Common Sense Couponing

We've all seen the videos where someone walks out of the store with a thousand dollars of groceries for $2.22. I'm not that kind of couponer. I don't have the time, the motivation, or the storage room. However, I do try to use a common sense approach to coupons that saves me a ton of money over the long run.

My basic approach is like many others in that I try to focus only on the things I would need to buy anyway and try to combine a store coupon and a manufacturer coupon or a coupon and a store deal.

Extreme Couponer Approach - Only buy items you can get for free or almost free.

My Common Sense Approach - I do try to combine a store coupon and a manufacturer coupon at the same time. If there is a store deal at the same time, even better. However, since I only buy things I would have bought without a coupon, I do not focus on getting it for pennies on the dollar but rather, on how much I can save and still get the things I need and/or want.

Extreme Couponer Approach - When you find a good deal, buy as many as you can at that price and keep a stockpile to store the extra.

My Common Sense Approach - I only buy as much as I think we can use in a reasonable amount of time. I live in a tiny house and I know we'll be moving in the near future. Stockpiling doesn't make sense for us. When shopping, I consider what the item is, how necessary it is and how fast we go through it. For necessities, I have a one year rule. If we won't use it in the next twelve months, I don't buy it. As an example, say I needed soap. Soap is a definite necessity that we will not go without. (We could but no.) We go through a bar in a little under a month.  Most packs of soap include 6 to 8 bars so one package lasts us about six months.  If I can find a good deal on one pack, I'll buy one but if I find a better deal on two packages, say a buy one - get one, I'll buy two and sacrifice some storage room in my house. If the item is something a little less necessary, like lotion, I probably would not buy any to stockpile. Another deal on lotion is probably going to arrive by the time I need it again anyway.

[Note: For some people, keeping a reasonable stockpile might make sense. If it does, go for it. We are currently living in a house half the size of our last one and that doesn't even count our old garage and two storage sheds. We're crammed in here. Common sense says no stockpile.]

Extreme Couponer Approach - Has numerous sources of coupons, such as buying four Sunday newspapers a week or paying a company to send you coupons.

My Common Sense Approach - I do receive one copy of the Sunday paper because I bought it on Groupon for ten dollars for the year and then used a 20% off code to get it down to eight dollars. When my membership expires, I will probably see if I can switch to a different paper for the same kind of deal because I like that the coupons come to me every week. It helps me remember to look for deals. I also occasionally look for a coupon online and print them at home. Usually using coupons.com but not always. Other than a few coupons that randomly show up in my mailbox, that's pretty much all I do to find coupons.

Extreme Couponer Approach - Spends hours each week cutting coupons, searching online, organizing, and going through store ads.

My Common Sense Approach - My newspaper comes every Sunday morning with the coupons and I spend about an hour cutting them apart and doing my organizing. Some weeks I look online for other coupons but usually I do not. Even if I write my grocery list at the same time, it almost never actually takes me the full hour.

Extreme Couponer Approach - Maintains a coupon binder with all the coupons organized by type and expiration date.

My Common Sense Approach - Ha. No. One way I keep myself motivated is by minimizing the time it takes me to get and keep my coupons. I aim for less than one hour a week. In order to do this, I go with the very classy keep-everything-in-a-sandwich-bag method. Well, actually, I use two sandwich bags. One for food items and one for non-food items. Each week, when I cut out the coupons from the newspaper, I separate them into the two piles and then stuff them in the ziplock bag. Bags work better for me because they seal and they can be bent and folded without ripping. Those two baggies live in my purse 24/7 because I am really bad about remembering to grab them before I go to the store. Coupons don't save you any money if you leave them at home!  When I go to add the new week coupons, I spend a minute or two going through the old coupons to pull out the expired ones and to remind myself what coupons I have. That's all I do. When I'm at the store, I flip through to grab the coupons I want and leave the rest. Easy.

Extreme Couponer Approach - Drives all around town each week to hit numerous stores in order to get the best deals at each store.

