Blogging Away Debt Blogging Away Debt follows real people on their journey to debt freedom — with tips on the debt snowball, budgeting, cutting expenses, and staying motivated.

by Tricia

When we first started reducing our debt, we really cut our expenses. As our debt decreased and our income increased, we gradually eased up on some of those cost cutting measures we took. I’ll admit that convenience is the biggest factor for not sticking with them.

First Example – hanging laundry to dry versus using our electric dryer. We had a system going and even installed a place to hang wet laundry in our bathroom. After a while, we didn’t hang our clothes as often. Gradually we stopped doing it altogether. Well, it’s back and we’ve already saved the electricity from two loads of laundry.

Second Example – using paper towels versus a kitchen towel. For a while there, we had weaned ourselves from heavy paper towel use. We were using kitchen towels for drying our hands, etc. Somewhere along the line, the kitchen towels went into hiding and we used paper towel after paper towel. “We’re out of paper towels again!” was a common comment. Well, they are now in a very non-convenient place in the cupboard to discourage use. Thanks to some after Christmas deals we have some more kitchen towels to use and our kitchen looks festive.

There are other things we stopped doing, but these are the ones we have agreed to bring back so far. At this point, since we need time for other things we are weighing the cost/benefit of each thing to see if it is worth it right now. Since we have an electric dryer, the laundry was a big one. And since we were buying paper towels often, they were another one. A side benefit of all this is that we are reducing our waste and conserving energy.

by Tricia

The weather around here hasn’t been that great and we haven’t been able to make the trip to do our major monthly grocery shopping. That’s when we stock up on the essentials since they are cheaper at another store. We have been running out of things, so we decided to head to a store that is closer to us.

Some things we couldn’t bring ourselves to buy. $1.30 for a can of soup versus $0.79 is a pretty big difference. We’ll do without the soup for now. Other things, like eggs and cereal, we had to buy.

This story of our trip down the cereal aisle is fairly typical. All three of us walk down it and I ask our son to see if there are any cereals on sale that he would like. We spot one of his favorite cereals (Lucky Charms) and see that it is 2/$5.00 on sale. My husband heads over to the generic Lucky Charms and I stay by the brand name so we can compare the prices and ounces. We may not use walkie talkie’s like the Economide family, but we have a pretty good system for comparing prices and we make sure our son is involved.

What wasn’t so typical is what happened before my husband reached the generic cereal section. He was stopped by someone working in the aisle and asked if he would like to buy one get one free for Kellogg’s cereals. All you have to do is say “Buy one get one free” and my right ear moves for better reception (yes, I still do the ear wiggling!).

It turns out that he is affiliated with Kellogg’s and was working in that store. Thanks to his coupons, we were able to get large boxes of cereal for $1.50/box (the coupons were combined with cereals on sale). Not too bad. He made my day right there. That wasn’t all, he spent a few minutes giving us a head’s up on some promotions coming soon.

We didn’t notice him talking to anyone else. While we were with him his attention was 100% on us even though other customers were passing us by. Maybe it was because we were obviously trying to stretch our dollars. Then I remembered something. Back when I used to work in a grocery store (which seems like ages ago now), we were encouraged to help people find the deals. Some of us workers would tell stories of how we helped people save money. Believe it or not, there were customers who were offended when we mentioned an available coupon. So we kept an eye out for the people who were looking at prices or maybe had a coupon folder – some clue that they were price shopping. It makes me smile thinking back on how we had scoped out all of the coupons around the store (even by the wines – sometimes there were coupons for produce or meat with no wine purchase required!) and how we handed those out to customers.

Maybe that is why the man decided to help us out. I made sure to thank him plenty (I probably said it three times before we walked away) and I smiled at him and saw a smile back. Yeah, I think that’s probably why he did it.

In other grocery trip related news, I found myself walking up to the coffee and sniffing it longingly even though I’ve never really been a coffee drinker. I don’t recall ever having caffeine withdrawals more than two days (I’ve quit caffeine multiple times in the past). I’m on day three and it has been the worst day yet. I was so close to getting some soda. But I held out and raided our hard candy when we got home to take the edge off of it. I sure hope today was the worst of it and man, I hope this post makes sense! My head’s still a little fuzzy 😛