Frugal Tip: Phone Service

We've had the Magic Jack I think since about February or March. Although we are not totally in love with, it's still a pretty good deal. The jack itself is $20 and a year service is $20. So when you first buy it, it will actually be $40, which will include the first year's service.

We didn't have a home service before and use our cell phones mostly, but we were looking for a way to reduce our cell phone bill. We were looking to go into prepaid, but instead we just put mine and my husband's cell phone plan with my mom and we share the minutes. But so we don't have to use up all the minutes and hopefully my mom can reduce the minutes, we use our Magic Jack phone as much as possible. The problem is, that you have to keep your computer on 24/7 if you want your phone to work. But it's worth it. There are times when it will say it's not plugged in and I can't fix it, but my husband knows how. I'm just clueless when it comes to this type of stuff.

So I would recommend this to anyone. In my opinion it's not perfect. But I do know people who don't have any problems with it and totally love it. There is a 30 day trial period, so if you don't like it you can get your money back. We got ours at Best Buy, but I think you can get it off of Magic Jack's website too. Now you do have to have a certain speed for it to work. I think you need 2 of something (can't remember what they are called). When we first got it we had 1.5 and it worked OK for us not having the right speed. Now I think we have 8 and it works better.

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Oh and a couple of things I like about it: Your voicemails go to your email! You can even listen to them straight from your email! You can also take your phone with you! My friend who recommended the Magic Jack to me said her father in-law brought it to his camp and had his phone there.

Allowance Chart

It's so important to teach our children how to handle money and it's never too early to start. My sister and I were talking and I'm probably the best with money of my four siblings. And I'm not where I need to be. I wonder how much better I would be if my parents actually sat down and taught me how to budget, the importance of saving and things like that. I think most parents forget to pass their knowledge of money down to their children. Even if it's learning through our mistakes we need to teach our children.

Even though my husband and I will probably never be at a place where we can give our kids a nice size allowance, I wanted to give them something so I can teach them how to save and live within their means. I decided when KJC turned five this past year, I would start giving her a dollar a week. I had heard somewhere to give kids change for an allowance because it seemed like they were getting more. And I'm sure you can do the same with older kids who get more and use dollar bills. I made this allowance chart so she can divide her money herself......

I divided it up 10% for tithing, 10% for long term savings, 10% for short term savings, 5% for the family mission fund and the rest for spending. I'm not sure if I want to stick with this. But as I learn better how to save my money and put money aside for different things, I might change this.

I was looking for paper coins that looked real, but couldn't find any. So I had to use plastic. I put the coins I would give her up to the top and then divided those same coins into the categories. I made a color copy and stuck it in a protective sleeve. You can also laminate it if you have a machine or access to one. I made three of these. I'm weird, and I like to see change all mixed up (with dollars too), so that each bank wouldn't have all the same coins, I made three and changed the coins around. :)

I don't get good ideas very often. Usually when I do something, I found it somewhere else. I'm very proud to say this was all my idea. I'm sure someone else does this too, but I didn't find this and duplicate it. :)

And to explain the family mission fund, in our church people in their early twenties can serve a mission for our church. Instead of everyone saving for individual missions, I decided to do one big mission fund so anyone who wanted to use it could and everyone would be contributing to the mission. Maybe my husband and I could even use it to go on a Senior mission when we are ready to retire.

SwagCode 10/9/09

Find the SwagCode at the SwagStore. Copy it, and paste it at SwagBucks. Expires 5 PM Pacific (7 PM central). EXPIRED

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Mega SwagBucks Day!

Thanks April for reminding me!

Yes, it's Mega SwabBucks today. There are 10, 20, 50 and 100's out there. Happy Searching!

I almost have enough points to get my first prize (that I want anyway)! It's going a little slower lately. I've been slacking in the SwagBucks department lately. But I'm getting back in there.