My Common Sense Approach - I usually shop at one grocery store and one drugstore, both of which are the nearest to my house. However, after going through the store sales on Sunday, I occasionally will add another store to my list if it's relatively close (to home or a place I will be anyway) and the deal makes it seriously worth the extra time. For example, I rarely shop at this local store about 20 minutes away from me because it takes too much time to get there and back. But one week, I saw that they had hamburger for 1/3 the usual price. I thought ahead to my week and realized I would be nearby on Wednesday so I set an alert on my phone to remind me to stop by. That week I bought enough hamburger for three meat-loafs, 3 batches of spaghetti, and a couple pounds for miscellaneous meals. (I batch cook for my freezer.) It was totally worth it because it was a really good deal and I would be nearby anyway. If I drove to that store every week because say, eggs were 10 cents cheaper, I would be wasting 40 minutes of my time and gas. Nope. Not gonna happen.

Final Thoughts -
While proofreading this, I realized that more than anything, I try to minimize the time coupons can take while still reaping the benefits coupons can give. I'm a law student, I don't always have time to shave my legs much less spend hours and hours on grocery shopping. All the same, I have saved hundreds of dollars this year alone on things I needed or would have bought anyway. Sometimes I get awesome deals and get stuff for free but other times, I let the awesome deal slip out of my fingers because the time needed to get that deal is not worth it to me.

It's all about balance.

My Favorite Cheap Eats Story

Every once in a while, the stars align and I can feed fiancé and I for pennies. Last month was one of those times. I stopped by Winn Dixie to buy eggs but decided to check out the rest of the store for deals. I walked by the whole chicken section and saw that there were a couple marked down for quick sale. The best by date was still a few days out so I decided to get one. A six pound chicken cost me 3 dollars. That's 50 cents a pound!

Now cooking whole poultry is not my favorite because it's kind of a pain getting the bird prepared and then you have to deal with carving it. However, it is delicious so sometimes it is worth it. I threw it in my largest cast iron skillet with a cut up onion inside the cavity and some butter and garlic under the skin. I baked it for an hour and served it with mashed potatoes and gravy ( made in the skillet with the chicken drippings.) Pretty easy meal right?

[Sorry for the terrible pictures and my messy kitchen. I took these pictures to text to my sister and didn't plan on blogging about it! Forgive me please.]

Then as I carved the chicken, I threw the icky parts, the cooked onion and the carcess straight into my crockpot and made stock. I had never made chicken broth before but it was embarrassingly easy. Throw bones into a crockpot set on low, fill with water and add spices and a bay leaf. Then you leave it for 12 to 24 hours. When you come back, you fish out the bones and bits with a slotted spoon and throw it away. The broth was so much better than the store bought crap I usually get that when I got my Instant Pot, the first thing I made was broth for my freezer. It was that good. My crockpot ended up making about ten cups of broth And it was made with ingredients that I would have thrown away!

However, I planned for this batch to be made into homemade chicken noodle soup. After I scooped out the bones and other solids, I added some frozen carrots, celery, and pearl onions and threw in a couple cups of the leftover chicken.  Then I let that cook on low for awhile and then added a package of uncooked egg noodles and some kale I had in the fridge. Once those were done and I added salt and pepper, I filled up ten pint freezer containers with the soup and put them in my freezer for later.

[No, I don't know why this was the only picture I took of my awesome soup. This was like my third bowl and half eaten at that. Dishonor on me, dishonor on my cow.]

At this point, I STILL had lots of chicken left over so I made a chicken pot pie in my cast iron skillet with a pre-made piecrust, leftover chicken, kale and a frozen mix of carrots and peas and pearl onions. Made a white sauce and baked. Fiancé ate almost the entire thing!!! And he has been begging me to make it again! It was delicious.

Then, if you can even believe it, we still had a cup or so of leftover chicken so Fiancé brought it with him for lunch on the fourth day.

To recap -  I paid:

$3.00 for the chicken
$1.50 for the ready to microwave, mashed potatoes
$3.00 (approximately) for the carrots, celery, bag of peas and carrots and pearl onions
$2.49 for the pie crust
$1.29 for the egg noodles
$1.79 for the kale
and a small amount for flour, spices, and milk.

For under 14 dollars, we had a roast chicken meal with mashed potatoes and gravy, a chicken pot pie and ten servings of chicken noodle soup. Oh and some leftover chicken. Obviously this wouldn't stretch quite as well for a larger family but it works pretty well for two!

