I have this sudden urge to get all of
my debts paid off and paid off NOW! I want to be debt free and be
able to actually have a little extra money to go on vacation and save
for college for the kids. Problem is I am no financial expert, quite
the opposite actually! So I guess I need to get Kreative!! I know
not my typical post on here but sometimes we do have to get Kreative
finacially too!
I don't want to take away from my
family time to reach this goal of being debt free so logic tells me,
yes sometimes I do listen to that little voice inside my head that I
call logic, that there are steps I can take to achieve this goal
without sacrificing my family and my time with them. So I hope to
share these steps as I take them. I can't wait and I am so excited
to hear from others. Maybe you have a similar goal, maybe you have
accomplished a similar goal or maybe now that you see my goal you
have it too and we can forge this path together!
My first step is to trim down our
current expenses. We don't have a lot of extras in our “budget”
and I say budget in quotation because I have an idea in my head of
what we can spend on everything, but in reality I am really bad at
sticking to a budget! So looking at our current expenses and I first
wonder how to cut down on our enormous grocery bill. Coupons won't
cut it alone although I do find sites like www.coupons.com
and http://krazycouponlady.blogspot.com
helpful they aren't gonna cut my grocery bill enough. I could stop
buying my husbands special juice, favorite soda and sweet treats but
in the long run that might cost me more for a divorce! SO I figure I
just need to be smarter about what I buy, not buying a lot of extras
that will sit in my cupboards for years until I throw them out
because they are expired. I need an easy and affective way to meal
plan!
There are a lot of meal planning
websites out there on the big world wide web but I finally found one
that I like, no change that LOVE! That would be PLAN TO EAT
(www.plantoeat.com). Why do
I LOVE this site? I can easily import recipes I find through out the
web (think Pintrest) with just a click. Plan to eat will organize my
online recipe book by courses and is very easy to navigate. I allows
me to drag and drop meals onto the days of the week for easy menu
planning. I can choose to plan a weekly or monthly meal planners and
then compile a grocery list off of any date range I choose! The
site is also available to me on my android phone so it is right at my
finger tips even when I am at the grocery store! There is a cost for
these services, it costs me $4.95/mo which is $60/year but I think my
sanity and my grocery savings more than cover this! Sometimes I will
run two grocery lists-one for the month and then take off the produce
that will spoil before the end of the month and then run just the
produce on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.
I save money in a few ways. One I
only have on hand the food I need to fulfill the meals I am planning
on making and if I stick to the list then I can keep my spending to a
minimum. Before I would go to the grocery store weekly spending
$150-200 each trip just grabbing things that I thought I needed or
sounded good . Now that I plan a month at a time and only go to the
store twice a month (once for the bulk of everything and a second
trip mid month for perishable dairy and produce) and stick to the
list I am spending about $200-$300 on my initial trip and $50 on my
second. So before plan to eat I was spending $600-$800 now $250-350,
WOW what a savings!! Two I know what I have on hand at home to make
so it gives me back the time I would usually spend daily on meal
planning and running to the grocery store and time is money! Third
because I went to the effort of planning the meals ahead of time and
grocery shopping a head of time I feel bad for eating out so I save
money by not eating out as often! A win on every level. I am also
pretty sure we are eating more healthy. So kudos to PLAN TO EAT for
making an amazing website and meal planning tool that has changed the
way I feed my family and for saving me money that I can now use to
pay a little extra on those credit cards to get those paid off
quicker!
