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Thanks guys! I use excel sheets for my bill payment system but I’m going to try that out with tracking my random expenses. Thanks for the tips!

I like the strategy Carla has. If there is no expiration date I think it would be good to hold onto until the girls can make a decision especially if its an amount thats not too large and can wait a bit.

I like to make challenges for myself. I love doing the 52 week money challenge because its not only something to look forward to but it acts as a guide too.

Thanks for your input guys. I agree with you Kelby. It just truly didn’t feel right to me and would have taken me over my budget.

I’ve bought a few different cars over the years and haven’t purchased maintenance plans with any of them. I wish I could say the reason was financial, but it was really because the sales/finance people always seemed really shady so I never fully trusted what they were saying. After hearing multiple horror stories from people that did the opposite…[Read more]

I’ve heard that these aren’t worth it, but I’ve honestly never really looked into them. This is the first car I’ve purchased so prior to this one all my leases included the maintenance, but I think I’d rather pay for what I actually DO need as opposed to throwing away money every month if I don’t need to.

That’s a good idea to look into the tax implications…I hadn’t thought about that. Thanks!

I believe in doing both at the same time. Paying into your retirement can be as little as a few dollars per pay and if you are getting a match it doesn’t make sense to stop your retirement efforts just to put a few extra dollars towards your debt. That money will be much more worth it with matching and compounding interest.

I would say find a…[Read more]

I think if you can take that option and the payment is significantly less than the payments your making monthly on your consumer debt it would be a good option. I would even look and see if there are any tax benefits to rolling in any of the debts to the mortgage as well.

The down side is that you may be paying more in interest since you’ll most…[Read more]

I love that this plan has real examples of the things you may want to do during your retirement. It’s not just making sure the bills are paid but to actually live comfortably. Thanks for sharing!

I’m with Kayla. I’ve used Mint, Mvelopes and a few others but I can’t find anything that beats an excel spreadsheet. For me, there’s just something about having to manually track everything that makes me think twice about unnecessary purchases.

I’ve tried all kinds of apps but my all-time favorite way of tracking my money is on a plain old Excel spreadsheet where I have to manually enter all of our information. It’s a little tedious at times, but I find that spending a little effort putting all that info in shows me that I’m committed to keeping track of our finances and that I’m making…[Read more]

All good points Kayla! Thank you for sharing!

The sales definitely have a catch and are really there so you can spend more than you intended. I will only shop a sale if I can double up on the coupons or incentives. For example, sweaters were 1/2 off and I had “store cash.” So, I got the discount plus the $15 in store cash and got the sweater for $19 opposed to the original price of $70 bucks.…[Read more]