Welcome to How I Save Money and tracking of income and expenses for the month... Please note that I get paid on the last day of the month so mycash flow net effect will usually be negative until the last day of the month... This does not mean that I am adding to my debt, it just means that the money coming in is less than the money going out because I do not get my salary until the last day of the month... Income for the month to date: $567.78 Expenses for the month to date: $2291.82 Net effect: -$1724.04 I ended up paying $11.57 for gas on the weekend at a cost of $1.82 per gallon... I am currently at $15.76 out of a gas budget of $75 for the month... just have a few more small credit card payments to go and one or two loan payments... … View Post »

I usually LOVE going to CVS but there was one time I had a really bad experience with a cashier ... She thought she had to give me a gift card for $15+ AND give back the paper coupons... … View Post »

I have a new theme... … View Post »

Today s free sample comes from Arm & Hammer toothpaste... I love Arm & Hammer toothpaste because I have sensitive teeth and it does not hurt my teeth but still works really well... … View Post »

Gas Even though gas prices have been coming down lately I still continue to practice the various hypermiling techniques that I did in the past... I have been saving money on gas because I do not use as much as I used to, even though the price is now much lower... I currently pay $10 more than the minimum on all cards except for the card that is the focus of my snowball ... I would normally use this money to get a 555 special once a month from Dominos and the pizza would last me an entire week (eating pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner)... I have to drive out to Subway to get the food and it is very difficult to get out of the parking lot and back onto the main road... Future plans I wanted to go back to school (to work on a PhD) next year but I am going to have to put that off for a little longer... If you have a post about the ways the recession has affected you, please consider submitting it to the group writing project by sending an email to groupwritingproject [at] debtbloggersnetwork [dot] com ... Include the following information in your email: your name, the link to your post, trackback link, and the title of your post... … View Post »

Welcome to How I Save Money and tracking of income and expenses for the month... Income for the month to date: $118.07 Expenses for the month to date: $678.95 Net effect: -$560.88 Income for the month thus far comprises various forms of advertising on the blog and interest on my ING accounts... Savings I included my savings as part of the expenses for the month in order to make it easier to save... This amount is transferred from my ING electric checking account to an interest bearing savings account at ING... I will see you guys and gals later as I continue my journey to save money and become debt free!!!!... … View Post »

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It is Halloween time again and my coworkers were asking me what kinds of halloween costumes I had in mind for tomorrow... The closest I came to was putting on a Santa Claus hat and wearing a red sweatsuit for a party... I had no idea we were supposed to be wearing costumes and it really is too late now for me to go scrounge anything up that would make sense... If I had known about it before I might have gotten into the spirit and looked for something like a vampire or living dead because I tell my students that when they misbehave they drain the life out of me... … View Post »

I am proud to say that I FINALLY have my budget set to zero... I also treated my savings like an expense because it is set up to be automatically transferred to a separate savings account in ING ... I did not include the income from the blog in my calculations because it is too irregular to predict... If I do get any income from the blog then it will be included at the end and will be a snowflake payment to be divided between credit cards and savings... I have payments set up in ING to go out automatically every month according to each bill... As my savings account grows larger it will be easier for me to make bigger snowflake payments as time goes by... I might even be able to do a large snowball payment and knock out a large amount of a debt at once... Tracking my finances in June: day 15... … View Post »