I know I write a lot about food and saving money on this blog that is supposed to be about law school but I swear it is connected. Right now, I am trying to save for the Bar exam next summer. Not only do I have to commit to not working or only working minimal hours during the bar study course, the course itself costs $3,000. Taking the bar exam itself costs about $700. Oh, but don't forget you need to pay your state to even apply to take the bar and to convert your student application to a full application. Plus, the school advises to have 5-6 months of expenses saved up because it takes months for the results to come out and who knows how long it will take to find a job after that. The more I can prepare now, the less horrible next year will be. 

Just When I Thought I Had This Whole Law School Thing Down

Well, I officially messed up. After all my time in college, what with community college, university and now law school, I really thought I had this whole school thing under control. And then I made a newbie mistake.

Fall semester starts in less than a month ... and I just found out I forgot to submit my FAFSA. I started it, I just never finished it.

Stupid Stupid Stupid.

I have no excuses. I don't know how I managed to forget something so big but I am officially FREAKING OUT.

My Thoughts On Swagbucks

Swagbucks -
A site where you can earn points that you can use to buy online gift cards by doing everyday tasks, some of which you already do every day.

I recently decided to try out Swagbucks to see if it was a reasonable way to make a little bit of money. I've tried other services in the past but most of them are either so glitchy, it is impossible to use or they want way too much time to make it worth it. If it takes me half an hour to finish a survey and you give me 50 cents, I'm not doing it. I've got more important things to do.

Luckily, I first became interested in Swagbucks because I found out that you can get points for searching the web. I do that a hundred times a day. Fast chicken thigh recipe or auto store near me or sore throat headache and fever. It sounded interesting so I tried it out.

I like it enough to keep using it, which is it's own enforcement. The way the website works is you have tons of ways to earn Swagbucks. You can take surveys, watch videos, sign up for various websites, clip coupons etc.

They also have daily goals where if you meet it, you get a few bonus points and streak bonuses for hitting the daily bonus for 7, 14, 21, or 30 days in a row. If you hit the goal everyday, you get over 6 dollars a month in bonuses.

When I first enrolled, I tried out all the various ways to earn the points and quickly earned over five dollars worth of them in only a few days. Each Swagbuck basically equals a penny. As I stated above, I am too busy to spend hours to earn pennies so I after a few days, I focused on the quick or easy ways to earn the points. For me, that was searching the internet, the quick poll, printing coupons, and buying things I would already buy through participating stores (Walmart, Amazon, and a few others).

Easy ways to earn points -
I have two browsers I use on my computer so I decided to set up Google Crome as my Swagbucks browser. All you do is follow the prompts to add their search engine as the default. They use Yahoo so it's not quite as advanced as Google but I still find what I am looking for just as easily. As you search, you randomly earn 5 to 10 points. I do not make a ton of money doing this but it looks like I get about 20 to 30 points each day just searching for things I would have searched for anyway. 25 cents a day adds up to $7.5 in a month. Not a lot but since I don't really try to set aside any time to earn these points, it's free money as far as I am concerned. Plus I can choose the type of gift card (or even paypal) so I can redeem it for a store I know I need something from. Groceries, over the counter meds, cat food, you name it.

The printing coupons and buying through their partnerships are only done as I need them. You can clip coupons and get points for printing them and you can get points for using them. Double whammy. Of course, that's only a deal if you actually use coupons and want the items they have coupons for. Otherwise, it's a waste. Same with buying through their partnership. The way it works is say you decided to buy a coffeepot from Walmart Online. You go to the Swagbuck website and click on the Walmart link. For every dollar you spend, you get a specific number of points. Right now, Walmart is at 7 Swagbucks per dollar. That's basically like earning 7% back on your purchase that you were going to make anyway! And what was the cost? Taking 30 seconds to go to the Swagbucks website before going to Walmart's? Worth it for me.

The quick poll is the only things I specifically set out to do each day and it takes less than a second to do. Each day there is a different question and you just click to answer it. Easy. Of course, with that easiness comes the fact that it's only worth one point so it'd be just as easy to not do.

