Blogging Away Debt

Take a “No Spend” Day, Modify it, and Turn it into a Year Without Buying Anything New

“No Spend” days are a fairly popular concept. You have designated days where you do not spend any money. We have a lot of those days since we stay at home a lot. Unfortunately, on the off days we spend a bit of money, but overall we save money because we are not always running out to the store for little things. The little things add up.

What would it be like if you didn’t spend money on new things for a year? If your vaccuum breaks, what would you do? You couldn’t buy one new – you would have to be creative and find one used. Sounds pretty interesting, doesn’t it?

Well, a group of friends decided that they would go an entire year without buying anything new. It’s been twelve months since they started their journey, and their sabbatical from shopping has made a profound change in their lives. They have even decided to do it another year!

You can read the story on Yahoo here.

Some of the key places to buy things were of course at garage sales and thrift stores. But they also went online to places like Freecycle.org and Garbagescout.com. Myself, I am a Freecycle member and I love it! Just recently I gave something away for free to another member, and when she picked up the item, she said, “Thank you so much. I just saved $88.” I could have tried to make a few dollars for the item that I originally bought used for $3.00 at a garage sale, but it felt good to give it for free to someone that needed it.

I think it would be fascinating to do what that group of friends did. It would be such a challenge yet so stimulating. Imagine how creative you would have to be to make it work.

Imagine how much extra money you could have to pay off debt!! 🙂

After an Absence, the Friday Blog Highlights are Back!

by Tricia

I was having a hard time keeping up with everything, so the Friday blog highlights went on the wayside for a while. Now that I am a user of Bloglines.com and I’ve subscribed to my favorite bloggers, I can now see an article that I like and save it for later. It’s so wonderful 🙂

First off, there’s an interesting read over at Mighty Bargain Hunter asking if you Budget Using the Force. I’ve never heard of the force method, but it turns out that is how I was budgeting. I’ve been trying the formal budgeting technique lately, but I find myself going back to the Force way of doing things (to a point). I’m still experimenting with budgeting and I think I will be posting soon on how I budget and some good alternatives to the way I do things.

Over at Generation X Finance, Jeremy has a post about Reviewing Your W-4 Exemptions. That’s always a great thing to do if your income changes during the year. I tend to overwithhold, because I do not want to be scrambling come tax time to pay the IRS money. One thing I’ll add here is that if you currently receive the Earned Income Credit on your taxes, you may be able to get that credit to you spread throughout the year instead of in a lump sum at the end of the year. We did that one year when things were tight and it really helped. For more info on that, here’s a link to the 2007 W-5 form. The W-5 form is what you will fill out and give to your employer.