Money Saving Solutions

For the past 6 months, we have been working very hard to pay off all of our debt (except our house, which may come later...one step at a time...we have now paid off 1/3 of our debt!!! Yippee!!) Anyway, I have been scouring the internet looking for the best (and easiest, I'm lazy) money saving ideas and tips. Because we still had the same bills and the same income, we were just trying to prioritize our money spending, so naturally, some things like the newest, neatest homeschool curriculums and nice, brand new books to read got pushed to the back burner...I still needed most of those things things though. So how to pay for them?

I found several money-saving websites, frugal living websites, and couponing websites. All of these gave me some great ideas on how to live on less and get more, while also saving money for big things we needed/wanted in the future (like homeschool curriculum or even trips to Disneyworld!) Here are my absolute favorite sites that I check more than once a day to see if there are any new bargains to be had:

• Southern Savers - has deals from store like Publix, Kroger, Bi-Lo, Harris Teeter, Food Lion, and pharmacies too (Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid) LOVE THIS SITE!!

• Couponing to Disney - she is saving money from using coupons, surveys, rebates, and more to fund a trip to Disney. She's doing great, too!

• Money Saving Mom - they are paying CASH for a new house!!! Great ideas and inspiration.

With all these ideas from great sites like these, we have been able to cut our grocery bill from upwards of $400 a month to about $170. I use coupons, sales, rebates, surveys, stockpiling, etc. to do this. And we eat well, too. It's not all beans & rice! I have a freezer full of meat and vegetables right now, as well as tons of canned/dry foods.

Also, we have added about $120 a month into "Savings" - automatic withdrawal - that is primarily for emergencies, etc. Honestly, we have never had anything in savings before, not even a little for emergencies. If something would have happened, we would have had to turn to family or who knows! So now we have some peace of mind...and a little savings account that's growing every month.

But we still have tons of neat homeschool curriculum/books this year. We have everything we needed, I just had to be creative about how we got it all. Ebay and the library are my new best friends...we have used curriculum and checked out books for ALMOST everything. Some books we had to buy (they are not in any library around here) but we have saved up money just for that purpose (see my Swagbuck post). So those books are free, the curriculum is cheap, and all the other books are free from the library. Since we haven't spent too much on books/curriculum, I feel we can spend on other things like the China Kit, GeoPuzzles, and Travel Scrapbooks ...all the fun things that we like to do in our homeschool haven't felt the budget cut!