Time extensive ways to earn points -
I looked at all the options to earn Swagbucks and my least favorite are the surveys. They look like easy pickings because there will be offered for 80 - 300 points for one survey but that is only if you actually get accepted for that survey. In my experience, you spend 20 minutes just to find out you didn't qualify. Worst of all, sometimes they don't even tell you and the survey that would have gotten you the points rolls over to one that doesn't. So you spend all this time on a survey that gets you absolutely nothing. Every once in a while, when I'm close to getting a bonus, I will do a survey or two. If you actually are selected, it's an easy way to meet the daily bonus, I just don't get selected enough to make it worth it.

Another way I won't be earning points is by playing the games. In order to earn points on the games, you must spend money on in game purchases. And they're all normal mobile app games like slots or bingo that you can download for free. If you spend a lot of money on these types of games, it might be worth it for you but it isn't for me.

The video section is kinda a wash. If I had free time, I might watch them but I probably wouldn't. They ask you to watch 6 to 20 short videos for 2 to 5 points. You have to pay at least a bit of attention to them to know when to switch to the next. It's too much trouble for such a small amount of points but if I was close to my daily goal, I might watch them just to get to the bonus.

How to redeem for a gift card -

In this screen shot, I chose to redeem some of my points on a restaurant.com gift code (Side-note on that down below) but regular gift cards work the same. From the homepage, you click on the link to the rewards store and either search or browse until you find one you want. You verify that you want to redeem your points for this gift card and your points are deducted. At that point, you are told that you may have to wait up to two weeks for the gift card to be available for you. In my case, it's only taken a day or two but that may vary.  When it's available, you can see it in your account, like above, and you also receive an email with the redemption link. It's a relatively easy process and you mostly just follow instructions. 

Referrals - 

You can also earn points by referring other people to the Swagbucks site. I haven't actually had anyone sign up yet so I can't tell you how that part all works but if you have a lot of friends, it might be something to look into.

And on that note, if you are interested in signing up yourself, here is my referral link.  Referral Link to Swagbucks or you can simply Google Swagbucks and sign up that way.

Overall Thoughts - I like Swagbucks but I don't expect to hit the Jackpot with it. It's a good way to earn an extra 10 to 30 bucks a month without much effort. I think that trying to get more than that is not worth the cost because you would have to spend hours a day for only a few dollars. I like to use my Swagbucks on the things I am going to buy anyway, like groceries but it's also a nice way to earn money for a monthly date night or the like.
The website and apps are pretty easy to use and I haven't had to deal with many bugs or glitches.

As always, it's one of those things that depends on the person. Some people will love Swagbucks while others will hate it. You do you.


{Side-note on Restaurant.com - Some people hate this site and wouldn't use it if it was the last coupon deal on the planet. I honestly love it 90 percent of the time. Fiancé and I used to use it for our monthly date night at our favorite restaurant in undergrad and then again when we went to Vegas. For us, we consider it a coupon instead of a gift certificate and I think that mindset helps us enjoy it. Assuming you are paying for it full price, this works by you buying a certificate with a face value of 10 dollars for 4 dollars.You then go to the restaurant and get 10 dollars off the bill of 20 or more. You save 6 dollars. There are different values but it's basically the face value times two. So if you buy a 25 dollar certificate, you need to spend 50 to redeem it. Fiancé and I used to use the 15 and under for the two of us and larger certificates for larger parties. The larger the face value, the more you save. 
Most complaints I have seen or heard, came from people who didn't understand how it worked and didn't read the restrictions before heading to the restaurant. They thought it worked as a gift card where you could order 10 dollars of food and get it free. I've also heard of a few instances where the restaurant refused to honor the certificate but that has never happened to us. I have exchanged certificates for a different restaurant when a restaurant was temporarily closed and it took only a few minutes. 

Anyway, relating this back to Swagbucks, I saw that I could buy a 10 dollar restaurant.com certificate  worth $4 for 200 Swagbucks. Since I like this site, that was not only getting me free stuff, but it was also doubling my return. A 4 dollar gift card to say Walmart or Amazon would cost me 400 points but for the coupon certificate, it only cost me half that. Sweet deal!]

