Quick Update

Just wanted to check in with everyone and tell you that we are still doing the spending diet. We are doing our best to watch our pennies and to be honest we are liking the rewards we are seeing. We got our phone bill this month that has our dish network, internet and phone and it was 50.00 less than last months because we changed some things on it. That was awesome!!!! I have continued to cut coupons and I will be going to the store this weekend so I will be sure to post on how much I saved. WOOT WOOT! I was reading the coupons queens blog and it was talking about how to save on birthday's, so I thought I would mention that my birthday is tomorrow. I will be turning 32 years old. GO ME~ :) Anyhow, my hubby was asking what I wanted to do for my birthday and honestly I told him nothing. I have come to the realization through doing all this, that we don't have to go out to eat, spend tons of money on things just because of an occasion. I mean I really just want to spend it with my family and friemds. So his mom invited us out to their house tomorrow for a cook out. What a great thing too, because I won't have to cook. LOL Anyhow, with that said, I have truly enjoyed doing this challenge because not only has it helped us save money, it has brought us closer as a family. We do more things together now and the best part? We aren't spending extra..... :)
Thank you guy for reading and be sure to check in and see how I do at the store...
Love,
tori~

1st grocery trip

Ok so as you know if you watched the news about us, we were spending about 500.00 a month on groceries. That is about 250.00 every paycheck, that's a lot of money!!! I realize there are 5 of us, but I also began to realize there has to be a way to save money on my bill! So I contacted the coupon queen for some grocery shopping tips. She was so helpful and was able to guide me through the art of printing and clipping coupons. I learned that Target not only takes their store coupons on products, but you can also use a manufacturer's coupons too. So with all these helpul tools under my belt, I was ready to begin. I printed and clipped then loaded all 3 of the kids into to the car and off we went. First stop: Target. We got all the things we had coupons for and then a few extras that we just couldn't pass up. My bill started out as 106 dollars and after coupons it was 84. I saved 22 dollars there. Woot Woot! Ok so then we headed to Wal Mart to get a few more things that we needed and I had about 10 bucks in coupons left to use. So we did our shopping and ended up using only 6.00 in coupons there. My end bill was 114.00. So in coupons alone I saved 28.00 and only spent 198 dollars total at the store. I know its not a GIGANTIC amount of savings, but it's a start. Normally I would've spent 250.00, but I was able to spend just under 200.00. I am very impressed with our savings, and I will continue to clip coupons in the future. Thank you coupon queen for all your help, I know that your tips will help our family out in the long run. Thank you guys for reading and I will post more later.

Tori~

Elijah's Birthday

Hi there everyone! I hope you got to catch us on the news last night. We have a DVR so we were able to record it so the kiddos could watch it today. They were so tickled to see themselves on the TV. It was fun for us as well to have people we know say hey we saw you guys on the news last night..... I even offered my autograph today to my friends. LOL! So anyhow, moving right along, today is Elijah's birthday. He is now an official 6 yr old. So since we are doing the 30 day spending diet, we did a family party. We gathered at my mom's house for homemade tacos and I made a birthday cake. His cousins Allie & Emily were there, so all the kids got to play together. We had a wonderful family time together and we didn't spend a whole lot of money, just a few bucks for a cake mix and frosting. Elijah had a great birthday and enjoyed spending it with the people he loves. Thank you guys for reading and I hope that you have a great night.

Tori~

Tonight is the night!

Ok tonight is the big night. We will be on the news for our big story tonight at 10:00 pm on channel 8. I am pretty excited about it, so for those of you following our story, please tune in. In other news, I just wanted to say Happy belated Mother's Day to all the wonderful hard working moms out there. We have one of the toughest jobs imaginable and I know we wouldn't trade it for the world. I told my hubby this year that I didn't want any gifts, he honored my request and gave me the greatest gift of all. TIME! After church yesterday we came home, ate some lunch and then my darling hubby took the children out front for play time while I took a nap on the couch. He also put away all the laundry away and made breakfast for me and the kids. Later in the afternoon I went to see my mom and then went to visit my dad who made a roast for dinner. It was a very wonderful Mother's Day and the best part? We spent no extra money!

