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’ve added a new financial goal to our list.  We want to install solar panels.  We’ve been talking about it for years, but the price made the possibility unrealistic (at least $12,000 to put in enough panels to power our house, and even that would require that we cut back further on our electricity use).  [...]

I’m feeling very productive today.  I’ve gotten lots of work done, and I just opened a 529 plan for our son.  I set it up with a $100 deposit, and a recurring $100 monthly deposit starting in July.  I also set up a UPromise account - we’ll see how that goes… I don’t think that [...]

My husband and I both currently work full-time (probably more than full-time if we were to actually keep track).  We don’t make a huge amount of money, but it’s plenty for us.  I know we could be earning a lot more money if that were our primary focus, but we decided a long time ago that [...]

Back when we were in debt, it was pretty easy to decide what to do with our paychecks.  Pretty much everything went towards paying off debt, working from the highest interest rate to the lowest.  We didn’t have to think about priorities or goals other than getting out of debt.  But now it’s a little [...]

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’re back home after our medical adventure week.  My husband is doing great; his knee is progressing much faster than anyone had expected, and we’ve been entertaining ourselves with home physical therapy sessions on his knee.  He’ll start going to a local physical therapist next week, and we expect that he’ll make a full recovery within a few [...]

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 [...]