Being a father to my twin girls, Lilly and Emma, can be a daunting task at times. Now that we’ve navigated through their first year, I thought I’d share some of the money saving tips that we picked up along the way. We have been able to live on my income alone, which has allowed Rebekah to be a stay-at-home mom to our girls. These three tips alone have helped us stay on track and save quite a bit of money this year.
1.) Do a monthly budget
ACK! The dreaded “B” word – synonymous with “broke”, “straight-jacket”, “noose”, “short leash”, etc. It’s really not any of those things – it’s a game-plan. None of the great coaches or military leaders went to their respective battlefields without a plan, yet so many of us do that with our money. Rebekah and I used to be one of those. We knew about what we were spending each month and that typically our income was a bit higher than our out-go, but we never really sat down with a budget to strategically layout what we were spending where.
YouNeedABudget (YNAB) is a great software package to help manage your budget. Rebekah and I chose this particular software package due to it being able to run on my Mac and her Win7 PC, and share the same budget file. We can each make updates to the budget and by sharing the file, we can see each others changes.
By using YNAB, we’ve been able to plan how much we’re going to spend in each of our categories such as groceries, restaurants, clothing, household items, etc. As we move through the month, we can then update bank transactions by assigning them to categories, we can see how much is left in our “envelope”. Once the envelope is empty – we stop spending in that category unless we both agree to move money from another envelope into that one.
By doing this simple monthly plan, we’ve been able to save ourselves $300 – $400 each month that we normally would have spent on something and not remember what we purchased!
2) Use Debit Cards instead of Credit Cards
Dave Ramsey was right – using cash stings a lot, using a debit card stings less, using credit doesn’t even register pain. Seeing that money leave the checking account after a transaction, really makes you think about how much you are spending and whether or not you really “need” it. Rebekah and I use 2 primary debit cards – one offered by PerkStreet Financial, the other offered by Target.
I talked about PerkStreet in a previous blog post, but we absolutely love our PerkStreet account. We earn at least 1% cash back on all our purchases with our MasterCard Debit card and don’t run up any credit card bills.
The RedCard from Target is pretty awesome as well. It links to an existing checking account, so it’s like using a Debit Card, but by using it, you get 5% off your total Target purchase, as well as some other benefits that are laid out on Target’s website. We started using this card because our girls liked the Target Up & Up branded formula. It was much cheaper than Enfamil, and we saved even more by using our RedCard when we bought formula. It equated to at least a $5 – $10 savings each month, just on formula.
3) Use Coupons
I didn’t personally do this one, but Rebekah does it like a champ! She subscribes to all these free online groups that get her the sale lists and matches up coupons go with what store sale to get stuff for free (or dirt cheap)! She plans her shopping trips and comes home with mass quantities of food and supplies for at least 50% of what the retail cost would have been.
In order to fully take advantage of all these deals, we did have to stockpile in some cases. Thankfully, we have some storage space in our garage for all the items Rebekah brings home – so we often can “shop” from the garage to make dinner or grab a snack. With her couponing, we’ve been able to comfortably feed our family of 4 on about $400 a month – and it’s certainly more than beans and rice!
We have done many other things throughout the year to cut down on costs as well as pay off some debts, but these items were the big three in comparison with all the others. All three took some work to get started. Our budget pretty much flopped the first time out of the gate – we severely underestimated several categories and overestimated in others. But after a few months of using our budget, our debit cards and coupons, we’ve been able to reign it all in so that they work well together and propel us toward our goal of being debt free!
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