by Tricia
Hi everyone. Tricia here with another update. I cannot believe that summer is almost over and school will be starting soon. Oh my…how time did fly.
Things in our financial arena could be better right now. I was a little more relaxed with tracking our finances (ok, I was lazy and didn’t keep a watchful eye on everything) and we spent more money than we probably should. We still do not have credit card debt, but we are not contributing to our savings account or paying off debt like I had hoped for this month.
This time, I’m not saying, “Hopefully next month things will be better.”
No, this time things will be better. How? We are ditching our debit card and the one credit card we use for cash back and pay off in full multiple times a month. We are going back to good ‘ole cash.
If you followed my story, I’ve mentioned many times that I do not like using cash. In fact, I’m still not crazy about it. But now that our credit card debt has been paid off, I have lost some motivation. Sure, we have other debt to pay off (student loans and mortgage), but I do not have the same passion to pay that off as I did with the credit card debt.
We need a challenge.
I thought about it for a while, and using only cash seemed to be a perfect fit. We’ll have a certain amount to use every week and once the cash is gone – there is no more spending. The cash will need to cover everything that is not normally paid via automatic payment or check. I have a feeling that it will lead us to do some creative things to make it through the end of the week at times. It should help spur our creativity and get our frugal juices flowing again. They were still there, just a little stale. Time to spice things up!
I’m pretty excited about the change in our financial routine. Perhaps it was time to try something a little different. I’ve always said that everyone should make their own recipe for financial success by taking tidbits from here and there. I guess I never thought about modifying that recipe every now and then just to keep things fresh. Perhaps this is just what we need right now in this stage of our lives 🙂
With that, I will conclude by saying that September will be a great month and I have to congratulate Beks – she just paid off her credit card debt. Woohoo!