:)

I will update more on our 3rd week in a few days. Have a great night.

tori~

WEAK MOMENT

Ok a quick little update on this fine Thursday evening..... So i have had one of those really trying "mom"days today and the last thing i wanted to do this evening after laundry, homework, cleaning and vacuuming our van was fix dinner. So we caved in and after the two younger ones gymnastics class, we went to Chic-Fila. However, we only ordered items such as the sandwiches with no fries and no meal deals. The cost was $20.00 for all 5 of us to eat, and it felt good to splurge on some fast food. So I guess you could say this was my first cheat in our challenge....... That's ok though, I am back on the wagon tomorrow.
Have a great night everyone!

Tori~

Week 2

Ok so we have finally made it to week 2 and this week seemed more challenging than the 1st! We have continued to stick to our guns though and have not eaten out in 2 whole weeks! WOOT WOOT!!! That to me has been the toughest thing to cut out. We have been spending more time at home especially since all the rain and decided we needed movies. Well a friend of ours told us about something called netflix and we decided to try it out. You can find out more info on their website here: http://www.netflix.com/?mqso=80015687
The great thing about it? You can sign up for a 2 week free trial. I have a hard time passing up anything that is free as I am sure many of you do. The other great thing is they offer a variety of plans that will fit any budget and plans are as low as 4.99 a month. We were spending 4.99 a week on PPV (paper view) movies or movies that were on Dish on Demand. $4.99 a week adds up to almost 20 dollars a month! So we are giving netflix a shot and opted for the 13.99 plan. You get up to 2 DVD's at once (one for us and one for the kids) and it comes straight to your door. We have tried the Redbox thing, but I am so forgetful about taking things back, so my 1.00 ended up being 5 or more! So for those of you that are interested, check out Netflix.
So moving on, I wanted to make note of how doing this challenge has really made me open my eyes to our bills. Normally we would get a bill and we would pay it, no questions asked, but since starting the challenge, I have reviewed each of our bills to see exactly what is on them. The most recent bill was our cell phone bill. We had made a few changes on our plan and added a line with more minutes since it would save us more money in the long run, but boy were we surprised when we got the bill. It was double than the previous months and the more I examined our bill the more I realized we were getting charged for 2 individual lines rather than our family talk plan that we "thought" we had signed up for. So after 3 different phone calls we got everything straightened out and got more than 100.00 credited to our account because of their mistake. So it does PAY to examine your bills closely. All in all our week has gone well and I am so grateful to be a part of this challenge so it can help others as it did us.
Oh and coupon queen if you're reading this get ready because I am going to need your help on my grocery shopping.
Have a great day everyone!

Tori~

First Week

Hey everyone. My name is Tori. I am a mom of 3 beautiful children, 2 boys and a girl and I am married to the most wonderful man in the world, Mark. The reason for my blog, is because we are doing a 30 day challenge. You might be wondering what kind of challenge we signed up for, so let me just explain. We were asked to be as frugal as we can possibly be for the next 30 days. Seems easy, right? Well we thought so at first until we realized how tough it was going to be. We met with Mark Bradshaw from CH. 8 and realized just how much extra we were spending on things like eating out, coffees at QT, & our cable bill. After that, my hubby and I decided we were up for the challenge. We agreed to no eating out, no taking money out for sodas or coffee or snacks and then looked at our bills to see what we could do without. We decided to call Dish Network and see if we could lower our bill somehow. We were able to save almost $30.00 a month just lowering the type of plan we had!!! So considering we just completed our first week, I am inpressed at how we're doing. As tempting as eating out was last week, we survived. I made dinner for our family each night, or we had leftovers. Mark & I also took lunches to work rather than eating out and we had lots of fun seeing what all we can save on. Well that is all I have to report at this time, but I will make sure to do updates every week for all to see......

Thanks for reading,
Tori