Frugal Babe

My husband and I have a self-imposed $1000/month spending limit for our credit card.  We put everything on the card, so it’s a good way for us to keep track of our spending.  When we’re getting close to the end of the billing cycle, we’re usually pretty close to our $1000 too, and tend to [...]

I’m happy to report that we seem to be back on track financially.  We’ve had a long-standing self-imposed spending limit of $1000/month for everything that can possibly be charged to a credit card.  This includes things like our phone bill, gas, food, entertainment, etc. but does not include things like the mortgage and our health [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Last night, on our way home from the gym, my husband got a hankering for Village Inn.  We haven’t been to a Village Inn in years, but as we were driving by (like we do every night), he said he felt like going in.  What the heck - we’ve been spending less than $50 a [...]

Time for the September expenses.  I can’t believe I haven’t always kept track of our spending like this - it makes everything so much more clear!  Anyway, here it is:
After-Tax Income:  $4793
Expenses:

mortgage = $1266
groceries = 451
health insurance = 329
household = 148
gasoline = 101
dermatologist = 100
electricity = 89
gifts = 71
HOA = 67
life insurance = 66
water/sewer = [...]

At the end of July, we decided to start tracking our expenses.  August was our first full month, and we find that tracking feels pretty easy now - we don’t have to remind ourselves to keep receipts and enter them in the computer, we just do it out of habit.  Sort of like flossing I [...]

Well, we just finished our first month of tracking expenses.  We’re not going to be spending money for the rest of the day, so I decided to post the results for this month.  It’s interesting to note that we’re on track to have one of the lowest credit card bills we’ve had in the last [...]

Our car expenses are nuts this month - it looks as if we have a car payment when I look at Microsoft Money!  We paid our car insurance for the rest of the year this month, and we had to pay our annual registration fee for both cars this month.  Both of them needed emissions [...]

We spent a crapload of money this past weekend.  I didn’t like having to put everything into Microsoft Money to track our expenses, but then again, it’s not like we were out buying shoes and purses. 
On Friday night, we went to a play with my brother and his girlfriend and her mother.  My brother’s gf [...]