Hear ye, hear ye, Money Saving Lords and Ladies! It’s Freedom Friday where I bi-weekly share our progress in becoming completely debt free. It’s also your turn to share your story of debt slaying. Whether you’ve paid off every cent you owe, are just getting started, or live somewhere in the in between, we want to hear from you! We’re better together, share your story and make us all stronger.
So I had a dream last night.
It’s kind of funny/embarrassing.
NO it wasn’t that kind of dream.
*But full disclosure, I have had dreams about speaking in front of large groups of people and midway through realizing I am partially unclothed. Analyze away.
Last night I dreamed that the King of Free and I were to be interviewed by the one and only Dave Ramsey. We were SO excited to share our story (although a little befuddled since we’re not debt free yet). I’m not quite sure where we were (my dreams are often a mix of known and unknown locations from different eras of my life), but for some reason, we were to be interviewed while laying in bed. Bizarre, I know, just go with me ok. Anyway. We were mic-ed up and ready to go. And we did a little opening segment. Then there was a video clip. And then anti-climatically both of us fell dead asleep. We fell asleep so hard that we missed the rest of the interview and woke up hours later. We were told that Dave tried to wake us but both of us were out like a light.
What’s that all about?
I have a feeling I know. We’re smack dab in the middle of this pursuit of being debt free (probably a foot and a half bit over the halfway mark). All we have left to pay off is the Evil Sorceress Sallie Mae. No more credit cards, medical debt, car debt, loans, or other obstacles stand in our way. But none of the money saving, frugalista, penny scraping, income increasing tactics that we first engaged in are new. I’m not saying I’ve got it all together and have reached the top in my status of being the Queen of frugal; however, a lot of the small changes that we made at the beginning of our journey (purchasing only with debit cards/cash, slicing our dining out budget, saving on groceries, clipping coupons, etc.) are a permanent part of our fabric now. So lately I’ve been feeling the need to step it up – to make more changes to ramp up our efforts.
As we look at our 2011 Budget (yep, we’re already fiscally thinking of next year), we’ve decided to make one more change that we haven’t yet. We’re going cash only for our groceries next year. I love my debit card. And I collect the reward points all year long to do our Christmas shopping. However, I think that we’d save a lot more money for Christmas if at the grocery store we used only cash throughout the year. I know a lot of you hard Ramseyheads are saying WHAT?! The Queen of Free doesn’t use envelopes? Nope, we haven’t taken that step yet. While I budget for everything for months (usually 3-6) at a time on Quicken and I stay within $10 of our grocery budget, I almost always go over. So if I go $10 every week for a year, we’re looking at $500 that we’re wasting. That’s definitely more than our reward points provide for Christmas shopping (and more than we would need to spend for Christmas, too).
So I’m waiting for the good Dave Ramsey to put his envelope system on sale (I’m guessing there will be some good Black Friday Deals) so we can gear up and step it up. No falling asleep in the middle of the journey here. Onward we go!
I think it’s time for the King of Free to blog for us again. Don’t you? Leave a comment if you want to hear from him next week on Freedom Friday!
