21 Frugal-ish Christmas Gifts for the Littles

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Christmas Time Is Here!

Ms. DebtFree here to confess that I LOVE Christmas.  It was the biggest holiday in my home and I have many fond memories of making peanut brittle and English toffee with my dad, helping my mom decorate the house and arrange our Christmas village, and going to dinners at the homes of our closest friends

We never went overboard with gifts -in fact, we often filled tins with a variety of homemade goodies for our friends.  As a child, I remember carefully crafting my wishlist to include the perfect balance of cheap and pricier items.  My strategy was to give my parents and siblings plenty of options while ensuring I would get that one big ticket item I had been eyeing for months.

Frugal Trip 2017

Beach Life

Alrighty folks, you've got both of us here to tell you all about our super fun and super frugal vacation we took at the start of November.

For those of you asking yourselves, "Isn't November a cold time of year to be vacationing in the Pacific Northwest?" we can now confirm it was a very cold time of year for our trip!  Nevertheless, we had an amazing opportunity to spend two nights at the Pacific Ocean for a grand total of $22.  That's right, $11 per night!

Loan Payments and the Struggle of Positive Thinking

Ms. DebtFree here with an exciting life/financial update!

If you haven't already figured it out, I bear some pretty hefty student loan debt.  Mr. DebtFree came up with an awesome plan for me to crush my debt starting with building my emergency fund.  Well, I recently fully funded my E-fund and decided to go after the first loan on my list.

This loan was $2,650ish with a 6.8% interest rate.  My first payment in October was $400 and I was all pumped up thinking I'd made some big hit on my loans.  Hahaha, not so much!  My overall balance increased by $200.  Yeah, you read that right.  *insert my dramatic eye-rolling here*

Anti-Frugal Spending

From my favorite show: Parks & Rec

Ms. DebtFree here with some transparency about my spending this month.  If I haven't mentioned this already, I really like shopping and a lot of my blogging is for personal accountability about my spending.  Well, this month I definitely had some frivolous purchases and figured I better fess up before we review our end of the month spending.

E-Fund Update

After 2 months of work, I (Ms. DebtFree) am very excited to announce that I have almost reached my emergency fund savings goal and have almost hit the $1,000 investment mark.

That may not sound like much, but for me it is a huge personal accomplishment.  Frugality is a new concept for me and I'm happy to say so far I'm doing great at following Mr. DebtFree's financial plan for me!

Who Needs Car Insurance Anyways?

Photo Credit

Ms. DebtFree here with a quick update on one of my "new job savings goals": car insurance premium discounts!

For the past 11 years I've been insured with the same company.  If some of you are paying close attention to our ages, that means I started driving at 15 with a driver's ed learner's permit.  So, after 11 years of being insured with State Farm I figured it was time to get additional discounts.  I should warn you, this post is partially about my attempt to save money but mostly a rant about the b.s. I went through trying to be more frugal!

Emergency Fund Roadmap

Ms. Debt-Free again!

My last post was probably extremely boring for a lot of you, unless you also understand the pull of Target and Sephora!  Today I want to get a little more serious and practical and talk about building an emergency fund.

This was a totally new concept for me when I met Mr. DebtFree.  I was skeptical at first.  I mean, how the eff can I build an emergency fund when I have almost $100,000 in student loans I need to pay off?  Eventually I stopped whining long enough to ditch the bad attitude and listen.  Here's what I learned.  

A Week of Unsubscribing

Hey there, Ms. DebtFree checking in for the week! 

Alrighty, so I promised I would be totally honest on here, yeah?  Well, I love shopping.  More specifically, I love discount shopping.  And in order to get great discounts what have I done?  Subscribed to emails from all of my favorite stores.  Apparently every store I’ve ever been to in my life became a favorite in just one trip! 

My personal challenge for the week was to find ways to cut back on shopping, or at the very least find ways to decrease the temptation to go shopping.  My work schedule has been absolutely bananas (politically correct way of saying “complete sh*t”) the last week or so and I didn’t have it in me to spend a lot of time or energy on saving money.  So, I came up with a completely free and relatively easy way to change how often I think about shopping: unsubscribe to any email from a store.  Sounds simple, right?  I discovered that’s not always the case.