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Finances Update

Last December I wrote a post about how Fiancé and I had dug ourselves into a financial hole that was rapidly getting too deep. Digging us out of a hole

After half a year, I decided to see how we did. Law school is expensive in so many ways that don't include tuition and books and it only gets worse the farther along I go.

I had six goals and only about half were a complete success.

GOAL ONE: Stop Eating Out - This one was mostly a success. We had a few hiccups when I got stressed around due dates and finals but overall, we ate at home way more often. In general, I do most of the cooking because fiancé isn't very good at meal planning. However, he made it a point to have the ingredients for the couple meals he does well and if I didn't have time to cook, he made the time. I also found a few really frugal meal ideals that drastically stretched our food dollars. I will probably write about that later.

GOAL TWO: Batch Cook Easy Cheap Meals - Definitely a success. I get email alerts for the weekend sales at Winn Dixie and when they had chicken leg quarters on sale for 25 cents a pound, I bought 20 pounds of chicken! It sounds insane but I broke it down into about 12 different freezer bags and each one had a different sauce. I had BBQ, Italian, Teriyaki, Sweet and Sour and many others. Then all I had to do was throw it in the crockpot before class and make rice or noodles when I got home. The sauces were all inexpensive marinades bought on sale so dinner cost between 2 to 4 dollars total (depending on the vegetable) and we usually had two or three days worth of leftovers. We obviously didn't always eat chicken but I made a couple ground beef and pasta freezer meals as well and the whole freezer lasted us months.

GOAL THREE: Work More Hours - Well, this was an utter failure on my part but was a success for Fiancé. My job ended shortly after the new semester and due to my insane course load, I didn't really see how I could get a new one. Fiancé found a new, great paying job and kept his part time one on top of it. That was a fabulous financial decision because a couple months later, his department at the new job shut down and he was back looking for a job. Him keeping his part time job really saved us a lot of stress.

GOAL FOUR: Stop Being A Crutch For The Other - Success! So the last couple years, we had had so many family emergencies, surgeries, and long periods of unemployment that we had stopped budgeting and splitting the bills. Whoever had more money would pay the bill and then when they were broke, they'd look to the other person to save the day. We have stabilized quite a bit and so have not had to fall into that trap for quite a while. We split all bills 50/50 so we are more able to anticipate future bills and budgets. As a consequence, we don't end up flat broke quite so often.

GOAL FIVE: Keep Our Bills Low - Until last month, this was definitely a success. We cut out all sorts of unnecessary bills before the New Year and didn't add any of them back. Then, we got overconfident. Fiancé's job was going well, I was employed for the summer and we had lived in Florida for two years and had never gone to Disney World. Yup, we ended up signing up for the annual pass (which is paid for monthly). Four days later, we found out his department was getting shut down. Oops. So this got downgraded to better but not a success. We should have put that extra money on our credit cards but we got caught up with the Disney excitement. You live and learn.

GOAL SIX: Pay Off Credit Cards - Failure. Complete failure on both our parts. My balance is pretty much the same as it was last December and I think Fiancé's is a little higher. On my part, I tried to pay more than the minimum due but couldn't always manage it. Then I forgot about some annual bills that were linked to my credit card instead of my debit and that pretty much undid all the work I had done on it. Fiancé did really, really well on paying down his credit cards but then his mom came to visit for the first time since we moved out here. He wanted to show her all the things he loves about Florida and he put it all on his credit card. Sigh.

Overall, I'd say we did better that we had been but we still have so much to work on. We obviously need to focus on our credit cards and keeping within our budget for food and such. We also have a friend coming to visit us this summer so I hope we can budget for that instead of going crazy with expensive ideas.

One thing that wasn't exactly a goal but I am glad I started doing was finding small ways to bring in extra money. Not necessarily jobs but small things like getting paid for research studies (not medical or anything) or mail in surveys (pays better than online ones but aren't as easy to find) and saving gift cards for expenses instead of using them to splurge on things we didn't need. I even started getting small gift cards (think 5 dollar walmart ones) by switching from searching on Google to searching on smaller, less known search engines. After awhile, those five dollar gift cards add up.

