Savin' dough

I'm tired of our big van payment and student loan payment. The student loan isn't very big but we just make slightly more than the minimum payment each month. I'm ahead several months on the van payments and always put all of our extra money toward it. We aren't in any credit card debt so once we retire those debts we will only have the house payment.

I've been reading the Dave Ramsey books and we are going to follow his plan for getting out of debt and building a 6 month emergency fund. Then we will work on retirement saving. We already have a Roth IRA and some stocks going toward retirement but I would love to put lots more money toward it.

So in an effort to reduce our grocery bill, I finally went to the Orowheat Bread outlet store. I used to go all the time. We can go through 1 loaf of bread in one lunch meal so bread was an expense I wanted to reduce. We do make our own bread for evening meals but it doesn't make very much and fresh baked bread doesn't last long in our house!

Here is what I got. I HAD to buy donuts for Graedon but still ended up with $45.00 worth of bread for $11.61.

Four loaves of buttermilk bread, two loaves of Orowheat wheat bread, two loaves of Orowheat light wheat bread (for me as it's lower carb than the rest), 3 big packages of hamburger buns including the ultra gourmet onion buns, a huge package of hot dog buns, a package of sandwhich rolls and a box of assorted donuts.

We love going down to farmer's market on Saturday and buying berries and veggies. We are growing our own veggies this year and the blueberries we wanted to buy are terribly expensive. So we hopped into the van on Saturday and went to pick our own. $1.00 a pound! We spent $20.00 and our freezer is full of fresh berries.

Now I'm looking for more ways to save money in our budget and get out of debt in 1 year. Fortunately I'm a frugal person (or I used to be when we had NO money) so I just need to get back into the swing of things. I need to get to the sewing machine and sew again as it saves us money on our kids clothes and I also sell my clothing on eBay.