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SwagCode 10/8/09

There is a new swagcode out there. It's on facebook here. It's in their status at the top of the page. Expires 2 PM Pacific (4 PM Central). EXPIRED

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Recipe: Goolash

This is a Frugal Recipe!

This recipe was always my favorite growing up and one of the few that I actually learned from my mom. My mom went back to work when I was in high school and worked a lot of nights or was too tired to really cook when she got home. Going back to work after about 15 years and being on her feet all day I'm sure was really hard on her physically. Anyway! It's super cheap and easy!

Ingredients:
1 lb. ground beef
1 lb. elbow noodles (about 4 cups)
V8 Vegetable Juice (the big bottle or the big can will work. The can is a lot cheaper than the bottle, but when I can find the bottle really cheap I buy the low sodium)
1 can stewed tomatoes (optional)

Cook elbow noodles as per directions. Brown ground beef. If you are adding stewed tomatoes when beef is done cooking, drain the fat, then add stewed tomatoes. I cut them up with my spoon. You can also add some of the vegetable juice to warm it up while the noodles are finishing. When noodles are finished, drain noodles, put them back in pot and add ground meat mixture and rest of veggie juice and heat up.

We usually eat on this for two days and it goes great with Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning! Yum!

You don't have to use V8. That is the kind I like after trying the Great Value brand. And I wouldn't recommend Tomato Juice either.

When my mom was on a diet she used to make up a bunch of noodles and for lunch or dinner she would put some in a bowl and pour V8 in it and put it in the microwave. No meat!

I've also heard of people adding corn to it.

We didn't grow up with the stewed tomatoes, but when my husband (who is the better cook) and I first got married and I made this for the first time, he insisted that we add stewed tomatoes in it. My feelings were really hurt. It was the first time I had cooked and I felt he thought it wasn't' good enough. I was telling my dad about it and I said, "And you know what the worse part about it was?...It was better!"

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**I'm making this for dinner tonight and hopefully I remember to take pictures and post them later. I'm know I'm a visual person when it comes to food. I can't really read a recipe and think, "Mmmm! That sounds good!")

Old Navy Thrusday

It's Thursday again! Be sure to keep checking back to Old Navy Weekly to try and snatch those high value coupons! I'll be in a chatroom at Engineer A Debt Free Life.

Check out M80 for the item of the week and what high value coupons are being hid this week.

For those of you who don't know about Old Navy Weekly, Old Navy updates this site every week with amazing coupons like $75 off $100 and $50 off $100. The coupons are hidden. You'll have to do things like click on the flying bird in the background or take the chapstick out of one modelquin's hand and put it on the other's lips. Best thing to do is practice on the old site, so when it updates you kind of have an idea on what to do.

No one ever knows when it's going to update. Typically it's been on Thursdays, but it's been on Frida before too. It's updated at 4pm on Thursday, but it has also updated 4AM on Friday! Just keep hitting that refresh button or F5!

Good Luck!

What is SwagBucks?

SwagBucks is a way to let you earn rewards just by doing what you already do, searching the web. Instead of going to Google, Ask or Yahoo, you go through SwagBucks. They use Google and Ask so it's pretty much the same thing. You can earn lots of different prizes but what seems to be the most popular prizes are gift cards. Gift cards like Amazon, Target and Barnes & Noble or get cash through Pay Pal.

I know someone who was able to buy a brand new laptop through Amazon by buying Amazon gift cards! There are other ways to earn SwagBucks, like through swagcodes. You find swagcodes through reading blogs, the downloadable toolbar, or through newsletters.

Find out for yourself here.

I'll try my best to post where you can find swagcodes. I've been kind of slacking in that department lately. I can't post the swagcodes. If I do my account will be deactivated. But I can lead you into the right direction and give you clues.

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10/16/09-As of today, I'm able to get two $5 Amazon e-gift cards (but I'm saving my bucks for later). That is in about a month's time. And there was a time that I wasn't even doing it. $10 for something I do anyway! Sweet! Free Money!

