Frugal Babe

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 [...]

As of this afternoon when I deposit our paychecks for December, we will have paid off more than $1000 in principal on our HELOC.  Doesn’t seem like much, but it’s a big deal for us.  We’ve had our house for nearly five years, and this is the first time we’ve ever paid down the balance [...]

We had our 13 week prenatal visit today - tomorrow’s officially the end of the first trimester.  I’m grateful that things are going so well, and we’re both so glad that we found such a good midwife.  The $3000 we’re paying her is money well spent, even if it’s not covered by insurance.  Our visit [...]

Yesterday we went to a Labor Day bbq at the home of a friend of a friend.  We only knew a couple people there, so we got to meet lots of new people.  The party was at a house in an old neighborhood downtown - full of houses built in the 1920’s with character and [...]

We sold our Oldsmobile on Sunday.  We were both kind of sad to see it go, but since my husband’s parents gave us their old car last month, we didn’t need the Oldsmobile anymore.  We sold it for $750, only $50 less than we were asking, so we were happy about the sale.  We posted [...]

In 1970, when my parents were newlyweds and struggling to live paycheck to paycheck, my mother started keeping track of their expenses.  They wanted to start building up a nest egg, but there didn’t seem to be anything left at the end of each month.  So she got a ledger book and wrote down every [...]

Now that we’ve paid off nearly all of our non-mortgage debt (only $1000 to go; it will be gone by mid August), I’m thinking more about what we want to accomplish financially this year.  For the last few years, it’s been all about debt repayment, and savings has taken a backseat to getting out of the [...]

My husband and I were talking last night about the loss of income we’ll have to deal with if we have a baby.  There’s really no getting around this problem.  You either have to pay for childcare or cut back on work time.  I have friends who use free grandparent daycare, but that’s not available [...]

I’m spending the weekend chilling out on the couch, resting before my 10k race on Monday.  It’s a big deal race around here (about 43,000 people ran last year), and a big deal for me aswell.  My goal is to go under 44 minutes, but I’ll be ok with anything under 45 minutes.  Last year [...]

When we bought our house in January 2003, we got a 30 year mortgage at 6% interest for $152,000 (the balance on that one just dropped below $140,000 - yay!) We had $10,000 for a down payment, which was far less than the traditional 20% (our house cost $190,000). At the time, we [...]