I've been blogging a little over 6 months now and I'm starting to understand that if I write it down here, I'm making myself publicly accountable to do what I say. With that in mind, I'm committing as my New Year's resolution to jump on the bandwagon (although I'm a little late) in cutting our costs and living more frugally. This isn't just a nice idea. Our home is now 15 years of and it's going through that first wave of replacement needs. Moreover, we're going to have some fairly substantial costs this year for home maintenance. We want to stay out of debt (and may have to dig out after the holiday excess).
Each month I'm going to focus on areas where we can save money. This month we are going to go back through the last year and get a baseline of our expenditures. (Notice I didn't say "expenses" but "expenditures.") We'll use that baseline to track our spending each month compared to last year. By the end of January, we should be able to pinpoint some areas where we might be able to save money this year. I'll report here the area we're focusing on and the progress in reducing costs. I'm sure I will be reading more blogs on this topic to get some ideas. I'm also happy to take some suggestions.
Wish us luck!
cindy
We just bought our new house this year, and we had to look at our finances very closely as well a couple of years ago. I was amazed at how much money I spent, and not in a good way, ha! I know there are a lot of computer programs to help you see where you spend your money, but I liked it doing the old fashioned way of making lists in a ledger book. Good luck to you in your year of frugality, I'm sure you guys will do great!
ReplyDeleteCindy, I just stumbled across your blog from Facebook. Interesting blog! And I've also started to watch closer where -- and why -- I spend my money. One thing that's really helped is mint.com. It's a free web site run by Intuit, the makers of Quicken. It does a great job tracking your expenses and categorizing them, and providing higher-level insight into "where your money goes."
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