January’s Successes

We’ve said many times that we need to get our acts together, start being more responsible, etc., but in January we finally made a real commitment to it. We still have a long way to go, but we’re off to a good start. Here’s what we accomplished:

1. We established our emergency savings account of $1000.
2. We paid a decent chunk toward our credit card bill. We plan on being credit card debt free by our first anniversary on July 3. It will hopefully be sooner, but that’s our deadline.
3. We started decluttering. We both have hoarding tendencies we need to keep in check, and we started getting rid of stuff (though we still have a lot more to get rid of). The stuff is either getting sold, being given away, or going in the garbage.
4. I got free stuff! I love free stuff. This month I got several samples of things, but, more exciting, I got several non-sample items: 1 free pair of Lee jeans, 1 free pair of Champion workout pants (now I just need to work out), Tide Swash (which I tried for the first time this morning and was amazed at the results), and a full bottle of Suave Rosemary Mint shampoo and conditioner (a much cheaper version of Aveda’s expensive stuff). I also won 2 free tickets to Valentine’s Day.
5. We made extra money selling stuff! We got $49.92 selling video games on Half.com and $150 selling stuff on Craigslist.
6. We got about $45 worth of free food. Most of it was from Arby’s (see my eHow article on how to get free food from Arby’s), but we also got free fresco tacos from Taco Bell, a free half gallon of chocolate milk thanks to a coupon I got from the Great Gallon Give, and we earned enough points at QDoba to get Josh’s chicken quesadilla free.
7. I made my nerdy spreadsheet to track my free stuff and extra income.