I also make it a point to use coupons on the necessities that I tend to forget that I will need. Every couple weeks I cut out the coupons for makeup, paper towels, soap and the like. When I need to buy something, I look at my coupon pile first and then spend a few minutes trying to find a store coupon that matches. If I can find a store sale at the same time, so much the better. In the last week, I bought Pantene shampoo and conditioner at $1.67 a bottle because I had two coupons and a store deal. I also used my CVS extra care bucks and a coupon to buy paper towels where it actually put more money in my pocket than I spent. CVS had the big pack of Bounty paper towels for ten dollars and I used two five dollar extra care bucks plus a dollar off coupon. Because my savings were more than the cost, I got a couple cans of dog food. I paid a $1.54 but got 10 new extra care bucks to spend on whatever I want. Eggs, toilet paper, frozen pizza, whatever I need. Think about that for a second, I paid a little over a dollar and a half for a 12 pack of paper towels and dog food and got ten dollars to spend on anything (except alcohol) at CVS. If I had just waited until we were out of paper towels and picked some up without a plan, I would have paid ten dollars, wouldn't have had dog food, and wouldn't have ten extra care bucks to spend on next weeks random need. What a waste!

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I feel like a Wizard

I'm not one of those super obsessed coupon queens. Every once in a while I'll go through and cut out the products I actually use but then I don't really go out looking to use them. If I'm planning on buying it anyway, most the time I go oh wait, I have a coupon for that. If instead I carry it around until it expires, well, I'm not too worried about it. I obviously didn't really need it now did I.

However, a few weeks ago, I was at CVS buying toothbrushes and saw that if I spent just a dollar more, I would get 6 dollars in extrabucks. Wasn't too sure how that worked so I googled it real quick and went, huh. It shows up on your receipt and you just spend it like cash. I can do that. So I just added some mouthwash and poof done. I'm sure they're betting that you'll either lose the receipt or forget to bring it with you before it expires but I just taped it to my wall by my door. You could also just leave it in your car.

So then I waited until I needed something that CVS carried. It ended up being mascara and so I went to see if my newspaper had any mascara coupons. Sure enough it did! Then I got excited about how cheap my mascara was going to be and thought, hmm. Wonder if CVS has an app. Of course it does, and if you download it, you get 5 dollars off. SCORE! So I grabbed my extrabucks and my coupon and off I went to go buy some makeup. While I was there, I saw that Covergirl (which I had a coupon for) had another extrabuck deal if I bought two eye products. It happens that I ran out of eyeliner a couple months ago so why not grab one of those too? Especially since I had too many coupons and not enough cost.

This is how it broke down.
$9.29 - Liquid eyeliner
$9.99 - Mascara
-$6.00 - Extrabucks
-$2.00 - Manufacture coupon from the Newspaper
-$5.00 - From downloading the app.
---------
So my total was $6.28 plus tax. But then, on my receipt I got another 5 dollars extrabucks! If I add that all up, I got 18 dollars off! Assuming I use it, I basically only spent 2 dollars and some change (because of tax) on 20 dollars of makeup. That's like dollar store prices on name brand stuff. Whoo hoo.

I'm not too worried about forgetting to use it because I have to go to CVS every 3 weeks to pick up my prescription anyway and extrabucks don't expire for a month. You don't have to spend any actual money in order to use it so if I'm cutting it close, I'll just grab it when I go to the pharmacy and pick up candy or soda or something. Sweet deal yo! Even if worse comes to worse and I don't use it, I still saved 13 dollars and I think that is a pretty sweet deal too.

I know there are people out there who would laugh at me because they manage to use so many coupons that their total is zero but I'm just not that serious about it. I also don't have the storage room to go and buy something if I don't need it right now.

But now that I know how FUN it is, I'm sure I'm going to do it again.

Digging us out of a hole

I bet you thought that if I hid from the blogging world for months, I'd come back and blog about law school. (The blog is called Taking On Law School after all) But you would think wrong.

