The Coup de Gras

Our dvr service was up for renewal this month and for the past 2 months, I've been getting emails reminding me to renew, otherwise they'd start charging me the pricier monthly option. (We prepaid to get savings.) But I intentionally put it off until the very last minute because I don't believe in giving people my money in advance until I absolutely have to. My money in my pocket is better than in someone else's. My procrastination paid off. I got an email promo that saved me $300 in renewal charges! Needless to say, I took advantage of that saving. :)

Today is also a vacay fund deposit day.  If you've been following my blog this week, I've had some pretty good luck at Rite Aid lately.  That amounts to a pretty good amount of savings.  I'm due some rebates back from Rite Aid, but I haven't requested the check yet so I don't count those savings. (Kind of like not counting my chicks before they hatch type of deal.)

Here's a break down of free money & savings for the last 9 days:

$10 Amazon gift cards from Swag Bucks
$5 from misc survey
$24 savings from Rite Aid
$35 savings from various stores & coupons


Total: $74
Add the dvr renewal savings: $374!  That's a huge chunk of change!

Tally

As I was doing thinking and prepping for this post, I watched a vid worth 2 Swag Bucks on Fiji tourism. I think that's a hint, no? :p

It's the end of the month, so it's time to tally up my savings for the month. I really didn't think I spent a whole lot this month, at least it didn't feel like it. I was much more on the ball about saving, and keeping track of every penny saved. I know I did a lot more couponing than usual this month though. I made the last vacation deposit of the month to the tune of $52 for the week to date. That's not what I actually saved this week though. My total saved was $57. $5 of my savings this week was in the form of coins, so rather than going through the extra effort to either convert them to bills or deposit them, I donated them. One of my kids is doing a thing at church where they continue to collect donations for post earthquake relief efforts in Haiti so I'm having my kiddo bring all the loose change to church to give to the cause. It just seems more worthwhile than dragging my kids to the bank, plus Haiti needs it much more than we do.

My total savings for the month of June, 2010 is........




$272

That's the most I've saved in a month since I started keeping track and being more conscious about my spending. I started this journey just wanting to be able to afford one person's airfare. Now that I've achieved that, I'd like to shoot for a bigger goal: to have all of our vacation meals covered. Then to have the meals covered, AND all of our airfares paid for. Then all that plus our hotel rooms. Eventually I'd like to have our entire trip paid for. Here, I even slaved to procure a chart for you because I'm just nerdy and masochistic like that. (And to the former supervisor of mine who claimed I can't do charts...suck on a coupon! I can do it in Excel AND Google Docs, then watermark it in Photoshop. Pffffft! :p)



If you'd like more details of what went into the total, feel free to leave me a comment and let me know. I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have. (Yes, I do read each and every comment. :) )

Because I made a month end deposit this week (even though it's the middle of the week) I will not post a savings update until the end of next week. Wish me luck in July! And to those who are saving along with me, I wish you luck as well! I would be thrilled to know what you're doing and how you're doing on your goals!

Vacay fund

Ha! Because private jets are how I roll. :p I penny pinch with this blog just so I can afford that private jet...uh huh... :p

Anyway..

It's Friday so that means it's time to make a deposit to the vacay fund. In general, I didn't shop a whole lot this week so there wasn't much in terms of savings. The one place I did shop was at the grand opening of a grocery store and the savings were massive! My deposit today amounted to $80 with over $70 of that from the grand opening grocery trip.

Vacay Fund Pay Day

It's Friday, so that means pay day to the vacation fund.  While reading a reader's comment on Couponing to Disney yesterday, I got a great idea.  The reader does a round up kind of thing to deposit money into her vacay fund with a max of $10 because they're on a budget.  For example, if the paycheck was $249.32, she'd deposit $9.32 into the vacay fund.  That sounded like a great idea to me so I decided to do the same.  Only, the "round off" part of the paycheck was a mind boggling.....42 cents. Yeah, I spat all over my laptop laughing so hard.  Oh well.

Anyway, we didn't spend much this week so the deposit is rather small...only $35.  Most of it came in the form of coupons, which hey, that's not bad!  The "big" part of the deposit came in the form of Swag Bucks rewards.  I got another $10 in Amazon gift cards from Swag Bucks last night, making my total rewards a record breaking (for me anyway) $20.  I'm excited to do some shopping. :D

Vacation fund update

I may have saved a lot last month, but it's taught me an important lesson: money that isn't cash needs to be deposited into the "no touch vacation account" right away or it will be spent. And it did. So this month, I'm doing something a little different. I'm making weekly deposits. I've chosen each Friday as my vacation fund pay day...starting with today.

I didn't have a big shopping week this week. In fact, I spent very little money and hardly bought anything. (That's a good thing, right?)  So, my savings from purchases and stuff were pretty small...just $15 and some change so I rounded my deposit up to $16.

Here's the break down:
$8.50 - Costco coupons
$5.00 - Opinion Outpost payment
$1.53 - misc grocery & hobby discounts

So there it is, the money is sent, gone, locked away, no touchy, no spendy.

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. :)