Six Figures Under

When You have to SPEND in a NO-Spend Month

February 26, 2019 by Stephanie 8 Comments

We don’t call it a No-Spend Challenge for nothing! If it were easy, it wouldn’t be a challenge, right? At the beginning of February, we set a goal to not spend anything on eating out, household goods, entertainment, trips, or any other unnecessary spending. In addition, we decided to make our no-spend month a pantry […]

Debt Smash-athon JANUARY Progress Report

February 13, 2019 by Stephanie 2 Comments

Way to go Debt Smashers! What an amazing month! I was so impressed by all the hard work you put toward paying off debt in January! I absolutely loved reading through all of your progress reports. You are up against some big challenges, but you’re making great progress. For those who are new here, in […]

Is a No-Spend Month Actually Worth It?

February 7, 2019 by Stephanie 5 Comments

A no-spend month saves money in more ways than you probably realize. A no-spend month also has a positive overall impact on your future finances. If you think that a no-spend month will just make you spend more later, then you need to read this. I got an overwhelming reaction when I shared our No-Spend […]

Real Family Budget Update– January 2019

February 5, 2019 by Stephanie 3 Comments

We had a great budget month to start the new year out. We didn’t have any huge expenses and we kept our spending under control. As always, in this transparent budget update I’ll share with you exactly how much we earned, spent, and saved in January. We made some serious and surprising progress toward our […]

How to Save with a No-Spend Month

January 30, 2019 by Stephanie 3 Comments

Are you going strong in your financial goals? Want to keep up the momentum? Or maybe January was a struggle and you want to reset and start over. Either way, a no-spend month could be great for you! Let me tell you what’s involved. It’s not as scary or as hard as it sounds. Why […]

Switching from YNAB 4 to the New YNAB– Plus a hack to make it better

January 28, 2019 by Stephanie 21 Comments

We’ve been using YNAB for a long time. It was with us through nearly our entire debt-free journey. YNAB 4 was a part of how we handled money in our family and we weren’t ready to part ways when the new online YNAB came along. YNAB (the company) understood that parting would be hard so […]

$327 Monthly Grocery Haul for Our Family of 7

January 22, 2019 by Stephanie 3 Comments

It’s been a couple of months since we’ve had a normal grocery shopping month. During November and December we didn’t do our normal monthly grocery shopping trips. It was good to get back to it! We waited until nearly half way through the month to do our monthly grocery shopping, though I did make a […]

Annual Spending Report 2018–California Family of Seven

January 10, 2019 by Stephanie 2 Comments

Have you ever stepped back at the end of the year to look at your spending totals for the year? Of course, this is only really practical and possible if you’ve been tracking your spending throughout the year. We started tracking (and minimizing) our spending back when we decided to pay off over $100K of […]

Transparent Family Budget Update– December 2018

January 1, 2019 by Stephanie 10 Comments

Happy New Year! It’s time for our last budget update of 2018! Thinking back on December, I can’t say enough about how nice it is to have sinking funds for things like Christmas and life insurance. When we were paying off our student loan debt we didn’t do sinking funds because we were funnelling absolutely […]

Join the 2019 Debt Smash-athon!

December 28, 2018 by Stephanie 9 Comments

If you’ve seen our new BIG goal, you know we’ll be pretty focused in 2019. We’re excited to have a huge goal to keep ourselves making financial progress. I know so many of you are working hard to make financial strides in the new year, too. I love hearing what you’re doing to reach your […]