Frugal Babe

I got my final paycheck from the library yesterday.  It was a good one, because I had more than 200 hours of vacation time saved up, and they cashed that out on my last check.  After taxes I ended up with over $2000, which is a good windfall.  Over the last year, I didn’t take [...]

We got our $1200 economic stimulus payment today.  We put the whole thing into our HELOC, since we have decided to make the HELOC a priority for the time being.  We’ve already maxxed out the HSA and my husband’s IRA for the year, and instead of moving straight to my IRA, we’ve been focusing on [...]

We maxxed out our HSA today.  $5800, done and done.  That feels so good.  A whole lot better than shopping sprees and dinners out.  We maxxed out our HSA last year too, but we did it in the last week of the year, and it was a struggle.  I much prefer having it done in [...]

Our insurance business is doing really well lately.  After four years of working on our website, my husband’s efforts have paid off, and the website is ranked number one on google for the keywords he targets.  Business has been good, although we’ve both been busier than ever…
A happy result of all the extra business is [...]

We had a prenatal visit today - everything’s still going really well with the pregnancy, and the days seem to be flying by.  We paid another $1000 to our midwife - we only owe her another $650, which we’re scheduled to pay in mid-April.  I remember when we were thinking about having a baby and [...]

I just put another $800 into our HSA.  That’s $2000 so far this year - only $3800 to go until we max out the account for 2008.  We’re trying to really swing for the fences with our financial goals this year.  We made the HSA priority one, and I’m hoping that we can have it [...]

All is takes is a quick glance around the internet to see that the financial outlook these days is not as rosy as it has been for most of this decade.  The doom and gloom crowd is predicting a full blown recession, while the more optimistic folks say that there will just be a bit [...]

Yea!  I’m back on line after being down for a few days.  Technical computer problems give me a rash, but luckily there wasn’t anything I needed to do.  Bluehost was down, and I just had to wait for them to come back up.  So now I can write to my heart’s content about the stuff that’s [...]

2007 was my first full year of blogging (I started in the fall of 2006), and as much as I enjoy writing my own blog posts, I also love reading everybody else’s.  Since I started blogging, we’ve paid off our non-mortgage debt, opened an HSA (and fully funded it in 2007, which is the first [...]

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 [...]