Blogging Away Debt

Yep, September is Going to Be a Rough Month

I thought September would be a rough month, and I am right. As much as I’d like to pay off some debt right now, I can’t. There’s no wiggle room. Zip. Zero. Nada. I’ve been at this long enough to know that there are these lulls. It doesn’t make it any easier, though.

Part of me is wondering if I should take a little bit from our savings account to knock our debt below the $8K mark to have some progress with our debt. If we didn’t have an estimated tax payment to make this month we could have made it under $8K. I’m really thankful we have the money to make that payment, though.

We still haven’t had a garage sale yet, but hopefully we can soon before it gets too cold. I have sold a few things here and there and have made about $70. We aren’t touching that money because it will be our change money for our garage sale. I may also try listing a couple things on eBay that I know will sell. We’ll see.

Our business is making a small amount of money right now, but we aren’t paying ourselves yet. I’d like to get the bank account built up a little bit more before we do that.

I’ll think about it for a few days. I just may pull some money out of our savings to give a little debt reduction “boost.” I feel pretty “blah” right now.

Thinking About Going Back to Basics

by Tricia

I’ve always thought it would be neat to go back to the basics when it comes to home life. Things like making our own bread, making our own pasta and even raising some chickens for eggs. We can’t raise chickens where we live right now, but I could start making our own bread and pasta. My mouth waters just thinking about spreading butter on top of a nice and warm slice of homemade bread. Mmmm…

I started researching how to make pasta, and did you know you only need three ingredients? Flour, eggs and salt. There are variations out there, but that is all you need to make the basic noodle pasta. You don’t need a fancy machine to roll it out, either. You can use a rolling pan and some arm muscle to flatten it out. Then fold it up, cut with a knife and unravel and hang to try. It stores up to a few weeks. You have complete control over what goes into the pasta and it cost less than store bought (from my very crude calculations the recipe I saw would run about 65 cents/pound).

Here’s a link to the recipe and instructions I found: About.com

I really want to give this a shot and see what happens. If it works well, I think I might have to make some pierogi too. Double mmmm… When I was younger, my neighbor’s grandmother would make them from scratch. She filled them with fruit, meat or potatoes. They were so good. I used to eat Mr. T’s Pierogies, but we’ve been cutting frozen foods out of our diet so I haven’t had them in a while.

I have also looked into making our own bread, but that takes longer to do and I have been waiting for the cooler temps of fall to do that. Our weather is now in the 60s, so maybe this weekend I’ll try my first batch. There are so many recipes for bread, though. A few promising ones that I have found are for white batter bread and peanut butter bread.

Just a note – the recipe site I linked to is pretty neat. You can filter by ingredients you have on hand, other requirements (like equipment) or even nutrition. For us trying to save some money, there is even a filter for “inexpensive” 😉

And for snack items? No more Betty Crocker mixes for us! Just take a look this simple and well rated recipe for brownies. I have a feeling our house is going to smell like homemade goodies all weekend LOL.