Frugal Babe

I was looking at our business credit card statements today, to make sure that everything was in order after our fraud incident last month.  They had cancelled my husband’s card and issued a new one, which was done as soon as we reported the problem.  We paid all the legit charges on the card, and [...]

When my parents came to see us on Christmas, they brought us a crib, which is now assembled in my office, awaiting my ouster to the guest room and the arrival of our little one in the spring.  My parents paid $30 for the crib (almost everything I know about being frugal was learned from [...]

Our corporation got its final commission check for 2007 today, and it was bigger than usual from that particular insurance company.  Combined with the fact that our business expenses were quite a bit lower in December than usual, we have about $1000 left over in our business account.  So we’re getting holiday bonuses.  I’m going [...]

Our networth rose to $90,772 this month, a $4000 increase since October.  That’s mostly due to aggressive contributions to our HSA, along with a $1000 increase in our retirement funds.  We also paid off some more money on our HELOC and our main mortgage. 
Our networth will take a hit over the next few months as [...]

Since we’re just about to start a new year, I thought I’d write about our goals for 2008 as far as money is concerned. 

Max out our HSA ($5800)
Max out my Roth IRA ($5000) and my husband’s traditional IRA ($5000)
Pay off $5000 in principal on our HELOC

In addition to these very concrete goals, we’d also like [...]

We’ve both had our final paychecks for 2007, so I have total numbers available for income and savings.  Our pretax income was $70,106.  We paid a total of $15,618 in taxes - not sure if we might get some of that back or not (this was our first year of being W2 employees of our [...]

Yesterday we officially maxxed out our HSA for the year.  $5650 is the IRS limit on contributions for a family, and we hit that mark - a huge milestone for us.  It puts us well on our way to having enough money to pay for our baby’s birth and to meet our deductible on our [...]

Wow, what a week this has been.  And we don’t even “do” Christmas - can’t imagine what it would be like if we did!  On Monday, I bought a shadow box picture frame (50% off) and was up until midnight making a scrapbook page to put in the frame for one of my best friends.  [...]

Since I love to cook, we buy very little processed food.  Our vegetables and fruit are always either fresh or frozen, and we buy lots of stuff in bulk, with very little packaging.  But beans and tomatoes are the exception to the rule.  I buy various kinds of canned beans and I also stock up [...]

Last night, during the “quiet your mind” part of yoga class, I came to an epiphany about how to solve our HSA vs HELOC dilemma (good thing I’ve never been able to quiet my mind during that part of the class). 
When we first set up the HSA, we were planning to use it primarily as [...]