Our period of 'relaxed hunkering down' is over and we are back to 'intense hunkering down with a purpose.'
During our time of relaxed hunkering down, we replenished all areas of our pantry and gave ourselves personal allowances.
While we continued to add to our savings, it was a much smaller amount and when I closed out the month of March, it made me sad not to see the larger amounts (for us) going into savings and or towards debt.
But this is a good lesson, reminder or whatever you want to call it ... you have to do the work in order to get the reward. In other words, saving and or paying off debt requires discipline and sacrifice. It's not going to happen without effort on our part, the calvary is not going to come and fill our bank account with money nor pay off our debt for us. We made the debt; we pay the debt.
Looking back at the first quarter of this year, we've made astounding progress toward our debt, far better than we thought possible when we started this journey. God has blessed us with opportunities to earn extra money and we have done our part by not only doing the work, but also by not blowing the extra money on incidentals that we could do without. We have kept to a very strict budget that provides for our needs but doesn't include room for luxuries.
Looking back at the first quarter of the year, not only did we make better than expected progress on our debt, but we met our savings goals as well. We've kept our savings goals at a minimum in order to have more money to go towards debt, but ... and this is important ... we are still saving! We don't want to get out of the habit of saving and look forward to the time when we are debt free and can build our savings more quickly. Until then, some is better than none!
So, what does the rest of the month of April look like, what are our goals?
Having our personal allowances back for a month was really nice, but we're both in agreement that we will give them up the rest of the month.
Since our pantry is well stocked, we plan to stay out of and away from the grocery store as much as possible. Of course, we will need to purchase milk or if we learn of a great loss leader deal on something we use, we'll take advantage of that, but other than that we don't plan on doing any grocery shopping.
Hubby will take his lunch to work and eat out only when necessary.
Our savings goal is to save at least $1 more than we did last month.
We've chosen the debt we want to knock out next and set the goal of paying off one third of it this month. It's going to take some 'hunkering down' to do it, but we feel like it's possible if all goes well. For the next quarter, April, May, June, our goal is to knock this one out completely! We think we can! We think we can! We think we can!
I continually pray about our goal to pay off as much debt as possible this year. I asked God to show me ways to be a better steward of what He has blessed us with and to open doors of opportunities to earn extra monies. At our ages, there are many things that we can no longer physically do, but God knows that ... smile ... He knows what we can and can't do and answers our prayers accordingly.
That's it for this week, how did you do, I can't wait to read your comments!
until next time,
mrs. patsi @ A Working Pantry
She looketh well to the ways of her household … Proverbs 31:27
Sharing 44 years' experience of frugal, prudent living and pantry building
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