I'm going to talk about finances and confess how Fiancé and I dug ourselves into a hole this last year that we now have to find a way out of. Between Fiancé bouncing back and forth across the entire nation due to family issues, unexpected unemployment, one surgery (mine), one significant back injury (his) and the feast and famine aspect of living off my student loan check twice a year, well, we put more debt on credit cards than any one couple should ever have. This last month has been the worst in the seven years we've been together. Fiancé injured his back in November and couldn't work for two weeks. In the almost eight years I've known him, he's called in sick one time. ONCE. Since we were already living paycheck to paycheck to pay back everything from my surgery and me not being able to work for awhile, this knocked us out of the game. For the first time in my life, I had to borrow rent money. We immediately cut every bill we possibly could, stopped buying food and canceled Christmas. I also doubled my work hours two weeks before finals. I had to do what I had to do and I wanted to avoid living in my car more than I wanted good grades. We shall see how that panned out next week when grades are released.

The good news is that 1) Fiance is now back at work and 2) it made us realize that we stopped looking at our finances just because it scared us.

So here is our new plan for 2016 -

GOAL ONE: Stop Eating Out - Now, in a funny turn of events, grabbing Mcdonalds too much last semester kind of saved our butt this last month but not exactly in a good way. In September, I did my normal batch cooking for the semester but rarely had the motivation to actually cook out of it. So when it came time to stop buying things cold turkey, we had over ten casseroles in the freezer, 8 crockpot meals and numerous sides. Why didn't we eat them before? Because I was lazy. However, when I went back and looked at how much we spent on fast food, we easily could have managed to pay our rent last month. So POOF. No more eating out.

GOAL TWO: Batch Cook Easy Cheap Meals - I'm thinking lots and lots of dump chicken meals with enough ground beef meals to keep us sane. If I remember in the morning, I can dump it in the crockpot. If I don't, I can dump it in the oven. Either way, we need to stop treating ourselves with food just because we had a bad day.

GOAL THREE: Work More Hours - This is something we're both committed to. Fiancé just got a second job and will be working 6 days a week, over 60 hours a week. I'm still in school but I'm going to keep my hours higher for as long as my boss will let me. I'm volunteering for every extra assignment I can and it seems to be helping. By working more, we will hopefully be able to dig ourselves out of this debt mess and save for the next big emergency.

GOAL FOUR: Stop Being A Crutch For The Other - One reason we go in this mess is that when my surgery happened, Fiancé was working. So I relied on him to pay my half of the bills. Then when Fiancé lost his job, I had just gotten my financial aid money. We obviously have no problem covering each other (we are getting married after all) but we sort of stopped dividing bills. A big bill would come up and one would pay it without the other having any clue how much we were spending. We used to be pretty good with a budget but this last year has just been so crazy, there was no way to budget so we stopped trying. Now that things are slightly more stable, it's time to get back to it. So this week, we finally sat down and went through every bill we have and taped it to the living room wall. Our goal is to have both of us split all our bills so one, my loans aren't covering two people when it's meant to cover one, and two, my loan money doesn't run out like it did this semester.

GOAL FIVE: Keep Our Bills Low - When we crashed and burned, we went and stopped all the bills that are nice to have but not necessary. Netflix, kindle unlimited, knitting software and my wine club went out the window and I have no intention of getting them back until we pay off our credit cards. Those ten dollars or less a month bills are sneaky. Half of them, I didn't even remember we had! Good grief.

GOAL SIX: Pay Off Credit Cards - Now I'm not sure how long this one will take us but I'd like to at least double our current payment plan. It would be awesome to pay them off in 2016 but with two people making less than 10 dollars an hour, that might not be possible. We will have to see.

Now this whole post is all about the things we did wrong. However, we did do some things right. Right before this latest catastrophe, I applied for a bunch more scholarships and I was just informed last week that I got an additional $5,000 a year scholarship. Added to my previous scholarships, this basically means I don't pay tuition anymore. YAY!! Another thing I did to help avoid this mess was when Fiancé was unemployed, I got a paying job. Yes, I still have my unpaid internship too so it's been a tricky balance but it was really the only thing that kept us going as long as we did. I'm so so glad that I didn't wait until we were broke to do this because by then it would have been much too late.

What do you guys do to cut spending?


EDITED TO ADD - I literally just hit publish and I get a text from Fiancé with the news that they're cutting his hours at work again. UGH. Sometimes we just can't win.


UPDATE: Click HERE to see how I did after six months (or so).