Budgeting

The Hubs has always dealt with the $ and bills. This past week he put me in charge of all of it, and it is already a new obsession. I'm pinning like a mad woman and searching blogs on how to get my grocery bill to a bare min. Follow my budget pins to see what has helped most. http://www.pinterest.com/baxter7/budg-it/ If I go through a blog that is not helpful or is old news, I delete the pin. I don't really coupon. Occasionally I will print one out, but that is about it.
I never realized how much we were mindlessly spending. Holy mom! We have some serious debt from school and it was not going to go anywhere with our out-of-control spending. I have made this into my new job and it is going to get done. We are going to be frugal, we will pay off debt, and we will still get to vacation every year.

Where I started...
An excel spread sheet for the budget. If you are excel savvy, it can do all the adding up for you with the right formulas entered and what not. My husband gets a paycheck every two weeks so we couldn't do the typical month budget, so we split things up to go on different spread sheets and will have to work on the budget every two weeks for sure.

We save with a Prime Amazon account and use the subscribe and save. We save 20% on household items, they come to our door, free shipping. I believe you have to have at least 5 S&S items for each order. I just reworked it so we only get an order of at least 5 necessities every 3 months. I just took diapers, shampoo/conditioner, and laundry detergent off of those orders because... we will be cloth diapering, no poo-ing (oh how I hate the term), and making our own detergent. (It will all be out in the open here. oh goodie! check other pages for more info)

Hello Dave Ramsey! He was the one that had my husband realizing that this needed to be part of my already important job. He was mentioning to a SAHM, that was thinking of getting a job, that figuring out the money and bills should be her job. There is always an expense that can be reworked or cut. This was very helpful... https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/1611/26335/9h/dramsey.download.akamai.com/23572/daveramsey.com/media/broadcast/mytmmo/pdf/guide-to-budgeting.pdf?ictid=btxt.ny13
We will be basically following the D.R. guide. Starting with any additional funds going to our emergency fund and then going from there.