Frugal Tip: Homemade Stain Remover

I got this recipe from my mom a while back. I didn't post this sooner because I wasn't sure how I liked it yet. Until last week. One of JRC's blankets got caught up in our van door as it was opening. It had grease all over it. I kept forgetting to wash it. Three or four weeks later I finally wash it. I sprayed it with the stain remover and scrubbed it with an old toothbrush (I've found that scrubbing with a toothbrush is needed even for the best of the store bought stain removers). I washed it and viola! It was clean! You can't even tell grease was all over it! So now I'm convinced that this stuff really works.

Here's the recipe:
1 cup water
1 cup ammonia
1 cup dish soap (my mom suggested Dawn "it gets the grease out." If you use the concentrated kind you can use half a cup)

My mom said something about adding the soap last or something last because it will bubble up. I don't remember. I quadruple it and put it all in a gallon jug, so it doesn't matter to me. A little warning: This stuff really stinks! Sometimes I have to take a break from pre treating.

Originally posted on my personal blog May 2009

Since I originally posted this recipe on my personal blog, I have changed it just a little bit. I no longer quadruple it. I have found that it kind of loses it power after a while. And I now use about 3/4 of a cup of concentrated Dawn.

Our Story

This is just to let you know a little about my family and how we got where we are today.

My husband and I were married in 2003, we didn't wait long for our first child who was born 13 months after. We now have 2 girls and a boy, 5, 2 1/2, and 13 months. I stay home with my kids, so we have one source of income.

After my son was born, a lot of unexpected bills started to pile up. The hospital bills from his birth were triple what were expecting to pay. Our mortgage went up $150 (they needed money in escrow and has recently gone back down). My youngest daughter and my son were sick a lot and had to be brought to the pediatrician and to specialists. I think in two months time we had spent $300 at $25 a visit! My daughter needed tubes put in her ears, so that was more doctor bills. So at the beginning of this year were were struggling and our savings had been wiped out. That's when I started to look for ways to save money. I had tried couponing in the past (a few times) and failed miserably! Just recently have I started to get the hang of it. I started looking into things like making my own baby wipes and things like that. At the end of March I started to put together a plan to eliminate our debt. I was so excited. I was going to start with April's bills and then the thing I had been dreading happened. My husband was laid off from his job the last weekend in March. The funny thing about it, I had called him to tell him our tax refund was deposited into our account and I was really excited. We were going to pay off one of the credit cards and put the rest aside. He didn't seem too excited and I finally pulled it out of him that he was laid off and he was on his way home. Luckily that money didn't come in a couple days sooner because it would have been gone! Remember, we had no savings! So we had that and two weeks severance and a week of vacation. Oh and the week before he was laid off a drunk driver hit our HOUSE and we later got money from that and a friend who worked in the construction business said just to keep it, that the damage wouldn't effect the value of our house. So we had money from that, tax refund, and severance. A few weeks after that, my husband was organizing a huge service project with the mayor of the city we lived in and while they were organizing the final details, a city vehicle backed up into our car! Yeah. What else could happen? Luckily, I think that was it. But really, they were kind of blessings in disguise. If it weren't for the money from the drunk driver and the city vehicle we would never had survived this. My husband was out of work for two months. He finally was able to get back on with the same company he was laid off from, but in Nebraska (we lived in Louisiana), less money, and we had to move ourselves. So here we are in Nebraska. Just recently I felt comfortable enough to start back up trying to pay down our debt. Our goal is to live debt-free. Eventually we would love to pay for everything in cash, even vehicles.

I don't claim to know everything about being frugal and couponing, but I'm learning. So as I learn, I want you to learn to! It's been so fun to find new ways to save money. Never in my early twenties did I think I would get excited about making my own baby wipes or cleaning my floors with rags attached to my swiffer. But here I am. Being frugal and loving it!