We (stupidly) signed a (stupid) contract that had us at $99/month for phone, cable and internet for a year, and then it jumped to $144/month for the second year. We also have a TiVo which I adore [...]

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squeaky wheel: mortgage edition

Our refinance finally got approved yesterday. Great news! My excitement at saving almost $350/month was dampened when I realized the settlement would come AFTER our mortgage payment for this month is due. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to pay it this month. You may or may not know that you have a grace period [...]

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NO Spend Month (1/1/09-1/31/09)

One of the reasons I started blogging was the success over at Wesabe of my No Spend Month thread. It’s not an original idea. I found an article in Reader’s Digest about it. I found blog posts about other people who have done a No Spend Month. My favorite example is over at Small Notebook [...]