Vacay fund

Tomorrow is vacay pay day and I had the most excellent savings weekend thanks to all the July 4th sales I took advantage of.  I saved an amount to the tune of $137 in just 2 days of shopping!  But I'm faced with a bit of a dilemma:  some of the things I bought, namely my Rite Aid scores, I wouldn't have bought if it wasn't for the spectacular deals, so do the savings count?

Thanks to the holiday deals...only counting the things I would have bought and needed, I'm now officially 68% into my goal.  82% if you factor in funds that have not been deposited yet.

Mailbox Love & Vacay savings

*sob* no mailbox goodies for me today.  I did, however, save around $12 at the store with coupons and sales.  Truth be told, I was a bit disappointed with my savings. In the end I spent around $100 so I basically got 12% knocked off my bill. Don't get me wrong. I'll take it!

As promised, I said I'd give a tally of how much I saved last month towards our vacation fund.

Final tally: $300!

I don't know how I'll beat that in June.

Vacation Fund

In early April of this year, I stumbled upon a blog called Couponing to Disney.  Right away, what struck me as interesting and different from other savings and couponing blogs was that Kristin, the blog owner/author was saving up for her family vacation to Disney World.  It wasn't just that, but how she was doing it.  She'd put spare change, coupon savings, etc into a savings fund for the trip. In 6 short months, she'd amassed over $2,000!  I was not only impressed but inspired, so I decided to give it a whirl to see what I could come up with.  I rarely carry cash on me.  Rare is even an exaggeration. I NEVER carry cash on me so I honestly didn't think I'd save anything, but everything needs a goal, right? I started my goal small only wanting to save enough for one person's airfare to Florida.  We're huge Disney fans, and after our vacation to WDW last year, we've been dying to go back.  (But fickle me is kind of having second thoughts about using the vacay fund to go to WDW and perhaps wanting to go somewhere else...Hawaii maybe? HA! We'll see how much I can dig out of the couch.)

On April 1, 2010, I officially started the savings fund. I proposed the idea to my kids and they were all too happy to contribute a little out of their piggy bank to start the fund.  I've been using the "gotta save money for Disney World" excuse ever since our first trip and it's worked miracles in warding the "I want this, I want this" Monster at the store so I figure, why not make it concrete for the kids?  They each happily contributed $6 and with my own little contribution, we started with a balance of $21.60.  By April 30 we saved $132.61 just from misc savings & change.  That's more than half way to one person's plane ticket!  The beginning of May was a bit of a slow start. I thought to myself, how am I going to trump $133 this month? We're broke!  The point wasn't to spend money on the fund but to just throw spare change and misc savings (coupons, rebates, etc) into it. 

So just how much did we save in May?  Come back on Friday when I do the tally and report. :)